( CNN ) Ask a New Zealander what happened on June 10 , 1886 , and they 'll tell you the planet lost its `` eighth wonder . '' The Pink and White Terraces of Lake Rotomahana were the world 's largest silica towers and the South Pacific 's biggest 19th-century attraction until a massive eruption at Mount Tarawera that momentous day blasted these natural wonders into oblivion . Out of that same eruption , however , a new wonder of the world was born . Waimangu Geyser roared into existence hurling black mud and sand some 1,500 feet ( 460 meters ) into the sky , making it the most powerful geyser the world has ever seen . This new attraction ignited a whirlwind of global interest in New Zealand 's volcanic North Island until it , too , vanished off the face of the earth in 1904 after a landslide changed the water table . The Pink and White Terraces and Waimangu Geyser may be lost forever , but their impression on tourists of the time is well documented . They are but two of many attractions of yesteryear that can now only be appreciated in the pages of a history book . Here 's a look at 10 others . The current Penn Station may be a charmless catacomb of labyrinthine low-ceiling hallways , but New York 's first Penn Station was a lavish masterpiece of the Beaux Arts style . The original facility 's domed ceilings , soaring archways and handsome columns welcomed more than 100 million passengers each year during the station 's golden era in the mid-1940s . But by the end of the 1950s , the dawn of the Jet Age and the birth of the Interstate Highway System took a heavy toll on visitor numbers . Plans for the new Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden were announced in 1962 , and a year later , the original Penn Station was knocked to the ground to make room for a smaller facility underground . The demolition of Penn Station in 1963 was not without controversy . The New York Times questioned at the time how the city would `` permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance . '' The whole affair is regularly cited as the catalyst for the modern historical preservation movement in the United States . Within a decade of Penn Station 's demolition , Grand Central Terminal was protected under New York City 's new Landmarks Preservation Act . Guaira Falls was easily the most powerful cataract in the world in terms of total volume with 1,750,000 cubic feet of water passing through each second . That 's more than double the flow of Niagara Falls and more than 12 times that of Victoria Falls . But good luck finding any trace of Guaira underneath the Itaipu Dam . More than three decades have now passed since one of the world 's greatest waterfalls was drowned to pave the way for a massive hydroelectric project . This natural wonder , lost to the world in 1982 , once lured hordes of local and international tourists to the Upper Parana River at the Brazil-Paraguay border . It contained 18 falls in total with a drop of about 375 feet , and its deafening roar could be heard from up to 20 miles away . At least three Globe theaters have graced the shores of the River Thames over the past five centuries . First there was the original Globe , built in 1599 by William Shakespeare 's playing company , the Lord Chamberlain 's Men . A fire destroyed it during a performance of Henry VIII on June 29 , 1613 , but a second Globe Theatre opened on the same site exactly one year later . It , too , closed in 1642 amid an outcry by Puritans who were opposed to theatrical performances . The legacy of the first Globe Theatre and the iconic plays it debuted to the world lives on at the modern reconstruction , known as Shakespeare 's Globe , which opened its doors in 1997 approximately 750 feet from the original theater . When Sutro Baths first opened to the public in 1894 , the three-acre complex housed a staggering seven pools ( at varying temperatures ) under a massive glass enclosure with springboards , high dives , slides and trapezes . The facility could hold as many as 10,000 people at one time and also had several non-aquatic attractions such as a natural history museum with Egyptian mummies and a sculpture gallery with artifacts from Mexico and China . The oceanfront property ensconced in the rocky San Francisco coast was considered a playground unlike any other the world had ever seen . Its Achilles ' heel , however , was an outsized price tag to match its ostentatious offerings . With exceedingly high operational costs , the Baths were never a commercially successful business -- even after owners turned the pools into ice skating rinks during the Great Depression . The facility shut down for good in 1964 and was destroyed in a fire two years later . Its remains are now protected as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area . In an 1839 fairy tale called `` The Garden of Paradise , '' Hans Christian Andersen describes a teenager named East Wind who flies home from the East and tells his mother , `` I came back from China , where I danced for a while around a tower of porcelain and rang all the bells . '' The Danish author 's fable may be a fantasy , but the tower of porcelain bricks was no figment of his vivid imagination . Considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages , the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing was built by the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty in the early 15th century and rose from a 97-foot octagonal base to a height of 260 feet . This glossy nine-story pagoda soared above the south bank of the Yangtze River in Nanjing for more than four centuries before it was destroyed under the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s . Its rubble remained relatively untouched until 2010 when a businessman donated $ 156 million ( the largest single donation in Chinese history ) to rebuild the medieval icon . The New York Hippodrome was billed as the largest theater in the world when it opened to the public in midtown Manhattan in 1905 , featuring a 100-foot-by-200-foot stage and the capacity to seat up to 5,300 spectators . This mammoth attraction lured the biggest acts of the day such as Harry Houdini and the `` Jumbo '' musical , but , like San Francisco 's Sutro Baths , it racked up a hefty upkeep bill . Just 17 years after the Hippodrome opened , its owners refashioned the Moorish-style building into a vaudeville theater . Five years later it became a movie theater , then an opera house and finally a sports arena . The doldrums of the Great Depression dealt one final blow to the facility and it was torn down in 1939 to make way for an office building and parking garage . The Chacaltaya Glacier lies 17,400 feet up in the Andes and was once one of Bolivia 's top tourist attractions , luring skiers the world over with the promise of tackling earth 's highest ski run . Thanks to global warming , however , the 18,000-year-old wonder has been reduced to a few lumps of unskiable ice that no visitor would go out of their way to see . In its prime it had the first rope tow in South America ( built in 1939 ) and the highest ski lodge in the world , at an elevation greater than Everest Base Camp . Chacaltaya was the closest ski area to the equator before it indefinitely closed in 2012 . Known as the `` bridge of ice '' in the local Aymara language , Chacaltaya is but one of many glaciers currently retreating toward almost certain oblivion . Walt Disney World 's very first water park , River Country , is looking anything but jolly these days after lying abandoned on the shores of Bay Lake , Florida , for more than a decade . The `` old-fashioned swimming hole , '' replete with swings , slides and whitewater rafting , closed for annual maintenance in 2001 never to open again . Park officials cited declining business after 9/11 and the success of Walt Disney World 's two newer water parks , Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach , as reasons for their decision . Bay Lake is also home to the only other Disney park to close permanently : Discovery Island . This abandoned ( but not demolished ) zoological park was yet another 1970s-era attraction that lost favor with visitors and eventually closed to the public in 1999 . All animals were relocated to new homes at Disney 's Animal Kingdom , a much larger zoo that opened in 1998 . A warning to any urban explorers out there : Disney employees still monitor both River Country and Discovery Island for trespassers . Like the operas that brought its audiences to tears , the story of the Royal Opera House of Valletta is fittingly tragic . Designed by Edward Middleton Barry in the 1860s , architect of the Royal Opera House in London 's Covent Garden , it was the crowning jewel of Malta 's capital city for just six years before a fire gutted the interior . It was resurrected from the flames four years later , but tragedy struck again during World War II when the Royal Opera House received a direct hit from an aerial bomb . A few columns remain in place on the corner of Strada Reale , forming a backdrop for the open-air Royal Piazza Theatre , launched within the ruins of the Royal Opera House in 2013 . Jonah 's Tomb in Mosul , Iraq , is the newest addition to this list and one of a series of attractions lost to war . Militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria , or ISIS , planted explosives in July 2014 around Mosul 's oldest mosque , which is traditionally held to be the burial place of Jonah the Prophet . Jonah is a key figure in both Christianity and Islam who , according to Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions , was swallowed by a whale . His tomb was a popular place of pilgrimage and joins a growing list of holy sites deemed idolatrous under the puritanical strain of Islam practiced by ISIS . Mark Johanson is an American travel and culture writer based in Santiago , Chile .
Unlike the current Amtrak hub , New York 's original Penn Station was a lavish Beaux Arts structure . Guaira Dam was once the most powerful cataract in the world . The Porcelain Coast of Manhattan was considered one of the Seven Towns of the Middle Ages .