S1E2: The Ban Years

In 1942, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia posed for press photographs with a sledgehammer — and declared war on pinball.In our second episode, we dig into one of the strangest and most consequential chapters in the history of American entertainment: the thirty-four year ban on pinball machines in New York City. We'll explore why the city — and dozens of others across the country — genuinely believed pinball was a criminal enterprise, how the game survived underground through the 1950s and 60s, and how a rock opera about a blind pinball champion helped shift the cultural tide. And we'll end in a city council chamber in 1976, where a young magazine editor named Roger Sharpe did something that should have been impossible — and in doing so, won pinball its freedom.It's a story about skill versus chance, law versus culture, and one called shot that changed everything.