Bostonians used to cool off on a flume off Huntington Avenue

Boston College's Burns Library posted this illustration for the Shooting the Chutes ride somebody would set up along Huntington Avenue at Parker Street back in the late 1890s - you get up to the top of a tower and then zoom, you shoot down the chute in a gondola and splash in the man-made pond at the bottom.

Shooting the Chutes - open for unlimited rides for just 10 cents a day, 5 cents for children - was on the Huntington Avenue Grounds, which was home to a stream of visiting circuses, carnivals and other attractions, at least until 1901, when it was turned into a baseball stadium for the Boston Americans - who, under the name Red Sox - moved to the brand new Fenway Park for the 1912 season.

According to the Globe at the time, as many as 700,000 people shot the chutes in one year.

Another ad, from 1897, via the Library of Congress:

Shooting the Chutes was a ride at Revere Beach's Wonderland amusement park as well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea originated at Coney Island, where an aquatic daredevil named Paul Boyton (whose name is on the top Boston ad) first set one up .

How much of a daredevil? He once booked passage on a trans-Atlantic cruise with a large rubber suit, a waterproof bag with 50 pounds of provisions, an ax and some flares and somehow convinced the captain to let him jump overboard a couple hundred miles off Ireland so he could swim to shore - which he managed to do even despite a storm that came up unexpectedly.