Tag: Luna Park

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Amusements and Thrills The Gilded Gentleman

How The Gilded Age Played: A Sweet Summertime Show With Esther Crain

Luna Park, 1917. Courtesy New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection

On the latest episode of The Gilded Gentleman, returning guest Esther Crain, author and creator of Ephemeral New York, joins Carl for a look at how New Yorkers stayed cool on summer days in the Gilded Age. 

As New York continued its march up the island of Manhattan, there were few places where New Yorkers that couldn’t escape to Newport could find somewhere to relax, play, stroll, and find some shade. 

The development of the Central Park provided some much-needed relief but it took some time for it to become a place that was accessible and viable for all of New York’s social classes. 

Bethesda Terrace, Central Park, 1890, courtesy the New York Public LIbrary, Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy

Meanwhile, out on the far coast of Brooklyn, the resort of Coney Island developed rapidly and became a truly great escape with its famous amusement parks where one could find adventure and perhaps a bit of romance. 

Esther takes us on a journey to visit these spots and spaces where Gilded Age New Yorkers could cool off, forget the realities of life for just a bit and have a really good time.  

LISTEN HERE OR ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLAYER:

And in two weeks on The Gilded Gentleman Podcast: Prepare for a history of the French Riviera

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Amusements and Thrills Bowery Boys Bookshelf

The literary Coney Island

On the beach at Coney Island 1910-15 (Courtesy Library of Congress)

Everybody sees Coney Island a little differently. Most people know it for the amusements but not everybody has the same feeling about them. One person craves the beaches, the food. Another prefers a stroll along the boardwalk, fireworks, an evening Cyclones game. Others live nearby, too familiar with the swelling weekend crowds. And some people — and this seems like blasphemy — have had their fill of Nathan’s hot dogs.

1Coney Island has always been a Rorschach test of class, morals and taste, an escape from the city for more than 150 years. (In the 19th century, it was an escape from two cities, as Brooklyn was independent then and had not yet subsumed Coney Island within its borders.)

It’s never been considered a bastion high culture, although its degrees of middle- and low-brow have been vibrantly written about from the very beginning.  In The Coney Island Reader: Through The Dizzy Gates of Illusion, edited by Louis J. and John Parascandola, we get a time machine through its many iterations, thanks to the observations of dozens of writers.

I don’t think of Coney Island as a particularly literary destination, and yet here we have some of their greats chiming in to describe the lusty pleasures of Brooklyn’s beach-side getaway.

We begin with Brooklyn’s greatest voices — Walt Whitman. “Yes: there was a clam-bake — and, of all the places in the world, a clam-bake at Coney-Island! Could moral ambition go higher, or mortal wishes go deeper?”  He’s writing in 1847 when the area is a barely developed destination.

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Jose Marti, the poet and Cuban revolutionary, is overtaken by its magic. “And this squandering, this uproar, these crowds, this astonishing swarm of people, lasts from June to October, from morning until late night, without pause without any change whatsoever.”

Today’s Coney Island amusement district is vastly smaller than the one which greeted Stephen Crane in 1894.  “We strolled the music hall district, where the sky lines of the rows of buildings are wondrously near to each other, and the crowded little thoroughfares resemble the eternal ‘Street Scene in Cairo’.”

As Coney Island grew larger in the early 20th century — with its three principal amusement parks Dreamland, Steeplechase and Luna Park — it pulled thousands more to its whimsical attractions.  It’s almost  hilarious to picture Russian writer and dramatist Maxim Gorky sitting inside the Dreamland ride Hellgate, with its hellish flames “constructed of paper mache and painted dark red. Everything in it is on fire — paper fire — and it is filled with the thick, dirty odor of grease. Hell is badly done.”

Surf Avenue 1910-15
Surf Avenue 1910-15

The Coney Island Reader combines literary observances with social commentary and documentary accounts featuring interviews with the impresarios themselves.  In a 1909 magazine article by Reginald Wright Kauffman, George C. Tilyou, the owner of Steeplechase Park, proclaims, “To sum up my opinion of the whole thing, we Americans want either to be thrilled or amused, and we are ready to pay well for either sensation.” (George’s brother Edward is represented here with a vivid essay called “Human Nature with the Brakes Off — Or: Why the Schoolma’am Walked Into the Sea.”)

More contemporary observations of the fictional kind are represented by Kevin Baker (who also contributes the forward), Josephine W. Johnson and Sol Yurick (from the novel which inspired the film The Warriors).

This is perhaps the only book in history that features the writing of e.e. cummings and Robert Moses. One saw saw “[t]he incredible temple of pity and terror,  mirth and amazement,” the other “overcrowding at the public beach, inadequete play areas and lack of parking space.”

Ah, Coney Island. It’s what you make of it.

 

The Coney Island Reader
Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion
edited by Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola
Columbia University Press

Top image: Luna Park at night, 1905 (polished up image courtesy Shorpy)

 

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Amusements and Thrills

Coney Island’s many death and destruction amusements

The entrance to the Johnstown Flood presentation (Cleaned-up photo courtesy Shorpy)

On May 31, 1889, a dam near the town of Johnstown, PA, collapsed after a brutal day of torrential rain, flooding the valley with 20 million tons of water and destroying everything in its path. There was virtually no escape, and 2,209 people died in the deadly flood.  Railroads, bridges and iron works were wiped off the map.  It remains one of the greatest disasters in America history.

Several years later, in 1905, on the Coney Island boardwalk, visitors could relive the danger in a bizarre reenactment set upon one of the biggest stages in the United States.  That’s entertainment!

The elaborate amusement, touted as “the greatest technical production in the world,” was only one of several theatrical presentations offering death and destruction, vivid dioramas of history and horror, for the pleasure of summer audiences.

These strange amusements were a precursor to the modern Hollywood disaster film, but they also served a more demonstrative purpose.  They provided Coney Island with a way to compete with Broadway, using new technologies and sophisticated stagecraft to recreate nature’s most horrifying scenarios.  Crowds marveled at the trickery, often rendering events with a macabre beauty.

On Surf Avenue and 17th Street, one could visit the horror of the Galveston Flood, recounting the 1900 disaster (actually a hurricane) that killed over 8,000 people.  The Evening World declared, “How the very spirit of the horrible hurricane can be caught by mechanical and electrical devices is the secret that will make the Galveston flood famous.”

Down on Fifth Street, audiences delighted to a revival of the eruption of Mount Pelee, which killed almost 30,000 people in 1902.  Opening just two years after the disaster, the Pelee attraction was particularly luscious and comfy — “cooled by six big ventillators and ventillating fans run by electric motor” — as audiences witnessed the effects of faux lava catching houses on fire. [source]

Not to be outdone, in 1906, impresario Herbert Bradwell, the producer of the Johnstown Flood attraction, expanded the water and light effects to recreate Noah’s Biblical flood.  The Deluge was both cheap spectacle and a morality play in five scenes, employing a flagrant water and light show to retell the ancient Biblical story, from the construction of the Ark to a host of tableaux outlining a possible future of “universal peace.” [source]

Coney Island’s most famous amusement parks certainly got in on the apocalyptic action.  Luna Park presented the thrill of fire-fighting with the 1904 show Fire and Flames.  Dreamland also joined the fray that year with Fighting The Flames where patrons could witness the horror of burning tenement.

Later that year, Dreamland replaced its fire fantasy with a vivid retelling of the San Francisco Earthquake, mere months after it killed almost 3,000 people and leveled the city.  The Earthquake featured a cast of 350 people within a stage creation of pyrotechnics and smoke effects, leveling the city on a nightly basis.

Below: Luna Park’s Fire and Flames and Dreamland’s Fighting the Flames were both featured in separate films.  


Perhaps the most dazzling of the many death and destruction features were the various incinerations of the ancient city of Pompeii.

The first came in 1903 down near the Manhattan Beach Hotel with The Last Days of Pompeii, which nightly decimated the ancient Greek city, using a host of firework tricks and various maudlin theatrics. A year later, Dreamland brought the Fall of Pompeii, with a thrilling simulacrum of fire, ashes and lava. [picture source]

But in terms of the sheer amount of destruction imaginatively depicted, nothing could top Dreamland’s 1906 show called The End of the World, which destroyed all of mankind in an auditorium seating 1,200 people.

“The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the destruction of the world by fire are the principal episodes in the production in which … more than a hundred people, a large choir and an organ take part.” [source]

Below: The entrance to the End of the World

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Podcasts

PODCAST: Coney Island – The Golden Age

The Coney Island that greeted vacationers and city folk in the years 1904 to 1911 was one of infinite imagination manifested in fantastic but cheaply built extravaganza.

A world of amusement starts here in New York — Coney Island, the world’s oldest and strangest collection of amusement parks, a mishmash of sideshows, concession stands, gambling halls, new-fangled rides and luxury hotels. Take a daytrip with us back to the early days of Coney Island. Hold on to your hat!

Part of what made the experience of Coney Island’s cheap, often disposable thrills was its meshing of new technology, human invention, and reactions to a strict moral society. It was socially acceptable debauchery, literally plugged in to the experience of a new century. The advent of electricity brought visitors out into the salty air until late at night. Benches were often sent slight electrical charges to make sure people didn’t sit around all day, not spending money! With electricity used more aestheticly as it was in Luna Park (right), they could light up the sky like Oz. The name Luna Park paid homage to A Trip To The Moon, a ride created by its parks owners Frederick Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy, which in turn was certainly a close approximation of the French 1902 silent film classic by Georges Méliès.

Over at Steeplechase Park, meanwhile, it was more centrifugal and gravitational forces that brought out the crowds, such as the Human Roulette wheel below. I dont know, there’s just something about this that looks profoundly unfun to me:

One of the more unusual amusements at Dreamland was Hell’s Gate, which emulated via the guise of starched Victorian morality the possible geography of Biblical Hell. Perhaps unsurpring, it was the combination of a burst lightbulb and a tar bucket inside Hell’s Gate that started the fire that eventually burned all of Dreamland to the ground in 1911, burning for 18 hours.

The proper entrepreneur who could maneuver through the early days of Coney Island corruption and make a financial killing. Take the inventer of the hot dog, Charles Feltman, who launched restaurants and hotels from the success of his sausage in a roll carts. This fancy restaurant, a favorite of vacationers of all social classes, sat where modern Astroland sits today:

(Not to spoil anything from our next episode, but in 1915, an employee of Feltman’s Restaurant Nathan Handwerker ate free hot dogs all summer, then devised an idea….)

Why stay in a luxury hotel when you can just sleep in a giant elephant? This unusual lodging was built in 1882, just a few steps from the world’s first roller coaster, the Switchback Railway, and you could view the beach revelers via windows that served as the elephant’s eyes. One leg featured a small cigar store, while the back legs had a staircase that led to your room. Perhaps because this doesnt exactly look like the most comfortable revolution in hospitality, the hotel soon became a favorite for prostitues, so that ‘seeing the elephant’ soon became a rather naughty euphemism. Our shabby pachyderm was mercifully put out of its misery in 1896 by fire. I love this aerial view of the area, with the Elephant lording clumsily over the landscape, well before the Island’s peak days a few years later.

Elephants in general didnt fare so well in Coney Island. Then there’s the case of Topsy, the once friendly elephant at Luna Park who went wild and killed three men. Her owners decided to put her down, attempting to poison her with cyanide-laced carrots, to no avail.

Enter Thomas Edison, who was trying to prove the dangers of his rival George Westinghouse’s alternating electrical current to his own ‘safe’ direct current. He did this by going around the country and electricuting dogs and cats as a demonstration. So when he heard that the owners of Luna were trying to off their elephant, he couldnt refuse.

They even made the ‘demonstration’ the topic of a silent film, which you can see here.

By the way, there are so many resources online about early Coney Island history, that I invite you to check a few of these wonderful places out yourself:

Coney Island History Project
Amusement Parks history
Coney Island History Site

And in case you don’t believe me about that sideshow exhibit involving premie babies in incubators, here’s a shot of some of the nurses displaying the stars of the show, followed by a look at the actual incubators. The exhibit actually ran for decades in Coney Island, until 1945. You know, because there’s nothing more entertaining than watching a newborn infant struggling to survive: