ANY PLACE THAT INSPIRED SONGS BY LOU REED, TOM WAITS, AND DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE MUST BE IMPORTANT: This week's news that Astroland, the Coney Island amusement park, may well be closing for good prompted a wave of nostalgia for Coney Island's supposed glory years. But Astroland dates only to 1962, and even the Cyclone, the park's signature coaster, is just eighty years old (a mere blink of the eye to us historians). For the true heyday of Coney Island, you really need to go all the way back to the turn of the 20th century, the era covered in John Kasson's marvelous book, Amusing the Million.
Kasson argues that urban recreation in Victorian America tended toward the "genteel" and the "rational," as exemplified by Central Park in New York and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But the amusement parks at Coney Island -- Steeplechase Park (1895), Luna Park (1903), and Dreamland (1904) -- provided a much different sort of public recreation. At these stunning new attractions, visitors of all classes could escape to an exotic world of sensation, excitement, and wonder, where for a few hours they could freely ignore the normal rules of everyday life.
A day at Coney Island offered an astonishing variety of entertainments to choose from. You could cavort on the beach, flirting with total strangers in revealing swimwear (scandalous!); you could enjoy a whole host of thrill rides, from "shoot-the-chutes" to the roller coaster; you could stay until dark and gape at the spectacular electric-light displays. Kasson argues that the Coney Island parks "manufactured the carnival spirit": they allowed turn-of-the-century New Yorkers to throw off social conventions and cultural norms for a brief time, before returning to the industrial-corporate order of the workweek.
A century later, however, even that limited feeling of communal rebellion has disappeared from today's massive theme parks, with their corporate management, synergistic cross-promotions, and hefty admission prices. And as the Astroland story suggests, the independent amusement park is a dying breed. Yet summer after summer, we keep coming back to these places. Why? At a time when we can amuse ourselves so easily on our various private screens (TVs, computers, iPods, video games), what kind of amusement can we get at an amusement park that we can't get anyplace else?
Next week: vaudeville, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and the birth of the movies.
Kasson argues that urban recreation in Victorian America tended toward the "genteel" and the "rational," as exemplified by Central Park in New York and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But the amusement parks at Coney Island -- Steeplechase Park (1895), Luna Park (1903), and Dreamland (1904) -- provided a much different sort of public recreation. At these stunning new attractions, visitors of all classes could escape to an exotic world of sensation, excitement, and wonder, where for a few hours they could freely ignore the normal rules of everyday life.
A day at Coney Island offered an astonishing variety of entertainments to choose from. You could cavort on the beach, flirting with total strangers in revealing swimwear (scandalous!); you could enjoy a whole host of thrill rides, from "shoot-the-chutes" to the roller coaster; you could stay until dark and gape at the spectacular electric-light displays. Kasson argues that the Coney Island parks "manufactured the carnival spirit": they allowed turn-of-the-century New Yorkers to throw off social conventions and cultural norms for a brief time, before returning to the industrial-corporate order of the workweek.
A century later, however, even that limited feeling of communal rebellion has disappeared from today's massive theme parks, with their corporate management, synergistic cross-promotions, and hefty admission prices. And as the Astroland story suggests, the independent amusement park is a dying breed. Yet summer after summer, we keep coming back to these places. Why? At a time when we can amuse ourselves so easily on our various private screens (TVs, computers, iPods, video games), what kind of amusement can we get at an amusement park that we can't get anyplace else?
Next week: vaudeville, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and the birth of the movies.
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