Expositions, Fairs, and Amusement Parks

EXPOSITIONS, FAIRS, AND AMUSEMENT PARKS

Decade of Fairs

American cities in the 1900s were engaged in a fierce competition for prestige and status, and civic boosters looked to world's fairs as one vehicle for attracting press attention, visitors, and new business. Thanks to the stylistic and popular success of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, promoters in the 1900s sought to imitate it across the United States. The 1901 Exposition in Buffalo, New York, (where President William McKinley was assassinated); the 1904 Saint Louis exposition; the 1905 Portland, Oregon, World's Fair; the 1907 Jamestown (Virginia) Tercentennial; and the 1909 Seattle fair were among the major spectacles of the decade. Fairs attempted to educate and entertain their visitors. They usually featured displays of the latest technological marvels, from railroad locomotives to dynamos to new household gadgets. Countries from around the world often mounted exhibits designed to reflect their own technological and industrial achievements and distinctive cultural heritage. The fairs and expositions of the 1900s prominently featured the new role of the United States as an imperial power. For example, the Philippines Reservation at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in Saint Louis displayed twelve hundred Filipinos living under "primitive" conditions. The exhibit was intended as a clear demonstration of their need for the missionary and educational influence of the United States. A similar display was organized for the 1909 Seattle World's Fair.

Impact

Fairs usually lasted for about six months. After they were over, often at least one of the fair buildings was turned into a museum, allowing the impact of the event to linger afterward, in a sense becoming a permanent world's fair. Newspapers and magazines spread the cultural influence of the fairs, as did the strenuous merchandizing of fair-related products. Sometimes seemingly trivial innovations had long-term consequences. For example, it was during the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904 that people first ate hot dogs and ice cream cones as they walked. They were the world's first "fast food."

Amusement Parks

One of the most popular attractions at the Columbian Exposition was the Midway Plaisance, a raucous and eclectic collection of exotic entertainments, restaurants, shops, and theaters featuring everything from the giant wheel designed by George W. Ferris to belly dancers and a "World Congress of Beauty." The legacy of the Midway was a new form of popular entertainment for the urban masses, and it inspired permanent amusement parks around the United States, where factory workers, secretaries, clerks, and other urban workers could spend what leisure time they had pursuing idle pleasures and inexpensive thrills.

Coney Island

The most spectacular of the new parks was Coney Island, located on Long Island, New York, nine miles from Manhattan. Coney Island had wide, sandy beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, which had made it a resort destination since the early 1800s. By the 1890s there were hotels, restaurants, roller coasters, and public ocean swimming, or bathing, as people then called it. Coney Island came into its own as a major working-class mecca during the 1900s, after three large amusement areas opened there. In 1897 George Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park, where customers could ride mechanical horses on a rail around the perimeter of the park, some-times going as high as thirty-five feet in the air. This was a thrilling novelty at the time, and it attracted thousands of riders. Inspired by Tilyou's success, Frederic Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy opened Luna Park in 1903 on the site of the old Sea Lion Park. The old, slower-paced Coney Island was literally replaced by the new, exciting resort. Luna Park quickly became known as "the Heart of Coney Island." It featured minarets and spires, and at night the bold park structures were illuminated by more than a million light bulbs, an exciting innovation during an age when electricity was in its youth. Finally, in 1904 William H. Reynolds opened Dreamland, with wide boulevards and murals of such marvels as the destruction of Pompeii. It completed a triumvirate of attractions that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors daily from May through September.

A Seaside Mecca

The crowds traveled to Coney Island by steamboat, railroad, elevated train, horsecars, bicycles, and even automobiles later in the decade. The most popular way to go, however, was the trolley, in large part because the price had dropped to five cents in 1895, making a trip to Coney Island affordable for just about everyone. To attract customers, the parks often offered combination prices, like Steeplechase Park's 1905 offer of twenty-five rides for twenty-five cents. Many people saved their money to be able to go even once a month. It attracted factory workers, salespeople, secretaries, even the new middle class. In return for the price of admission, the new resort promised safe, respectable fun, in the open air.

New Mores

Since so many kinds of people patronized the new amusement parks, they became a place for immigrants to learn about the way Americans behaved in a setting entirely different from the school, settlement house, or factory. The taboos of genteel society began to crumble in these settings as single men and women met each other there without chaperones. The rides encouraged physical intimacy; the sign for Coney Island's Cannon Coaster shouted: "WILL SHE THRO W HER ARMS AROUN D YOUR NECK AND YELL? WELL, I GUESS, YES!" Swimmers wore very little clothing by contemporary standards—yet another way in which moral strictures were challenged.

Decline

Coney Island's heyday lasted only through the 1900s. Motion pictures and other new forms of popular entertainment offered stiff competition by providing exotic locales and vicarious excitement closer to home. In 1911 Dreamland suffered a disastrous fire. Luna Park's Skip Dundy died in 1907; his partner died in 1919; and the park faded slowly until it, too, burned in the 1940s. Only Steeplechase Park remains in the 1990s, with the Cyclone rollercoaster and without the Steeplechase Race—a reduced version of its previous glory.

Sources:

Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World's Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);

John F. Kasson, Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978);

Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Cen tury-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).