Amusement Parks and Theme Parks. Elements of the American amusement and theme park go back to antiquity. More direct antecedents include various European traditions, ranging from medieval fairs and carnivals to seventeenth‐century pleasure gardens such as London's Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Cremorne. These gardens featured pyrotechnics, games, live entertainment, promenading and dancing, and even primitive versions of amusement rides. Prior to the American Revolution, several modest versions of such gardens opened on the East Coast.
These were initially largely pastoral environments that catered to an essentially rural culture. They began to change in the late nineteenth century, however, reflecting the new urban industrial age. Spurring this change were profit‐minded entrepreneurs, hotel and resort operations, and the electric traction or trolley companies established following the
Civil War. To meet the flat fees charged for
electricity by utility companies, trolley concerns sought ways to stimulate weekend business. One effective method was to build a park at the end of the trolley line, thus creating an early version of the amusement park. In addition, by the mid‐nineteenth century, numerous seaside resorts had begun to appear along the upper eastern seaboard. These resorts initially catered to the wealthy, but easy access via public transportation rapidly changed their status.
Despite the many precursors of the modern amusement park, including mechanical rides dating back to 1800, the immediate impetus was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in
Chicago and its “Midway Plaisance.” This amusement area, consciously separated from the fair's more “serious” exhibits, became the prototype of amusement parks for the next sixty years with its enticing array of concessions, shows, and rides, including the first Ferris Wheel, designed by the civil engineer George Washington Gale Ferris (1859–1896). Costing $350,000 (recovered quickly), the original Ferris Wheel stood 264 feet high, weighed 1,200 tons, had 36 pendulum cars, and accommodated 2,160 riders.
Inspired by the success of the “Midway Plaisance,” Paul Boynton opened “Water Chutes” on Chicago's south side, arguably the first modern amusement park. Turning eastward, Boynton in 1895 opened a similar venue, “Sea Lion Park,” on New York's Coney Island. Boynton's addition to what had been simply a beach resort dating from the 1870s marked the beginning of the traditional amusement park's golden era—a period of massive
immigration and explosive urban growth.
Between 1895 and 1903, three additional amusement parks were built on Coney Island: “Steeplechase Park” (1897), spearheaded by George C. Tilyou; “Luna Park” (1903), constructed by Elmer “Skip” Dundy and Frederic Thompson on the site of the unsuccessful “Sea Lion Park”; and, within a year, across from “Luna,” the $3.5 million “Dreamland,” created by real estate speculator William H. Reynolds. Even though the parks initially attracted enormous crowds (one million on one day in 1914), Coney Island's decline began before
World War I: “Dreamland” burned down, “Luna” went bankrupt, and Tilyou died. By
World War II, Coney Island's heyday was over, with fewer patrons making the subway trip from Brooklyn. By the late 1990s, only one park, Astroland, remained as a sad reminder of Coney Island's glory days.
Nevertheless, Coney Island served as a model for most subsequent “traditional” amusement parks, many built by transportation companies following the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The number of such parks peaked in 1919, with 1,500 in operation. The 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in the development of mechanical rides, followed by initial prosperity during the early Great Depression as patrons sought inexpensive entertainment and a vicarious escape from hard times. By 1935, however, only four hundred amusement parks remained. World War II further battered the industry, taking for the war effort materials needed by the aging parks, contributing to their deterioration.
Postwar prosperity initially revived the amusement park business, swelling attendance and revenues, and stimulating the construction of new parks. Beginning in the 1960s, however, urban amusement parks again struggled to survive and many of the more historic parks closed, including Palisade Park in New Jersey, Chicago's Riverview, Cleveland's Euclid Beach, and North Dartmouth, Massachusetts's Lincoln Park.
Ironically, the savior of the outdoor amusement business, and at the same time a major factor in the demise of the older‐style traditional parks, was the theme park, a creative example of advertising packaging and organizational savvy. Walt
Disney's concept of organizing amusement areas around one or more themes was revolutionary. “Disneyland,” which opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955, set the pattern with its five distinct, themed areas replacing the old midway. Although originally scoffed at, the theme park idea gained momentum quickly. The first successful park after Disneyland, “Six Flags Over Texas,” opened in 1961; by the late 1990s, Six Flags owned twelve parks and the corporation claimed that 85 percent of Americans lived within a day's drive of a Six Flags park. Just as the urban amusement parks had flourished in an era of trolleys and subways, the theme park, tapping a regional and national market, was a product of the age of the interstate highway system and commercial air travel. In 1971 the Disney organization opened Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, still the World's largest theme park a quarter century later. EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), one of several additions to Disney World, opened in 1982.
The American theme park spread around the world in the 1980s and remained in the 1990s a global success. Although escalating costs and a saturated market slowed the growth of theme parks in the 1990s, business remained healthy. In 1996, for example, Disneyland attracted a record fifteen million patrons and some two dozen other major parks set similar attendance records. Entrepreneurs constantly seek innovations, including the Indoor Family Entertainment Center phenomenon of the 1990s, most notably represented by “Camp Snoopy” (1992), a seven‐acre theme park inside Minneapolis's giant Mall of America, which boasts sixteen rides (including a log chute and a roller coaster). As the twentieth century ended, the United States boasted approximately six hundred parks, large and small, with fixed‐site amusement rides.
See also
Barnum, P.T.;
Circuses;
Consumer Culture;
Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension;
Highway System;
Leisure;
Shopping Centers and Malls;
Tourism;
Urbanization;
World's Fairs and Expositions.
Bibliography
Richard W. Flint , Meet Me in Dreamland: The Early Development of Amusement Parks in America, in Victorian Resorts and Hotels: Essays from a Victorian Society Autumn Symposium, ed. Richard Guy Wilson, 1982, pp.99–107.
Robert W. Rydell , All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1984.
Judith A. Adams , The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills, 1991.
David Nasaw , Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, 1993.
Don B. Wilmeth , Amusement and Theme Parks, in Encyclopedia of American Social History, eds. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, 1993, pp. 1705–12.
Steven Watts , The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 1997.
Don B. Wilmeth
