The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

Coney Island and Blackpool came to define the playful crowd across the Atlantic World of 1900, creating through their innovations and diversity unique settings for industrial peoples to find release from routine and care. To explain their success, we have to ask: Why and how did these resorts break away from the ruling conventions of the Victorian seaside and embrace the exciting otherness of the popular classes at play? Simultaneously, we must question how Coney Island and Blackpool differed, leading them on sharply contrasting paths. Divergences in physical and climatic settings, land holdings, entertainment customs, political contexts, and ultimately social and cultural traditions will shape our query. What follows is a brief historical comparison of how the industrial saturnalia of the seaside emerged in all of its diversity by the 1900s.

Coney Island and Blackpool were shaped by their geography and climate, which led them to draw crowds in similar but still unique ways. Coney Island is a five-mile-long, oval-shaped peninsula on the southern tip of Brooklyn on the southwestern shore of Long Island. It is located nine miles east of New York City’s Manhattan Island. It was little more than a flat wasteland until it was settled in 1824 when a private road covered with seashells was built over the creek that divided Coney “Island” from Long Island. Given the cost and time of carriage travel and ferryboats across the water from Manhattan, Coney’s earliest visitors were mostly an adventurous handful of genteel New Yorkers and more distant travelers. Road owners opened a hotel that appealed to these pursuers of solitude and health-giving salt air. Coney attracted political and cultural notables (from leading Senators Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun to writers Herman Melville and the young Walt Whitman). Its main advantage was its south-facing east-west axis, assuring long sunny days in summer along with cool ocean breezes.

The scene became far more commercial when regular ferry service began in the mid-1840s to the western end of Coney nearest to Manhattan. In hopes of attracting the business or casual crowd from the city, two enterprising New Yorkers built a circular wooden platform upon which they placed a tent. Soon, around this “pavilion” gathered a smattering of cheap wooden bathhouses, eateries, saloons, gypsy fortunetellers, and ballad singers who attracted New York’s diverse, even plebeian crowds. One visitor remembered the “barn-like bar room” with “counter boards held up with barrels.”¹ By the 1860s, this western section of beach had become a notorious refuge for gamblers and crooks evading police because, though it was near the city, it was beyond the control of the authorities. The West End also drew the slumming rich and politicians seeking respite from the demands of respectable society. Later it was known as Norton’s Point, named after the notorious politician Michael Norton of Tammany Hall who bought the site in 1874. The West End of Coney Island reflected the curious culture of the city with its mixture of dandies, corrupt politicians, and plebeian underworld figures.²

Blackpool was similarly situated close to rapidly expanding urban areas, in this case that part of the English county of Lancashire where the first Industrial Revolution got under way in the late eighteenth century and continued to gather momentum until the First World War. It was, however, further from the developing population centers than Coney Island was from New York: The nearest substantial town was 20 miles away and Manchester was more than double that distance. Its main original asset was similarly a long, open shoreline, facing westward to the Irish Sea, with generous and often boisterous tides. From at least the 1750s, Blackpool slowly built up a polite visiting season based on the provincial gentry and the middle ranks, in response to the new fashion for sea-bathing cures and seaside scenery.³ Alongside this, and apparently antedating it, was a plebean tradition of popular sea-bathing at the August spring tides, when there was said to be “physic in the sea.” Artisans and small farmers traveled on foot and by horse-drawn cart right across Lancashire to take the waters in their own way. This was an ancient custom, widespread across Europe and coinciding with the Roman Catholic festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It was eventually to be imported to the United States by Irish migrants in the form of “Cure Day,” still a feature of Coney Island in the 1950s.⁴ In its Lancashire guise this popular festivity involved drinking seawater by the gallon, and as well as bathing unclad in the sea and consuming spirits to “fortify the stomach.” This latter custom continued to grow in popularity right up to the arrival of the railroad in 1846, which linked Blackpool to the growing industrial towns of south and east Lancashire.⁵

By this time the little town had a year-round population of perhaps 1,500, which doubled at the August peak of the holiday season. Blackpool was therefore a longer-established and more respectable place of resort than Coney Island at this stage, except when the “Padjamers,” as the plebian bathers were known, arrived. Its middle-class visitors had a reputation for being plain in dress and speech; and also for a healthy appetite for food and drink.⁶ By 1850, the horse racing on the beach, and the local summer fair, had both been suppressed. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the northern cliffs, one of several public houses with dancing and other amusements, was a far cry from Norton’s Point. Finally, the gypsy fortune-tellers among the sand dunes remained almost invisible. The trains brought up to 12,000 visitors from the cotton industry towns at an August weekend in the early 1850s. New local government bodies controlled bathing and licensed street vendors and donkey drivers. Some visitors dressed flashily or scruffily, swore noisily and tried to bathe naked without using the bathing-machines. But these were the only blemishes on mid-century Blackpool’s respectability.⁷

Advances in road and rail transportation enabled both seaside resorts to become sites of an extraordinary range of entertainments that by 1900 appealed broadly to the popular classes. Given its location, Coney Island may have been destined to prevail over other American seaside spots. But investments in roads and rails from New York City population centers guaranteed it, especially in developing the central and eastern sections of the Island. The opening of a plank road (1850), horse tram (1862) and a steam rail link (1864) from Brooklyn to the center of the island superseded the advantage of the West End’s being closer to Manhattan by sea. The land development schemes of William Engeman in the center, known as West Brighton, provided a vast range of alternatives to the notorious male-oriented West End and heralded the advent of a more hetero-social pleasure zone. The opening of two Iron Piers at the center in 1879 and 1881 made possible boat transit on a grand scale, bringing visitors from as far away as Philadelphia, Newark, and New Haven. The piers were entertainment sites in themselves, each offering a 1,000-foot platform of ballrooms, restaurants, and other activities jutting out into the sea.⁸

This was merely the beginning. Ultimately, Coney Island became the seaside counterpoint to America’s greatest city when still newer railroad lines and the entertainment complexes built in conjunction with them completed the shift of commercial activities from the West End to the center and east side of Coney. In the meantime, the western section was transformed into a respectable suburban housing district called Sea Gate. Between 1867 and 1880, five railroads were constructed specifically to facilitate tourism. In 1867, what became the Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Railroad was extended to West Brighton, prompting the development of a diverse bathing and entertainment zone. Nearby, Andrew Culver in 1876 opened a railroad that extended from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to Culver Plaza along Surf Avenue (a commercial road parallel to the beach). Lying between the two piers, Culver Plaza became a choice area for Coney Island entertainments. These train lines opened Coney Island to the salaried employee on a day trip from Manhattan, eventually via the Brooklyn Bridge. The fare was 35 cents for a round trip ticket, cheaper than the ferry (50 cents), but still beyond the reach of most wage earners. In addition to its stately 300-foot Centennial Tower, Culver Plaza offered a telegraph office that provided current stock quotes and Paul Bauer’s West Brighton Hotel for a business clientele. Nearby, Charles Feltman’s Ocean Pavilion, with a dance floor for 2,000 and a restaurant that served up to 8,000, catered especially to prosperous German immigrants. In 1879, another syndicate built the Sea Beach Palace in the heart of West Brighton and linked it with a third line, the New York and Sea Beach Railroad.⁹

West Brighton became identified with what New Yorkers meant by “Coney Island.” It was a classic example of a late Victorian seaside pleasure spot, but on a relatively huge scale: Purpose-built railroads fed customers into anchor hotels and pier businesses and leased concessions surrounded these featured attractions. Gradually, the crowd at West Brighton became more plebeian. In the 1890s, when these rail lines were linked via mergers that made possible direct electric trains from downtown, Manhattan wage earners could reach the Island in 45 minutes. By 1896, that trip cost only 20 cents, making Coney Island the natural destination of ordinary New Yorkers on a day trip.¹⁰

In response to the social mix that the new rails and private development provided, West Brighton became a curious combination of genteel pretensions and popular fascinations. The Seaside Aquarium opened in 1877 with an aviary, zoo, and aquatic tanks. These exhibits may have appealed to the more refined tastes of the middle classes. But the Aquarium also provided performing bears and ostriches, Punch and Judy shows, a music hall, and even displayed Siamese twins. The Iron Steam Boat Company stressed the scenic journey from the Battery to West Brighton in 1883, but also proudly noticed the thrills of the “flying horses, wings and velocipede machines” that could be found on Coney. A mark of sophistication was the claim that Bunnell’s Brighton Museum of albinos, armless boys, and “Hindoos” was run by an “honest showman” who provided “true wonders.”¹¹

Even after rail travel made West Brighton a popular site, more discerning genteel visitors could still find relief from the teeming crowds. On the more secluded far eastern end of Coney Island were built two additional railroads to accommodate the more upscale customer at hotels of suitable status. Austin Corbin’s New York and Manhattan Beach Railroad (completed in 1877) delivered affluent New Yorkers disembarking from Brooklyn ferryboat docks to his Manhattan and Oriental hotels on Manhattan Beach. In 1878, Brooklyn developers (including William Engeman) imitated Corbin’s scheme by building the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island railroad from Brooklyn depots to the door of their Brighton Beach Hotel (located between the east end and the West Brighton center). These railroads created a relatively exclusive zone, isolated from the more plebeian center.

Despite these differences, Coney Island remained primarily a destination of the urban day tripper. The luxury hotels served mostly guests on short stays and many more visited the hotels for dining or promenading than rented rooms. Missing were the vast stands of hotels and rooming houses usually associated with seaside resorts like Blackpool or Atlantic City. The most numerous private spaces on Coney Island were bathhouses for changing into swimming suits. The proximity of the Island to New York made the crowds more ephemeral than at Blackpool. Even more significant, the increasing ease of access to the resort meant that distance and cost of transportation no longer filtered out the underclasses. Coney Island drew its visitors increasingly from the rich ethnic and cultural mix of the New York tenements, with access so cheap and easy as to pose few barriers even to the poorest so long as they confined themselves to the free entertainments of the beach and the visual pleasures of looking on. This created an extraordinary social mix that both disturbed elites and created potential social tensions on the Island.¹²

Blackpool similarly broadened, deepened, and expanded its appeal during the late nineteenth century, but with somewhat different outcomes. Its crowds grew from about 200,000 per year in the early 1860s to three million forty years later.¹³ Almost all came by railroad: In addition to the line built in 1846, a second connection with industrial Lancashire was opened in 1874 and another direct line for holiday services opened in 1913.¹⁴ The railroads were willing to provide cheap fares for day and weekend visitors and for people staying for a week. Still, the main impetus to growth came from the ability and desire of working-class people from the cotton towns to spend time and money at Blackpool. This built on the tradition of the Padjamers but extended it greatly. Of crucial importance was the growing purchasing power of working-class families from the 1870s, when basic commodity prices began a sustained fall, and where young couples and mature families in the textile towns had access to more than one income. This excluded working-class families with young dependent children and where wives were unable to work outside the home. As a result, working-class Blackpool became predominantly an adult resort, an unusual phenomenon in Victorian England. In contrast with the United States, a week’s vacation was commonly available, even for factory workers. The Industrial Revolution had not extinguished the traditional Wakes’ holidays of the cotton district, which at mid-century were transformed from local festivals into popular seaside holidays.¹⁵ These were not paid holidays. They had to be budgeted during the year, but savings clubs were organized by religious bodies, the retail Co-operative societies, and even street or neighborhood committees.¹⁶ During this period “cotton Lancashire” also gave professional soccer to the world. Music-halls, indulgence in tasty convenience foods like fish and chips, music-making (with a surprising number of piano purchases), and a cheap popular press all were part of the rise of the world’s first working-class consumer society.¹⁷ Blackpool was central to this “work hard, play hard” culture because it offered an explosive, inexpensive release from regular, monotonous work in a place that was accessible and familiar, while it also offered exciting novelty.

Here we identify a clear and enduring contrast. While Coney drew on the diversity of nearby New York City, Blackpool recruited its visitors over longer distances, but from much more closely knit, firmly established communities with a strong sense of identity and a broad familiarity with each other’s occupations and ways of life. These were universally white and English-speaking, with a variety of Lancashire town and village accents; practically all Protestants but with a smattering of Catholics. Whole towns went on holiday at the same time and thus there were fewer anxieties about the anonymity and decency of the crowds than at Coney. And Blackpool kept its middle-class visitors. The central district between the two piers of the 1860s was a working-class preserve, while the North and South Shore areas were consecrated to middle-class families.¹⁸ Even in the working-class zone, however, many stayed up to a full week, and this generated a demand for cheap rooms with breakfast, hot water, and cooking services. Whole streets of redbrick, four-story lodging-houses went up around the stations between the 1860s and the 1890s. By 1901, there were 2,642 landladies listed in the census.¹⁹ Many of them came from the towns of Blackpool’s hinterland and offered accommodation to their former workmates and neighbors. While Coney Island had a few clusters of summer bungalows for families living away from the City, they paled in comparison to the permanence and size of the Blackpool boarding houses.²⁰ These aspects of the local economy gave greater stability and security to Blackpool as a permanent and year-round resort settlement.

As influential as geographical location and transportation were the climate and length of the season. Coney Island’s cold winters and hot summers made for a short, but very intense season. While most entertainment venues closed by mid-September and then opened only in mid-May, business was very brisk between June and August. Most seaside resorts were seasonal, but Coney Island was especially dependent upon warm Julys and Augusts, particularly on Sundays. Because very few New Yorkers had even a week’s vacation time or a even a two-day weekend in 1900, businesses prayed for sunny summer Sundays that brought in tens, and later, hundreds of thousands of day trippers. A few wet and cold Sundays could make all the difference between business success and business failure.

This had a number of implications. First, the short season encouraged minimal investment in buildings and other facilities. Coney Island was noted for its shanty town look and not just in the more tawdry streets. Wood and other cheap materials were used even in the construction of hotels and music pavilions. Second, one of the main attractions of Coney was relief from the summer heat. Far more than at Blackpool, the beach was a focal point of crowds. From the 1850s, when “mixed bathing” became acceptable, Coney’s long smooth sandy beach allowed thousands to wade far out into the sea before the water was deep enough to require any swimming skills. The inland amusement district, of course, drew many who never set foot on the beach, but the seaward complex of bathhouses, food stalls, and roving sellers of novelties, oysters, and steamed cob corn drew throngs. Before the coming of the public boardwalk, access to the beach was restricted. Bathhouses that leased lots above the tide allowed only patrons to use the beach. When reformers built the boardwalk in 1923, they also provided free access to the shore, bringing the center of Coney Island into line with federal law and rendering it comparable with the British conventions that kept beaches public at Blackpool.²¹ As a result, by the 1930s, the beach culture at Coney Island became even more pronounced, often drawing more people than did the amusement parks, Surf Avenue, and other amusement centers.

Blackpool’s beach became less central to its identity and attractiveness as the years went by. The sands between the North and Central piers could still be crowded with families in deck chairs and children making sandcastles as late as the 1960s, but they could never match the sheer spectacle of the thousands of frisky folk in bathing attire who thronged Coney’s beaches over a similar period The main reason, of course, was because the weather was much less kind. Also important, bathing regulations and conventions were less permissive than at Coney: A few bathing machines were still in use until the 1930s, although most people paddled without paying for them. Nevertheless, the beach crowds increased even after the palatial municipal open-air swimming pool of 1923 provided a popular alternative. While temperatures at Blackpool very rarely reached the levels of those experienced on an August day at Coney Island, its season was longer even though few bathed outside the height of summer. It opened at Easter, was very busy for the movable Whitsuntide week holidays in May or June, and served as a center for the various regional summer Wakes holidays. From the 1870s onward, it reduced its dependence on good weather by building up an unprecedented and unparalleled array of indoor attractions in its “palaces of pleasure,” solidly built of brick, stone, steel, and glass, which soon became more important than the beach in defining the town’s identity. The longer season made these investments at Blackpool feasible. Thus, while Blackpool was less a beach resort, it became even more a commercial pleasure resort than did Coney. The weather then shaped the destinies of Coney Island and Blackpool in many subtle ways.²²

No matter how pristine or exclusive a pleasure spot may be, almost inevitably once a site begins to draw a crowd, it pulls in commerce and entertainers that challenge the genteel values of early visitors. Only when landed aristocrats, entrepreneurs, or public officials held large contiguous acreage of resort property (or dominated zoning and other local regulations) could they exclude the gypsy fortune tellers, pushcart merchants, target game stalls, and prostitutes who sought a piece of the market created by the beach, built-up attraction, or the crowd itself. Neither Coney Island nor Blackpool exhibited this exclusive power of elites nor were able to keep out down market diversity.²³

By the 1880s, Coney was divided into a popular center at West Brighton and an exclusive east end. While West Brighton never had the notorious reputation of Norton’s Point, it too had a shanty area called the Gut, in an old creek bed between West Third and Fifth Streets that catered to criminals, jockeys, and stable boys with beer, gambling, and whores. Another center of low life emerged after 1882, when Peter Tilyou cut a planked road parallel to Surf Avenue to direct traffic to his Surf Theater. The area soon was called the Bowery because of its resemblance to New York City’s rough and wild working-class entertainment district. Cabarets, featuring entertainment on raised stages or pavilions, sold drinks to the audience seated at tables. The larger places had curtained booths where the rich might be visited by women for private (sometimes nude) shows. After fires in 1899 and 1903, the Bowery became more upscale with brick buildings and music halls. Still, despite West Brighton’s early respectable attractions, the area had become a dizzying assault on the senses with band music, freak shows, mechanical rides, and a “dense but good-humored crowd.” When a reporter strolled down Surf Avenue on a summer weekend in 1904, he opined: “one might well image Noah’s Ark to be waiting at the other end of it,” so exotic were the animals and people in and around the sideshows.²⁴

This diverse, often downscale entertainment in West Brighton emerged from the particular way by which land was purchased and leased, ensuring a competitive environment of cheap attractions. Gravesend, a small country township on the southeast edge of Brooklyn, held jurisdiction over Coney Island. Beginning in 1847, the township gradually took over claims to the shoreline from the dispersed descendants of the town founders, and leased the more developed western portion to showmen. From his position as town Commissioner of Common Lands in 1867, John McKane built a local empire by accumulating government offices and leasing out land at very low prices to friends who obligingly hired his construction business. In turn, leaseholders financed their projects by subleasing adjacent lots to more transient and less well-connected entrepreneurs who offered the crowds mechanical rides, food stalls, and the like. This process guaranteed the downscale character of West Brighton attractions. McKane oversaw development of the Bowery in the 1880s and tolerated prostitution and gambling on horse races and boxing matches, to the anger of Brooklyn reformers to the north. After years of defying outside authorities, McKane was finally imprisoned in 1894 for election fraud. Despite McKane’s ouster and pledges of reform from new officials, the pattern of subleasing was already well-established, thus perpetuating the cheap, diverse entertainment enterprises that served the urban masses.²⁵

While land in West Brighton was parceled out, much larger lots (with the aid of subterfuge) were purchased in the less developed eastern end, assuring more upscale development. William Engeman bought 200 acres of prime Brighton Beach shore land in 1868, half of which was sold to the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railroad, which built the Brighton Beach Hotel in 1879. He also built the first of three racetracks that would attract the “swells” mostly to the eastern end of the island. Even more ambitious was Austin Corbin’s purchase of 500 acres of Manhattan Beach to the east of Engeman’s holdings, where the Manhattan and Oriental Hotels were built in deliberate isolation from the plebeians that thronged to West Brighton.²⁶

Large land holding in the east assured a high social tone by the exclusion of peddlers, food stalls, freak shows, and whorehouses. Corbin even erected a high fence around his hotel to keep out peddlers and the riffraff, and hired Pinkerton detectives to weed out undesirables from his railroad in transit to the Manhattan Hotel. The beachfront was also patrolled by private police. Following an ignoble tradition started at Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, Corbin famously also banned Jews. Genteel culture prevailed in the east. The bathing house included 1,650 dressing rooms for men and 600 for women, each with running water and gas heating with an amphitheater between men’s and women’s wings for viewing the sea and bathers. Even if mixed bathing was allowed, participants were advised to spend no more than thirty minutes a day in the sea. Musical entertainment dominated. Military bands (especially the ensembles of Anton Seidl, J. P. Sousa, and Patrick Gilmore) were regular summertime attractions and until the mid-1890s Sundays were devoted to “sacred music.” Henry Pain’s fireworks spectacles also attracted this genteel crowd. This London-based showman (self-proclaimed pyrotechnist to Her Majesty the Queen) presented grand simulations of battles and natural wonders often involving hundreds of costumed actors, elaborate stage scenery, and even a man-made lagoon to display fireworks. Pain’s Battle of Gettysburg, Eruption of Vesuvius, and the Fall of Pompeii were among the spectacles with elaborate scenery, special effects, and casts of hundreds staged in an amphitheater that eventually sat 12,000. His 1902 program, The Fall of Rome, included dancing “damsels gauzily clad, playing on timbrels” on the steps of the Temple of Venus, and, as Rome burned, Nero strummed his harp; fireworks dramatically ended the show.²⁷

The popular areas of Blackpool also had divided landownership. In 1838 the township of Layton with Warbreck, within which Blackpool developed, was found to be subdivided between 133 freehold proprietors, of whom 27 held more than 25 acres. But Bonny’s Estate, a large parcel near the sea, was sold off piecemeal in 1841. Soon streets created behind the sea frontage became slums, while the front gardens that faced the sea hosted the stalls and fairground amusements that would later form the “Golden Mile.” The Clifton family also sold off their estate when the railroad station opened near their property, providing another area of cheap commercial activity for working-class trippers. Thus, throughout what became central Blackpool, the competitive entertainment market prevailed without interference from ambitious developers in ways comparable to the western and central portions of Coney Island.

By contrast, the North Shore cliffs saw more up-market development, with a sea-front toll in force until 1899 to discourage working-class visitors. A land company had combined several smaller holdings together in the early 1860s to control development along the shoreline and justify the building of the Imperial Hotel. At the other end, South Shore was far enough away from the central entertainment and lodging-house district for developers to agree on middle-class family homes and superior boarding-houses.²⁸ The local equivalents of Brighton and Manhattan Beaches actually lay outside the Blackpool boundary, going southeastward along the estuary of the River Ribble. Lytham was a classic case where a wealthy squire preferred to develop his property in an attractive, planned way, while St Anne’s, a product of a speculative land company, offered a similar controlled environment to respectable families. In such ways both the Blackpool region and Coney Island were able to be many things to many people, an essential recipe for both conflict and profit.²⁹

If property-holding patterns worked to divide east and central Coney Island as well as to separate central Blackpool from its near neighbors, the economic power structures and political contexts of both resorts ultimately led to sharper contrasts. Despite the short leases and parceled land holdings that allowed small players into the game at West Brighton, big money always controlled and profited from the site. In fact, large structures dominated the vista, helping to promote and define the Island. The Iron Tower of 300 feet, which had been moved from the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, was the first of many such sights at Coney Island. Its innovative elevator gave visitors a special view at the top. Competing with the stately Iron Tower was the whimsical 122-feet high Elephant Hotel, a tin-covered pachyderm built of wood in 1884. The Elephant Hotel drew thousands to its gift shop and the diorama in its legs. Stairs led to thirty-two guest rooms and a public view of the shore in the howdah on top. Although it burned down in 1896, the expression “Seeing the Elephant” became a common American expression for satisfying questionable desires. More sedate was the 375-foot Beacon Tower, built in 1904 that trumped earlier towers with presumably 100,000 electric lights for night display and a beacon light shining into the sea, becoming the focal point of the Dreamland amusement park and the island itself.³⁰

Blackpool also acquired landmarks that set it apart from its British competitors. Its first two piers had predated Coney’s, the North Pier in 1863 catering for the “better classes” and charging a twopenny toll to make this clear, while the South Jetty, later the Central Pier, opened three years later to welcome a lower class of visitor. In 1870, it began to offer open-air dancing to an unpretentious “German band.” Later, a third pier, catering to the middle class opened in the south. The 1870s saw the opening of the Raikes Hall pleasure gardens, with artificial lake, fireworks displays, dancing platform and (unofficially) prostitutes, and the Winter Gardens, a distinctive piece of pleasure architecture whose concert hall and theater soon became more important than its genteel indoor promenades.

But the outstanding landmark, the key symbol of Blackpool’s opulent populist distinctiveness, was the Tower, which opened in 1894. At nearly 517 feet it presented a much stronger accent on the flat local skyline than any of Coney Island’s towers or other extravaganzas. Moreover, it was very solidly built. The Tower soon became, as it remains, the first sign of the approaching resort, an object of desire sought eagerly by children (and adults) peering through the train window as they neared Blackpool. It was constructed along the lines of the Eiffel Tower, forming yet another link between international exhibitions and leisure architecture. Below its high girders nestled a massive rectangular brick building containing a zoo, an aquarium, a circus, a theater, a spectacularly opulent ballroom, roof gardens, and a restaurant. The Tower, in fact, was a whole resort complex in its own right, accessible on payment of sixpence, a sum that could readily be afforded from the holiday savings of the Blackpool’s working-class visitors. Although a speculative and probably fraudulent London company had originally promoted the project, John Bickerstaffe led a local takeover to ensure that the building was completed, to the benefit of large numbers of shareholders drawn from Blackpool residents, business people, and visitors. This kind of popular shareholder capitalism was central to the development of the pleasure palaces for which the town became famous. This element of shareholder democracy differentiated Blackpool from Coney Island, and although the men who ran the companies also played a disproportionate part in running local government, with regular scandals involving property speculation and the licensing of drink outlets, there was no Blackpool counterpart of John McKane.³¹ The 1890s also saw the opening of the Alhambra, next door to the Tower and of equivalent size. Although it failed initially to pay dividends, it stayed in business for more than sixty years. Blackpool also received its Gigantic Wheel in 1896, only two years after the Ferris Wheel came to Coney Island, a second accent on the Blackpool skyline, but unusually short-lived (closing in 1928). These were substantial, lasting, indeed monumental investments, in sharp contrast to the ephemeral nature of so many of Coney Island’s headline attractions.³²

Despite the superficial grandeur of the Beacon Tower, the efforts of Coney Island entrepreneurs were seldom in any sense substantial or collective. Sharp business competition had its roots in New York City itself in the self-promotion of urban businesses attempting to attract passing crowds. Like their counterparts on the streets of New York, Coney Island entertainments and related businesses relied on ballyhoo—boisterous, dramatic, and often deceptive promotion. Its most common form was the barker, talker, or spieler (often an out-of-work actor because of the summer slump in theater-going) who used patter and exaggerated claims to “pull” crowds into freak or other shows by appealing to morbid curiosity or even the vanity of the crowd. Only different in form was the special publicity, usually with much newspaper coverage, used to promote amusement parks. George Tilyou attracted thousands to the opening of Steeplechase Park by publicizing that he had to “guard” his sister who would be wearing priceless diamonds while serving as a ticket taker. Drawing on the novelty of airplanes, Dreamland’s Beacon Tower became the site of an aborted launch of a “winged aeroplane” in August 1908 that fell into the sea to the amusement of many attending. There was no effort to collectively enhance the image of Coney Island through joint advertising.³³

Coney Island businesses advertised individually, and not much at that. In fact, much publicity for Coney Island was indirect, often in the form of postcards given away by Coney Island entrepreneurs. Beginning in 1898, the one-cent stamp allowed vacationers to send greetings to family and friends at little cost, even if they lived only a few miles away in the city. In the summer of 1907 each week the Brooklyn Post office handled one million post cards. Trade cards (advertising other products) featured the naughty side of Coney Island, as in “On the Road to Coney Island” with a humorous drawing of a man meeting a girl on the shore. Early movies such as Thomas Edison’s Cakewalk at Coney Island (1896) cultivated this theme. Milton Bradley offered a board game, A Wonderful Account of an Excursion to Coney Island (1881) for adults to play on cold winter Sunday evenings. Coney Island ceaselessly called to attention to itself in the embossed ashtrays or scenic lithographs that served both as souvenirs and advertising. Still, the image of Coney Island was hardly a collective effort of its businesses.³⁴

It was not until 1902 that merchants (perhaps worrying about the publicity that was focused on the new Luna Park) organized a Board of Trade. Even then, much of the publicity for the Island came from two of the great amusement parks, Luna and Dreamland, which competed for bragging rights through postcards and newspaper display ads.³⁵ One collective effort, however, was the mid-September “Mardi Gras” festival, first organized in 1903. It did not matter that the autumn was the wrong season for traditional Mardi Gras: the label and what it conjured up were all that mattered. The parade and various contests brought crowds back after the end of the hot summer season for a final fling. In 1904, the Surf Avenue parade featured a float fitted with a giant frankfurter or “hot dog” machine. From time to time, a dog was thrown in one end and strings of frankfurters were pulled out the other. Opening the ceremonies, Henry Pain thrilled the crowd of thousands along the beach by setting fire to a three-masted ship offshore.

In 1906, the event leaned toward self-parody when it was dubbed the Carnival of Plenty complete with Prince Plenty and Queen Prospera. A mile-long parade of floats lit in electric lights featured the theme of “the longing for luxury, [and] for a life of ease in a land beyond toil.” Floats had “laughing girls perched upon huge wine glasses and mammoth bottles” and women dressed as “greenbacks” representing “Plenty of Money.” The real fun began after the parade when the crowd armed with bags of noisemakers and slapsticks acted out their own celebration. Along Surf Avenue, “the soubrettes were bombarded with confetti and the orchestras were drowned by the unearthly shrieks and clang of the horn and cowbell.” This bit of saturnalian disorder connected Coney’s Mardi Gras to the European ancestors it invoked. But it was still the creation of Coney Island businesses, not a religious tradition. It celebrated and promoted the sublimity of technological progress (exemplified by the wonder of night-time electrical lighting) and the right of hard working Americans to enjoy a new age of prosperity provided by the entrepreneurs of pleasure. Coney’s Mardi Gras was an important part of the commercial promotion of the site, but it was a comparative rarity.³⁶

Blackpool’s case was very different. As befitted a period in British history when urban government was enterprising, running utilities at a profit to lower local taxes and investing in parks and libraries was common.³⁷ But Blackpool’s municipal corporation went much further. Soon after its creation in 1876, it became very active in promoting the resort as a whole. After all, representatives of the entertainment, drink, and building industries dominated it, and within three years the corporation had obtained powers from Parliament to levy a local property tax to be devoted to supporting a town band and advertising Blackpool’s attractions. This was a unique privilege as rival sea resort municipalities soon found when they sought to compete. It was not until 1921 that much lesser advertising powers became generally available to other resorts.³⁸

Blackpool made full use of this opportunity. It immediately set up an Advertising Committee, which issued the first in a long sequence of publicity guides to be widely distributed in libraries and other public places. In 1881 the committee launched a poster advertising campaign on railroad sites that eventually spread across the whole of urban Britain to the disadvantage of competitors. At the dawn of color lithography, these posters presented the full panorama of Blackpool’s attractions. The town government also promoted fetes and special events to prolong the season at both ends. Beginning with celebrations to inaugurate the electric lighting of the promenade and a Battle of Flowers, these promotions moved on to motor racing and air displays in the early twentieth century. Culminating this trend in 1912 was the autumn Illuminations, providing a blaze of electrical color along the shore. This was entirely a municipal initiative that, while suspended because of the First World War, was revived in 1925.³⁹ A great deal of Blackpool’s success can be ascribed to the efforts of the town government that acted as a business in competition with rival tourist towns and treated local taxpayers as shareholders.⁴⁰

Not that the private Winter Gardens or the Tower sat idly by. They advertised directly in the press and were careful to encourage journalists to write promotional stories. William Holland, manager of the Winter Gardens from 1887 to 1896, brought London music-hall experience and a proven populist touch to the job. He jokingly invited Lancashire people to come and spit on the new hundred-guinea carpet, alluding to low media expectations of working-class behavior but conveying his understanding that folk were too civilized to do any such thing.⁴¹ This jocular boosting mentality was common among Blackpool’s entertainment bosses at a time when the “Pleasure Palaces” were locally run. It rubbed off on the local authority, whose advertising manager, Charles Noden, became a well-known figure in his own right, famous for such coups as promoting Blackpool to battlefield tourists on the site of Waterloo in Belgium by hiring a farmhouse wall to display slogans.⁴²

The success of the Blackpool Corporation provides a particularly sharp contrast between Blackpool and Coney Island. To an astonishing degree, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Coney Island lacked governmental regulation. As we have seen, in the two decades after the Civil War, merchants easily manipulated a leasing and land purchase system when Coney Island was ostensibly “administered” by the village of Gravesend. The machine politics of John McKane assured that moral and business laws were weakly enforced. After McKane’s ouster, although the area was incorporated into Brooklyn in 1894 and into New York City in 1898 when the two cities merged, little changed except that the dominance of a few companies leasing property grew greater. At the same time as government authority became more distant from the Island, attempts of outside religious and civic reformers to improve the site had little success.⁴³

At Coney, government was more of a nuisance than a help to local promoters. Regulation of its social tone was often arbitrary and certainly erratic. Police commissioners attempted in 1899 and again in 1909 to enforce the 1895 ban on the Sunday sale of alcohol imposed by the City. Police found it difficult to enforce this rule because of a loophole that allowed drinks to be served with a meal (often a small sandwich) and immediately relaxed their standards. Police periodically cleared the beach and streets of peddlers and even attempted to suppress Danse du ventre (belly dancing) shows in 1896.⁴⁴ In June 1907, a zealous police chief prohibited barkers on the Bowery from using megaphones to tout their shows. This only induced the “talkers” to hang huge placards around their necks with their messages. A very similar battle took place in 1922 when a new police inspector not only tried to drape cheesecloth over Plaster of Paris Venuses on Surf Avenue but to resurrect the old law against street shows. Neither effort lasted for more than a few days.⁴⁵

As a freestanding municipality dominated by the tourist industry, Blackpool’s local government played a much more active role. It imposed minimum building standards and street layouts and ran most utilities. Only the water supply was privately owned, but it was locally run with more concern for supplying a vital need in a health resort than for profit as such. The local authority also invested very heavily in the sea front, where a broad promenade and carriage drive was opened on top of a new sea wall in 1870. This was all freely accessible to the general public, as was the beach. This was all in direct contrast with the situation at Coney Island, where fragmentation, division, and payment for access was the norm.⁴⁶

This is not to say that local government in Blackpool was uncontroversial. Local elections were often hard-fought, and there was sometimes fierce criticism of the business ethic that dominated the Corporation. The general legitimacy of municipal democracy in Blackpool was, however, seldom questioned, and then only from well-defined pressure groups.⁴⁷ As in Coney Island, the question of what sort of public entertainment was acceptable and of how to maintain order on the streets and beaches was particularly contentious. Opportunistic small traders were eager to clutter up streets and front yards with stalls and entertainments that some found unsightly, while uncertainty about jurisdiction over the beach between high and low tide allowed (in 1895) a proliferation of 316 stalls and shows in the popular central area of the beach. Quack doctors phrenologists, and chiropodists who cut corns in public, shooting gallery operators and ventriloquists, as well as the more commonplace vendors of fruit, ice cream, candy, oysters, and toys avoided paying local taxes. An attempt to abolish these beach businesses in 1880 had failed, and it was not until 1897 that the Corporation succeeded in getting rid of most of them and making the respectable remainder pay rent. This did not solve the problem of stalls in front of houses. Nevertheless, Blackpool appears relatively sedate when compared with Coney Island, and vice and girlie shows were kept very successfully hidden. When, in 1896, a Methodist minister and temperance reformer, angry about the running of streetcars on Sundays, complained that “Compared with Blackpool, Paris is sweet, and Sodom was a paradise,” it is tempting to wonder what he would have thought of Coney.⁴⁸

Both Coney and Blackpool drew upon a similar pot of entertainment traditions that appealed to a transatlantic popular culture, even trading or borrowing from each other. Both shared in the legacy of traveling freak shows, acrobatic acts, menageries, and target games; they drew also upon the more recent and upscale tradition of music and dance halls, and even the uplifting attractions of exhibitions and world’s fairs. Yet national differences still produced distinct mixes that made each resort unique.

Amusements associated with seaside resorts like Coney Island and Blackpool have distant roots in the trade fairs and rural hiring fairs, and in urban pleasure gardens. England and Wales had a long tradition of fairs, going back to the twelfth century, which gradually added amusements to their business functions. For example, London’s Bartholomew Fair, dating from around 1133, had become by the seventeenth century a three-week venue for puppet shows, jugglers, and freaks. In the early 1830s, licenses granted for this fair included 25 menageries, 15 human freak shows, 15 displays of conjuring, rope dancing, and other physical skills, and four waxworks. London’s Greenwich fair was described as, “A never to be forgotten orgy of noise, swings, dancing-booths, oil lamps, fried fish, fat women, giants, dwarfs, gingerbread nuts, unappreciated actors, jugglers and acrobats, mud, dirt, drink, gin, beer and skittles.”⁴⁹ London-area fairs were suppressed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but elsewhere similar urban pleasure fairs survived and prospered. A great burst of innovation and investment began in the 1860s and 1870s in new fairground rides that were later borrowed by seaside entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic.⁵⁰

Another historical root was the urban commercial Pleasure Garden. It had elite origins and usually charged entrance fees, both to earn a profit and to exclude “undesirables.” London’s Vauxhall Gardens (opened in 1661) and the Ranelagh Gardens (1741) certainly anticipated the social tone and style of Coney Island’s Manhattan Beach with their flowerbeds, elegant rotundas, and concerts. In 1774, the Marylebone Gardens also foreshadowed Henry Pain’s pyrotechnic extravaganzas with its extravagant simulation of the eruption of Mt. Etna. Such attractions continued through the nineteenth century: London’s Cremorne Gardens offered music, dancing, shady retreats, drink, and firework displays, as well as animal and acrobatic acts that one could also see at fairgrounds and the seaside. As the evening proceeded, respectable customers would give way to prostitutes and their clients, but the attractions of this pleasure ground outweighed its perils.⁵¹ Such enterprises were not confined to the British metropolis: Blackpool itself had the Raikes Hall pleasure gardens, which was founded as late as 1871 and survived for thirty years.⁵²

Problems of reconciling popularity with respectability weighed heavily on the impresarios of crowd pleasures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵³ Mechanical rides were one solution because they offered thrills without the dangerous pleasures of commercial sex, gambling, and drink. Amusement concessions featuring hobbyhorses and distorting mirrors appeared in London on St. George’s Row. Gallery games, swings, and crude merry-go-rounds were attractions at commercial picnic groves serving American fraternal organizations from the early nineteenth century. Picnic groves such as Jones’s Wood near New York City’s East River in the 1850s offered rides, but also introduced the extravaganzas of the English Pleasure Garden with reenactments of the Battle of Magenta. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, to generate traffic on the weekends, trolley companies set up picnic places and amusement parks in landscaped settings at their suburban terminals. As with Blackpool’s Raikes Hall in 1900, residential expansion brought the demise of some of these picnic groves, including Jones’s Wood itself. Others, like Kennywood in suburban Pittsburgh, became major mechanized amusement parks by the end of the nineteenth century.⁵⁴

While today we associate carousels, Ferris Wheels, and roller coasters with children, these mechanical rides did not emerge, in fact, from the child-centered culture of the late Victorian middle class. The carousel was the outgrowth of a game designed to prepare twelfth-century Arab horsemen for war. Brought to Europe by Spanish and Italian Crusaders, by the seventeenth century, it had become part of ceremonies displaying French horsemanship. In Paris at the Place du Carrousel, gentlemen speared a ring with a lance while riding a galloping horse on a circular track. This contest was mechanized in the seventeenth century with the construction of a post and spoke-like extensions at the ends of which were placed primitive wooden horses. When these extensions were rotated by servants, a mounted young equestrian could practice the art of spearing rings with a short lance. This technology was then adapted for fairground use. In England, the “dobby-horses” of the late eighteenth century were first turned by children (paid with rides), then by animals, and finally by steam in 1861. Six years later, Gustav Dentzel set up the first American carousel company in Philadelphia, and, in 1876, Charles Looff made Coney Island’s first carousel, creating the distinctive “Coney Island style” of animal carving in his own factory. Brooklyn carousel makers took things a step further when they introduced a galloping motion, using an overhead crank system. In 1893 the Englishman Frank Bostock brought home a set of gallopers to accompany his famous menagerie. Despite their modern associations with small children, these were still mainly adult rides as late as 1885.⁵⁵

Unlike the carousel, the roller coaster had origins in thrill seeking. It appeared first as a 70-foot-high wooden incline covered in iced snow that seventeenth-century revelers in St. Petersburg, Russia descended on sleds.⁵⁶ Young adults, not children, were its patrons. In the late eighteenth century, a French entrepreneur built a track using closely spaced rollers (hence the name roller coaster). Elsewhere, however, coasters had closer ties to the railroad track. In 1870, an abandoned inclined-plane railroad for mines near Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania was converted into a novelty ride. American inventor La Marcus Thompson adapted this device into his invention of a primitive gravity switchback coaster in 1884. While Thompson’s ride required men to push the cars up an incline on both ends of the ride, steam-powered chain lifts emerged by 1885 and the track became a circuit. Thompson added exotic painted images of nature to make a “scenic railroad” (first seen at Atlantic City in 1886) that became the basic format of modern electric rail indoor “dark rides.” Still, it was the thrilling sensation of vertigo that made the roller coaster appealing. In 1900, the Flip Flap coaster at Coney Island turned the rider in a complete circle in a ten-second experience that caused neck pains. Soon, improvements in the loop (by redesigning it to be more oval) made this thrill a minor success in 1902. Further developments by John A. Miller by 1910 involved under-track wheels to make higher inclines and sharper turns possible without cars jumping off the track. In the 1920s, mammoth wooden coasters were huge successes in amusement parks worldwide.⁵⁷

While amusement rides were developing in both countries, British innovations were slower to move beyond the flourishing traveling fairground scene. While Frederick Savage of the town of King’s Lynn produced the first British roller coaster in 1888, ⁵⁸ large mechanical rides were slow to appear in Blackpool. Informal fairground amusements were located on the beach. This prevented anything larger than a set of swing-boats because of the need to continuously move them to cope with the tides. When a steam carousel appeared in a front yard in the mid-1880s, neighbors successfully banished it as a “nuisance.” Such amusements were associated with the traveling fair, of which Blackpool was not a part. It was not until the establishment of the Pleasure Beach at the turn of the twentieth century that mechanical fairground rides became a major feature of Blackpool’s attractions.⁵⁹

The scenic spectacle was another popular amusement shared by both Americans and British. Designed for adults, like the thrill ride, it attracted an astonishingly wide range of people, including the middle classes. Originated in eighteenth-century Italy, these massive, highly realistic, and dramatic paintings of natural wonders, disasters, and battles toured nineteenth-century American and British communities. Mounted on walls or made to move in front of stationary viewer, these scenes, variously called panoramas, cycloramas, or dioramas depending on their construction, simulated a world of space and time beyond the everyday lives of viewers. In their most modern form, they were housed in circular buildings, and viewed from the center, often through foreground objects (soil, grass, trees, building models) and enhanced through projected images on the canvas paintings. In nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, dioramas became substitutes for travel, displaying Greek ruins, Swiss scenery, Niagara Falls, and the Battle of Gettysburg, for a shilling or a dime. Aided by the romantic patter of a lecturer, these scenic displays encouraged an appreciation for the sublimity of nature and historic architecture, gave a wide range of viewers a fixed image of a sacred site, and eventually encouraged tourism to these places. The American interest in the scenic spectacle was especially strong. This may be due to the self-conscious sense of distance that many Americans felt from sites of historical wonder. ⁶⁰

But the British could also be captivated by such displays and the traveling fairs helped to popularize new forms of spectacle such as the bioscope and magic lantern. The cinema itself had British origins in fairground booths at the turn of the twentieth century, although here the emphasis was on presenting large numbers of local people to themselves and their friends through moving pictures of shopping streets, sporting crowds and factory gates when people were leaving work. Although shows of this sort were presented at the popular seaside, the dioramas and their successors were less identified with Blackpool than with Coney Island.⁶¹

While we might well expect “uplifting” scenic spectacles to have a broad appeal across middle and working classes, the cross-class interest in exhibits of human and animal curiosities may seem more surprising in retrospect. The freak show, today associated with the tawdry, exploitative, and unrefined (despite current attempts, not least at Coney Island itself, to reclaim it), created a century ago a fascination with the extraordinary that was similar to what attracted the middle class to panoramas.⁶² Freak shows crossed class and taste lines until the twentieth century. As early as the seventeenth century, dwarfs, giants, “ossified” (thin) and fat people, the gender ambivalent, and conjoined twins were displayed in traveling shows and at fairs in England. This did not mean that they appealed primarily to the popular classes. The attraction to freaks trickled down from the upper classes. Dwarfs had long been prized in royal courts, often rising to positions of power and privilege. Not only Queen Victoria, but also Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Abraham Lincoln found dwarfs fascinating and met with the likes of “Tom Thumb.”⁶³ Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists often portrayed freaks as grotesque, in the nineteenth century they became humanized, even cutesified. Showmen often gave dwarfs pretentious names (like General Tom Thumb) or portrayed the grossly obese as Happy Jack, Jolly Irene, or even Baby Ruth. Impresarios changed the image of giants, long pictured as enemies of children and as villains, into gentle, if sometimes sad figures. The career of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man,” illustrates the prevalence, and ambiguity, of such values in Victorian England.⁶⁴

The freak was family entertainment. Despite modern disgust with the freak shows, few in 1900 distinguished them from the scientific exhibition, or simply other spectacles of the dime museums and circuses of the era.⁶⁵ These cross-cultural mixtures had a long history. In both the United States and Britain by 1810, curiosities of nature, along with personal oddities such as George Washington’s shaving brush, were displayed in small commercial “scientific” museums in cities. These places offered compromises between enlightenment and entertainment, promising both to educate and to titillate. They evolved into dime museums. The most famous was P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in the 1840s and 1850s, but the dime museum flourished until about 1900 in urban America. Simulations of world travel and great historical events shared a common roof with obvious humbuggery when Barnum displayed the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington and the “What is It?”—an exhibit of the “missing link” between man and monkey. Dime museums presented indifferently live musicians, hypnotists, and freaks as well as waxworks, menageries, panoramas, and other visual illusions appealing to the diverse tastes of urban audiences. Dime museums also featured chambers of horror with topical exhibits, including wax displays of the execution of criminals in the latest legal killing machine, the Electric Chair, as well as torture used in the Spanish Inquisition. Even genteel middle-class audiences attended this assortment of spectacles that later would be split into high and low culture.⁶⁶ While the middle class had begun to withdraw from freakish spectacles by the first decade of the twentieth century, the cross-cultural and cross gender appeal made the dime museum a success and model for Coney Island.

Nor was this just a matter of dime museums, as such. To give a British example, in 1892 the twentieth Earl of Shrewsbury, busily marketing his great house at Alton Towers as a tourist attraction, eagerly purchased a collection of instruments of torture on a visit to Nuremberg Castle and gained extensive press publicity when he exhibited them as part of a broader collection of eclectic curiosities.⁶⁷ World’s Fair, the newspaper for British traveling show people, in 1913 featured advertisements seeking work from a “Human Spider,” the “World’s Champion Irish Fasting Lady,” and “Mdlle. Flo the Tattooed Lady,” while an exhibition manager at Portsmouth was in the market for “Fat Lady, Midgets, Tattooed Lady or Giants preferred on salary.” Exotic animals, birds, and snakes were also available for exhibition.⁶⁸ Another cross-class entertainment was the traveling circus. Its animal and acrobat acts shared space with sideshow freaks in the mammoth circuses that toured around both countries by train from the 1850s. The Wild West show, as a genre, was also part of this complex, crossing the Atlantic through the British tours of Buffalo Bill and British imitators like Texas Bill Shufflebottom, whose enduring Wild West show toured with traveling fairs until his death in 1916 and was then perpetuated by his sons.⁶⁹

Coney Island and Blackpool integrated the thrill ride, spectacle, and animal and freak show into their seaside pleasure sites to varying degrees before 1900, but it was the popular entertainment quarters of “World’s Fairs” that created the model for the seaside amusement parks. Here the United States took the lead. While London initiated the era of the international exhibition in 1851, with eager imitators elsewhere in Europe, it was in the United States that these extravagant displays of scientific and cultural progress and national and regional pride were repeatedly built. New American cities showed off their growth and wealth in a long series of exhibitions beginning in Philadelphia in 1876, followed by Chicago (1893), Nashville (1897), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), Chicago (1933), and especially New York (1939–40).⁷⁰ Moreover, American exhibitions were especially willing to compromise with popular tastes and became more so over time.

Freaks were an essential part of these otherwise uplifting exhibitions from 1876. Even though placed in the separate Centennial City, fair goers could see the “Wild Men of Borneo,” “The Man Eating Feejees,” and a 602-pound fat lady along with the latest compound steam engine at the main grounds of the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876. While the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition invested heavily in the stately architecture of the Court of Honor and sober displays of scientific achievement in its White City, charging 50 cents admission to keep out the wandering crowd, it also built an amusement strip, the Midway, 600 feet wide and nearly a mile long. Rather than allow a tawdry fairground to emerge spontaneously on the edge of the Exhibition, the Exhibition’s Department of Ethnography managed the Midway and pretended to offer lessons in geography and world culture there. The Midway operated on a pay-as-you-go basis, thus encouraging a large and socially diverse crowd. In addition to romantic reproductions of a Square of Old Vienna and an Irish Village with a “Blarney Castle” were exotic scenes of Algerian and Tunisian Villages complete with Bedouin tents. There were African mud-dabbed huts displayed with “native warriors,” a South Sea village featured supposedly cannibalistic Samoans, and the Streets of Cairo introduced crowds to “Little Egypt,” the Hootchy-Kootchy dancer. These displays inevitably featured primitive and childlike, or alternatively sexual, manifestations of the “otherness” of these cultures, emphasizing the superiority of the “civilized” observers. Despite its ethnographic and educational pretensions, the Midway was actually run by Sol Bloom, a 22-year-old impresario who also introduced the Ferris Wheel, a 264-foot high steam-powered ride capable of lifting 1,440 passengers in thirty-six cars.⁷¹

In many ways, the world’s fairs were only following a pattern established by regional fairs. As early as 1858, freak and animal shows, including learned pigs, and beer saloons congregated outside fairs in Ohio. By the 1890s, similar venues in New York featured “fakirs, freaks, and uproarious fun.” “Little Egypts” appeared everywhere in the aftermath of the Chicago World’s Fair. From 1894, imitators of the fair Midway also included traveling “carnivals,” which combined thrill rides and side shows. By 1940, there were about American 350 carnival companies which often divided profits with local fire departments or fraternal organizations.⁷² Understood in this context, Coney Island became a sort of permanent midway and carnival with only scattered signs of the world’s fair’s original didacticism. Isolated on the “island,” Coney offered an experiential contrast to the stately look and serious business of the rising Manhattan skyscraper.⁷³

Blackpool’s frivolity offered a similar kind of contrast with the factory chimneys and colliery winding gear of its industrial hinterland. But its popular entertainments were firmly rooted not so much in any World’s Fair or county show, but rather in the itinerant fairgrounds, local pleasure gardens, and music-halls. The British had resisted the incorporation of entertainment into the international exhibition and embraced it only in 1908 at London’s White City, years after the opening of the Pleasure Beach. The great exceptions were the exhibition grounds at the Crystal Palace site in southwest London where many innovative rides and experiences were tried out in England for the first time and passed on to amusement parks.⁷⁴ Despite all these differences, both resorts from the beginning of the twentieth century became indelibly associated with the amusement park.

The amusement park, a large, enclosed area controlled by a single company regulating or directly owning various entertainments within, certainly had nineteenth-century precedents—for example, Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens from 1843 and Blackpool’s own Raikes Hall from 1871.⁷⁵ But amusement parks added new rides and experiences as well as a ceaseless quest for innovation to the traditional menu of seaside and fairground pleasure. Most distinct was their gate admission charge (though Pleasure Beach was an exception) that excluded undesirables who threatened the social tone of the park. The idea of grouping these entertainment elements into a permanent site, removing them from the helter-skelter of the temporary fair or midway, appeared in 1895 at Coney Island. Paul Boyton, famed as an ocean swimmer and inventor of the frogman suit, opened Sea Lion Park that year with a smattering of rides (the circular Flip Flap coaster, the Shoot the Chutes water slide, and the Old Mill, a scenic railroad for romantic couples) in addition to a dance hall and an arena for performing sea lions.⁷⁶

George Tilyou, son of a Coney Island entrepreneur and a rival of McKane, followed with an enclosed amusement center in 1897 that he called Steeplechase Park. Having made a small fortune on introducing a downsized replica of the Chicago Midway’s Ferris Wheel in 1894, he added a scenic railway, carousel, and a ride, the namesake of his park, which playfully imitated a steeplechase race with wooden horses on an undulating track. Like Sea Lion Park, he charged a 25-cent admission fee (but for 25 attractions), prohibited drink, and banned gamblers and whores. Located at the western end of the Bowery, this 15-acre site shared the plebeian gaiety of that street without its “moral danger.” The park’s motto, “The Funny Place” and trademark image of a jester’s devilish face with a grin showing no fewer than 33 teeth, reinforced Tilyou’s mission: “We Americans want either to be thrilled or amused, and we are ready to pay well for either sensation.” Entry required more than a quarter to spare. It necessitated passing through a Barrel of Love, a 10 by 30 foot revolving drum that put visitors into each other’s arms. Other novelties included an Earthquake Floor, Trick Staircase, and House Upside Down as well as a Grand Canal, Lover’s Lane, and Far West Mining Camp.⁷⁷

Even though Tilyou’s park was burnt to the ground in 1907, he quickly reconstructed it (charging 10 cents entrance to see the ruins).⁷⁸ The new facility featured a Pavilion of Fun, a 2.8 acre modern building of glass and steel. It provided a rain- and sun-free array of frequently changing rides, shooting galleries, and sideshow features that was encircled by a new and improved Steeplechase ride. Though George died in 1914, Steeplechase remained in the family, first run by his young son Edward and then a second son Frank until 1964. It was the bargain of Coney Island.⁷⁹

In 1903, Frederick Thompson and Skip Dundy bought Paul Boyton’s failed Sea Lion Park north of Surf Avenue and created a 36-acre park far grander than Steeplechase. While Dundy provided financial experience, Thompson used his architectural background and experience in the “world’s fairs” at Nashville and Buffalo to build an “electric Baghdad,” creating not the formal classical look of the White City of Chicago’s Fair, but a dense forest of spires and colonnades that he claimed “promoted release, dynamic motion, overwhelming transformation, and above all, exotic illusion.” Like the temporary buildings of the world’s fairs, Thompson used “staff,” a mix of gypsum (used in wallboards), alumina, glycerin, and dextrin made stiff with fibers (mostly from burlap) to create a plaster-like substitute for stone. This material allowed for cheap exteriors, built over steel or wood frames that could be shaped quickly into copies of friezes, statuary, towers, domes, and colonnades from ancient European and Asian civilizations. Again, as with Steeplechase, the key was balanced contradiction: While Luna Park shared with the White City an elongated reflecting pool with monumental architecture on the sides and a 200-foot high Electric Tower at one end, this stately rectangle was disturbed by a Shoot the Chutes water slide ride at the other end.⁸⁰ Unlike the Bowery, Luna was an extravaganza of order and, at night, its 200,000 lights guaranteed decency even as they created feelings of freedom from constraint.⁸¹

Like Disney much later, Thompson recognized the need for a focal point, in the pool and tower, an area that also facilitated the circulation of the crowd in and out of attractions on all four sides of the rectangle. Scenic railroads and towering rides offered vistas on the whole place. Nevertheless, Luna was hardly a modern theme park. Most of the attractions were contracted out on short-term leases, producing a constantly changing hodge-podge. In its first year, near the foot of the tower, were located two circus rings for trained animals, equestrians, and clowns. To the left of the Chutes was Dr. Couney’s baby incubator display and near the entrance was Thompson’s own signature spectacle, the Trip to the Moon. Other attractions included the War of the Worlds (a strange miniature fantasy of the navies of the European powers attacking New York City, but saved by Admiral Dewey’s Fleet) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a submarine ride based on Jules Verne’s famous book. Finally, in the tradition of Chicago’s Midway, around the grounds were Irish, Hindu and Eskimo Villages.⁸²

All of this had appeared elsewhere, but Luna Park was unique in its continuous promise of novelty and innovation. In 1904, Luna Park had four million visitors (who paid 10 cents for admission with attractions priced separately), forcing the owners to raise a second deck around the pool to accommodate the overflowing crowds. Thompson continually changed Luna Park, each year adding more and more architectural markers: “Wherever there was a chance to put up a tower or a minaret to break the line of any roof or expanse,” Thompson noted in 1906, “I have stuck one on to please the eye.” By 1911, Luna Park claimed 1,210 red and white painted towers, minarets, and domes.⁸³ In Luna’s second year, Thompson purchased an additional 16 acres; there he put the Streets of Delhi, which included an Indian palace and processions of horses, costumed soldiers, and elephants. He brought La Marcus Thompson’s Scenic Railroad to the park and even changed the costumes of female cashiers to Mexican hats and Bolero red jackets to create a new look. In 1905, the already dated Twenty Thousand Leagues was replaced with Dragon’s Gorge, an indoor scenic railway which featured an entrance flanked by “two enormous dragons with outspread wings” and a waterfall under which cars sped. No longer a novelty, Trip to the Moon dropped its admission to ten cents. Always up-to-date, Luna Park added the Fall of Port Arthur, depicting the most dramatic event in the recent Russo-Japanese War complete with working models of the torpedo boats that had been used to sink the Russian fleet. In 1908, the Trip to the Moon was finally replaced with the Battle of the Merrimac and Monitor, followed two years later by A Trip to Mars by Aeroplane. Thompson had created a very successful formula for Luna Park that attracted 31 million admissions in its first five years.⁸⁴

However, so much money did Thompson lavish on his ever changing park, that in April 1912, his creditors drove him out of the business when they discovered the park’s debts of $665,000. However, even a financially more prudent management recognized the need for continuous innovation to draw fresh crowds every year. It added more lights and even more towers as well as new spectacles in 1914–15. Among these were the Fall of Adrianople a stage spectacle for an audience of 1,800, Vernon Castle’s Summer House Dance Hall, and a village of midgets.⁸⁵

A third amusement park, Dreamland, attempted to reproduce a permanent world’s fair at Coney. Built in 1904 by William Reynolds, a former Republican State Senator and suburban housing developer, Dreamland distanced itself even further from the Bowery than did Luna. Spread out on 15 acres of choice West Brighton land extending from the old Iron Pier to Surf Avenue, Dreamland was built at a cost of $3.5 million. It promised its first visitors for the dime admission fee (attractions extra) “Avenues Wide and Imposing—No Crowding.”⁸⁶ In contrast to the oriental look of Luna, Reynolds insisted on a classical appearance—all white buildings built around a stately lagoon. A 375-foot Beacon Tower modeled after that of the Giralda in Seville stood at one end, besting Luna Park Electric Tower in size and illumination. Reynolds built two Shoot the Chutes side by side opposite the Tower. Visitors arriving by night on the pier by ferry from Manhattan terminals enjoyed a magical and majestic vista of Dreamland (with a claimed one million electric lights illuminating the skyline) and had immediate access to a dance hall accommodating 25,000. The street entrance at the site of “The Creation” (brought from the St. Louis Fair of 1904) invited visitors to walk under a huge replica of a classical nude female, 150 feet wide and 75 feet high, and decorated in gold paint. The Creation took audiences on a scenic boat ride along a 1,000-foot canal encircling the interior of a domed building that showed depictions of the Biblical First Seven Days. Adding to the aura of “gentility,” the young women at the cash booths wore “white college gowns and mortar boards.”⁸⁷

This White City look-alike did not, however, offer displays of scientific and cultural progress, but a combination of simulated tourism, thrill rides, and sideshow acts often veneered with grandeur and religious imagery deemed suitable for a “respectable” middling class crowd. On the East Promenade was located the Canals of Venice, a 250 by 80 feet model with gondolas carrying passengers along 54,000 square feet of painted canvas of Venetian scenes. Nearby was a scenic rail ride called Coasting Through Switzerland with the latest refrigerated pipes to “keep this artificial ‘Switzerland’ as cold and as full of sweet pure air as can be found among the picturesque Swiss mountains.” But Dreamland also featured a British import, Bostock’s Circus (which included a French cyclist riding on a tilted circular track above twenty fierce lions in the Circle of Death), Ben Morris’ magic show, Fighting the Flames (reenacting a tenement fire), and the Seven Temptations of St. Anthony (a spectacle for men with paintings of voluptuous women “tempting” the saint).⁸⁸ On the West Promenade were attractions with educational pretensions, the Destruction of Pompeii and Under and Over the Sea (a simulated submarine ride under the Atlantic), but also Lilliputia (“a city” of 300 midgets), a dog and monkey show, and the Baby Incubator exhibit (moved from Luna). And on the lower portion of the pier, Dreamland leased out stalls for shooting galleries and other Bowery fare.⁸⁹

Like Luna Park, Dreamland underwent dramatic changes nearly every year. The Creation was so popular that Dreamland made Biblical themes a specialty, by offering thrilling encounters with the hereafter. Hell’s Gate, a boat trip in a water flume to Hell done in plaster of Paris, so captured the crowd’s imagination that in 1906, a new exhibit, the End of the World, replaced a staid boring scenic ride, Touring Europe. This apocalyptic fantasy featured reproductions of Doré’s pictures of the dead rising from graves and the holy taking wing. The next year, “The Hereafter” stage show portrayed the destruction of the world by fire backed up by 200 singers performing melodies from the Damnation of Faust. Religious and classic themes at Dreamland, however, were balanced with new thrill rides, especially the Leap Frog Railroad built on a 400-foot long pier extending into the sea. In 1906, the exotic Village of Moqui Indians appeared with space taken from the Midget City and the timely display of the San Francisco Earthquake replaced Fighting the Flames. The next year, however, earthquakes were passé and this exhibit was replaced by a scenic railroad, “The Great Divide,” which simulated travel across the Rockies with a mechanical volcano and pleased thrill-seekers by erupting as they passed by. Despite the high-minded rhetoric and elegant pseudo-architecture, Reynolds knew from the beginning that visitors’ tastes were hardly “refined.” In fact, Dreamland hired circus and sideshow showman Samuel Gumpertz to develop spectacles, promoting him to General Manager in 1909. Gumpertz featured freak shows and exotic villages along with replicas of the Siege of Richmond.

In 1911, the white paint was already peeling off the staff buildings, forcing Dreamland to undertake a major facelift, this time abandoning the purity of white for cream and firehouse red. The costly renewal was to no avail, because on May 27, 1911 a fire broke out at Hell’s Gate that within three hours consumed the entire park. It was never rebuilt. Both the cost of continuous refurbishing and Dreamland’s failure to find a market niche led to this decision. The site was leased out for parking and to various rides and exhibits, becoming the location of New York’s Aquarium in 1957.⁹⁰

In all their diversity, these three Coney Island amusement parks anticipated later twentieth-century theme parks, especially with their stress upon an integrated architectural fantasy. But they also called back to earlier traditions of the dime museum, circus, and fairground, which they brought together in the enclosed park, often in seeming contradiction to each other.

Blackpool had only one enduring amusement park of this kind—the Pleasure Beach. There were, of course, precedents. The town’s “Golden Mile” was a central seafront strip dominated by cheap exhibitions and sideshows. The Tower and Alhambra, the great entertainment complexes of the 1890s, sat side by side on the central promenade. Fairground rides came and went as part of the menu of attractions in this area. Like the earlier fringe attractions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Raikes Hall, the Pleasure Beach grew up at the edge of the built-up area, where land was cheaper and building expansion did not compete for space.⁹¹ Its promoters found an ideal location, at the end of the promenade electric tramway that had opened in 1885. The combination of cheap land (though vulnerable to high tides) and accessibility proved irresistible. A partnership between Albert Ellis (a phrenologist on the Golden Mile) and J. W. Outhwaite (a Blackpool butcher with family ties to a Philadelphia carousel company) leased the 20 acres that formed the core of the new enterprise.⁹²

The key figure, however, was William George Bean; and here we see an even more direct transatlantic link. Bean was a Londoner, born in 1868, but moved to the United States at 19 years of age and found his way into the Philadelphia amusement machinery industry. When he returned to England in the mid-1890s, he operated a bicycle railway, eventually locating along side Outhwaite’s carousel in Blackpool. Soon the two men joined forces (as the Anglo-American syndicate) and, by 1904, had bought nearly 40 acres of unassuming sand dunes including 500 yards of sea frontage.⁹³ Like its Coney Island counterparts, the syndicate under Bean’s leadership not only operated its own rides but also rented sites to others for stalls and mechanical rides. As the amusement park developed, Bean also negotiated with the local authority over building plans and public order issues.⁹⁴

Attractions soon began to proliferate at what became the Pleasure Beach. In 1904, the Sir Hiram Maxim Captive Flying Machine was introduced, another piece of transatlantic technology: Maxim was an American who had introduced machine guns to Europe in 1883, and subsequently dreamed of building a steam-powered flying machine. Being unable to raise the capital for this project after a prototype crashed spectacularly, he turned to “captive flight.” His flying carriages, revolving around a central pylon, proved a huge success at Blackpool after trials at Earls Court in London. Over the next few years a string of innovations followed, from River Caves (a spectacular scenic ride), the Grotto (an indoor fantasy ride), a water chute, and tobogganing tower to the Monitor and Merrimac battle show, the cakewalk, submarine switchback, oscillating staircase, and haunted cabin. The first big Roller Coaster arrived in 1907, in the form of a La Marcus Thompson Scenic Railway. Several of these were transplanted Coney Island attractions (for example the Helter Skelter of 1905, a spiral slide on the outside of a “light house” that survived until 1935). Bean, who was eager to identify with American enterprise, made annual transatlantic trips to catch up on the latest innovations. He was also keen to develop signature buildings and attractions. In 1907 appeared the Spanish Street, “themed” stalls which had hitherto been random and ramshackled, while, in 1913, the “Moorish” Casino (a word that had no gambling connotations in England) became the Pleasure Beach’s defining landmark. By 1914, the Pleasure Beach had a summer staff of 600, up to 100,000 visitors on an ordinary day and 200,000 on a Bank Holiday, and £200,000 invested in its attractions.⁹⁵

This did not match the scale at Coney Island; but there are several other significant differences between the Pleasure Beach and its Coney Island counterparts. The Pleasure Beach was built up piecemeal over several years, but it was built to last. The Sir Hiram Maxim machine is still in use, and when the original Casino was replaced in 1937 gelignite had to be used when the normal demolition methods proved insufficient. The regular devastating fires that ravaged Coney Island had no counterpart at Blackpool, where fires were unusual and did not spread. The Pleasure Beach management was even more concerned with the respectability of its image than were the Coney Island parks. For example, in 1909 Bean finally agreed to banish the gypsies who had constituted the area’s original attraction. The Corporation was a hard taskmaster, because it had to deal with early opposition to the Pleasure Beach from its suburban neighbors, and because some of its leading lights (including managers and shareholders of the Tower Company) regarded the Pleasure Beach as a dangerous competitor. In 1907, in order to defend his interests, Bean found his way on to the Council. The revenue the Pleasure Beach generated for the municipal electricity works and tramways soon became a major point in its favor, creating a local-government interest in sustaining this new attraction. The owners of Coney Island’s parks had no such influence in the chambers of New York City Hall.⁹⁶

Even more to the point of the contrast, Blackpool’s core identity at the turn of the century was bound up less with the Pleasure Beach than with indoor entertainment in the form of the shows and dance halls at the Tower, Alhambra, Winter Gardens, and the piers. At Coney Island the amusement parks were the defining features, and indoor entertainment was less magnificent or distinctive. From its beginnings Coney had its pavilions on raised platforms on the sand that offered live music and dancing. Luna Park and Dreamland at various times offered spectacular dance floors. But they were ephemeral like everything else at these parks. Similarly, while many a later star started in the Bowery music halls or as singing waiters (Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, and Irving Berlin, for example),⁹⁷ music and theater played a small part in the history of Coney Island, especially after the arrival of the amusement parks. Evidently, these entertainments were well provided for in Manhattan’s theater district. Coney Island was a place for different things.

By contrast, Blackpool had a strong identity as provider of a range of indoor entertainments that were not specific to the seaside, but helped to attract people to it. Most British seaside resorts were infamously dull in the evenings and inhospitable on rainy days. But Blackpool became a regional entertainment capital in the late nineteenth century. Nor was this just downscale music-hall entertainment, although there was plenty of that. From time to time the big theaters played host to international performers like Caruso and Melba, and the Grand Theatre of 1894 would put on new plays directly after their opening run in London’s West End, sometimes with the same cast. Manchester was much further from Blackpool than Manhattan was from Coney Island, and there was nothing in between to challenge Blackpool’s summer status as northern entertainment capital. Here, emphatically, the playful crowd had indoor as well as outdoor incarnations.⁹⁸ The amusement park (about which more later) was important to both resorts, but, as much else, in differing degrees and ways.

While Coney Island and Blackpool had much in common, they represented two different cultures and societies. As we have seen, the close proximity to New York City and the short, but hot, summer season shaped Coney Island in many ways. But characteristics of 1900 American society and culture also reinforced these patterns and further framed the American seaside experience. Most important was the transient character of Coney Island. To be sure, its sidewalk and seashore novelty businesses, especially on the Bowery, were similar to those on Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Both featured many businesses based on short-term leases. Such leases made it easy to open a stall or store, but because these businesses were also poorly capitalized, they came and went with equal frequency. In its American setting, however, this pattern was more extreme with the widespread use of wood and staff in buildings. Moreover, Coney Island subtenants had no incentive to build expensive brick and steel structures because their landlords refused to lengthen their leases (in anticipation of rising land prices).

Even more, in contrast to Blackpool, Coney Island’s central and well-financed entertainments were equally transitory. The extraordinary Elephant Hotel was in business only fourteen years and the well-financed Dreamland with its spectacular Beacon Tower, merely seven. And even the longer surviving Steeplechase and Luna Parks changed their attractions almost annually, at least in their early years. As the New York World noted in 1897, “don’t imagine because you were [at Coney] last year, it will bore you to go again. The frivolities at Coney are as changeable as its sands.” American audiences expected novelty and the amazingly cheap construction in staff and burlap not only made change economically possible, but also a necessity. It is no wonder that these creations so often needed repair and were often easier to replace than to maintain, and, most tellingly, that they burned down so often.⁹⁹ In fact, Coney Island construction was such a fire hazard that in the 1900s insurance rates were $5.50 for $100 in insurance protection per year compared with three cents for brick and stone buildings in New York.¹⁰⁰ Thompson certainly reflected the common American view when he wrote in 1908 that though Blackpool was the closest thing to Coney Island in Europe, “it is a long way behind. It is stiff and solemn, and its buildings lack the other-world suggestiveness of our Coney Island erections.” Coney promised fantasy and novelty above all else.¹⁰¹

This assumption that Blackpool lacked imagination stands in need of challenge, but there is no doubt that Blackpool’s version of popular seaside culture was both more staid and controlled, and directed at a more solid and less ephemeral market. Blackpool drew on the stable, rooted cultures of the industrial towns of northern and midland England, not from cosmopolitan, shifting Liverpool, Britain’s nearest analog to New York. Its attractions were aimed at people in regular work, often in skilled jobs, concerned to maintain their reputations among the neighbors and workmates who all went on holiday to the same place at the same time. The lines of respectability were drawn more generously on holiday, allowing for cheerful indulgence in more alcohol than usual, for chaste flirtation and holiday romance, for sexual innuendo at the music hall, and carefree excitement on mechanical rides. But these were the safety valves of the self-disciplined, in a culture that internalized repression.¹⁰²

The two resorts also offer us sharp differences in the crowds that they attracted. While (as we will see later in greater detail) Coney Island was unable to maintain a distinct social tone and class separation on the beach, Blackpool was more successful. Whereas Coney Island was a site of a succession of socially distinct crowds, much as was true in many American urban and suburban neighborhoods, in Black-pool the class and regional composition of the crowds seemed to remain relatively unchanging throughout the decades from the 1880s to the 1930s and even beyond. Even as the catchment area extended across Britain, the overall impression was that this was more of the same, as other parts of working-class Britain adapted to the holiday culture of Northern England. Moreover, Coney Island was far less successful in maintaining the social tone of its elite eastern shore. Even in the 1890s, “genteel” Manhattan Beach did not necessarily attract small quiet gatherings of America’s aristocracy of wealth and manners. Corbin expected, not hundreds, but thousands, of the smart set to take his train to the Manhattan Hotel. In the early years, 30,000 visited the Manhattan Hotel on Sundays and few were paying guests. They came for the “nice” bathing houses, dining, or even sauntering on the veranda. Corbin’s railway eventually connected Manhattan Beach to the rival, but less exclusive, Brighton Beach Hotel. Even on the back stairs of the four-story Oriental Hotel, gamblers could be found; and the middle-class who could not afford to stay at the Manhattan Beach appeared at its restaurants for a special lunch. None of this marked the eastern end of Coney Island as a sanctuary of gentility.¹⁰³

Despite claims of exclusivity, as early as 1895 the east end of Coney Island began to succumb to the mass commercialization of West Brighton. That year Manhattan Beach opened a 12,000 capacity bicycle oval and enlarged Henry Pain’s arena for fireworks and drama. Even a minstrel show appeared in 1889. The building of the Brighton Beach Amusement Park in 1906 on the eastern end of the Island represented the final concession to popular taste. But, even all this was not enough to save the Manhattan, Oriental, or Brighton Hotels from decline. The claim of serenity, of course, had been compromised from the start. In 1879, William Engeman built a race track at Brighton Beach. Soon it faced competition in the more stylish Sheepshead Bay Track. A third track, an offshoot of Sheepshead, was opened in Gravesend in 1886. All three tracks drew a cross-class crowd of men from Wall Street barons and politicians to actors and professional gamblers. Court and political battles over on-track betting led in 1908 to tough restrictions and the closure of the tracks in 1910. Deprived of gambling, the Manhattan and Oriental hotels closed a few years after and the Brighton Beach succumbed quietly in the early 1920s. The rich fled to more distant elite sites and the east end became the site of suburban housing.¹⁰⁴

By contrast, Blackpool did not become a one-class resort. The Corporation successfully defended the North Shore against fairground and other incursions, partly by taking control of a key area of the land company’s estate to the north of Claremont Park; and this remained a holiday area for middle-class families. Despite the arrival of the Pleasure Beach, much of South Shore remained relatively exclusive, with a large population of prosperous retired people and of business commuters to Manchester and the industrial towns of south and east Lancashire. ¹⁰⁵

Not only did Coney Island fail to maintain its elite zone, but also the social character of the Island’s visitors was in continuous flux. While the genteel east end of Coney Island barely survived the nineteenth century, West Brighton became ever more prominent. Like the well-known phenomenon of residential succession in American cities, West Brighton over time shifted from crowds of bourgeois, to skilled workers, and finally to low wage earners.¹⁰⁶ For a time, the result was a uniquely mixed crowd. The mostly male entertainments were concentrated in a few areas, separate from the milling crowds. And, when gambling and brothels moved out of the Gut and the Bowery and onto Surf Avenue in the late 1880s, Coney elites drew a line and eventually drove out McKane, who had tolerated this incursion of sleaze.¹⁰⁷ As we have seen, for years, West Brighton catered to a cross-gender/ cross-class crowd.

This diversity surely excited anxiety (as we shall see in chapter 3). Stall games like the “Kill the Coon” or “African Dodger” that involved throwing balls at black people let whites, no matter their ethnicity, displace their aggression on to blacks and made all of European descent “respectable” by excluding the African American. An unofficial color line (on beach and bathhouses) was an especially prominent feature of turn of the century Coney Island.¹⁰⁸ In many ways, this emerging pleasure crowd was unique. It created cultural blendings and social mixtures that were relatively uncommon in the late nineteenth century and it broke from both the code of the mostly male culture of commercial sex, boisterous drinking, and gambling that had prevailed in the West End and the genteel culture (however compromised) that had been attempted to the East.¹⁰⁹

That heterogeneity, however, was not to last long. Gradually, Coney Island became a truly plebeian resort as the middle and even high-wage working class abandoned it for more distant and less crowded seaside attractions on the New Jersey shore and in less developed portions of Long Island after 1910. As we shall see, rather than preserve exclusive portions of Coney Island, the more affluent went elsewhere. They abandoned Coney to the poorer immigrants (and blacks).

Blackpool was also a plebeian resort, but not in isolation. It kept a middleclass presence throughout the period of working-class invasion, sharing a common pleasure culture, although one in which middle-class males were more at ease than respectable women of similar social standing. It lacked the sort of undisciplined or unschooled working class that still generated alarm on other parts of the British coastline, especially where the “roughs” of London’s East End, Liverpool, or Glasgow appeared. When compared with Coney Island, the relative homogeneity of its visiting public is set in sharp relief. It was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (few even of Irish descent), and dominated by the disciplined, industrial (and industrious) working class who had saved for the privilege of making the journey and, importantly, the stay.

Blackpool and Coney Island in the first half of the twentieth century were the premier sites of the plebian pleasure crowd. Yet, for many reasons, Blackpool would adapt and survive for the balance of the century and beyond, while Coney Island would slide into ruin and nearly disappear. The difference says a lot about culture and class, about American commitment to novelty and mobility, and British tradition and class stability. But the contrasting results had roots in much more. Location and climate were critical: Far from London, Blackpool became the full-service entertainment capital of northern England, a destination tourist site complete with a wide range of lodging for which the sea was only a backdrop. Coney Island remained the day-tripper’s seashore site for New Yorkers, as much for the cooling breezes, sandy beach, and warm waves as for its inland commercial entertainments. ¹¹⁰

While Blackpool was able to extend its season and justify substantial investment, Coney Island was forever a summer weekend site and thus forever ephemeral and peripheral. Blackpool was modeled on a relatively stable entertainment tradition: piers, the lavish interiors and entertainment traditions of music halls, pubs, and fish and chip shops, and customary fairground attractions.¹¹¹ The situation at Coney Island was much less stable. In the early twentieth century it was certainly more innovative, grafting the American World’s Fair experience on to older traditions to create new fantasy spaces and exciting mechanical rides and entertainments. Within Blackpool, the Pleasure Beach worked in similar, if more conservative, ways. But Coney’s ceaseless, restless pursuit of novelty made it impossible to create a viable and enduring set of traditions. At the same time, the older pleasures of the circus and dime museum that Coney Island offered were soon to be challenged by bourgeois modernizers. While Blackpool’s relative distance from population centers served as a social filter that allowed it to sustain a respectable clientele of white and blue collar working people, Coney Island was progressively more accessible to the poor of New York City, unable to exclude undesirables or to maintain any sort of “social tone.”

Whereas Blackpool’s local government was able to promote and renew itself as a tourist destination, Coney Island was continuously at war with political forces to the north in Brooklyn and to the west in Manhattan. The Island was never able to define itself and found itself repeatedly caught between the reformers’ efforts to “clean up” Coney and the pressures for commercial interests to maximize short-term profits. The key divisions within Blackpool were between the central entertainment interests (especially the Tower Company) and the Pleasure Beach, but did not disrupt the resort’s success.

Despite all these differences and their long-term effects, Blackpool and Coney Island defined the pleasure crowd in industrial Britain and America. They shaped the meaning of public enjoyment for an era, becoming instantly recognizable as signifiers of a popular culture of exuberant temporary release from the daily constraints of work, neighborhood, and routine. It is to the question of why and how Britons and Americans embraced these sites for relief from the rigors of industrial life that we now turn.