The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

By 1900, Blackpool and Coney Island had become emblematic sites of the playful crowd and industrial saturnalia. In the late 1920s, however, their career paths began to diverge sharply. Especially after the Second World War, the differences became more pronounced, revealing the cumulative effects of economic, political, and geographic divergences as well as contrasting tendencies within the crowds themselves. In many ways, both sites went through a similar cycle: from “discovery” and initial commercial exploitation, to the dominance of the artificial over the “natural,” threatened loss of distinctiveness and desirability, and incipient decline. From that point onward, however, Coney Island went into an accelerating slide from which it never recovered, while Blackpool was able to reinvent itself in a succession of new guises, appealing to new constituencies and thus keeping the resort alive and dynamic.¹ Blackpool has not gone as far as Las Vegas in a “tradition of invention,”² but it has been resilient to threats on a variety of fronts, using the myths and legends of its past, as well as the surviving buildings and practices, to good effect.

Coney Island’s problems can be traced back to the 1930s and even the superficially prosperous 1920s, when despite ever-growing crowds on Coney’s beaches at summer weekends the increasingly proletarian visitors spent less while affluent New Yorkers abandoned the Island and took their cars along the new parkways to the more respectable environs of Jones Beach and Rockaway Beach. While Prohibition damaged the drinking culture of Coney Island in the 1920s, Robert Moses, as New York City’s parks commissioner, launched a personal crusade against the raunchy frivolities of Coney in the 1930s. Coney’s problems intensified in the post-war decades, coming to a head in the mid-1960s with the closure of Steeplechase, the last of the great amusement parks, together with the spread of redevelopment blight and the emergence of gang violence and racial tensions. This was part of a wider pattern of decline among blue-collar northeastern resorts in the United States as the more seductive climates of Florida and California became increasingly accessible. It was also the fate of a resort plagued by continual conflict between middle-class reformers and the plebeian crowd of Coney.³

Blackpool, by contrast, reinvented itself at the urban margins and drove itself up-market during the 1920s and 1930s with municipal promotion of parks, promenade extensions, and planning schemes, while keeping the older attractions of its popular core. The relative lack of antagonism between the old plebeian crowd and elite reformers explains much of this success. After World War I, it benefited from the extension of holidays with pay and improved material living standards to new sectors of the British population. It was not until the 1960s that the wider spread of a new car-based leisure culture, and developing competition from the sunny southwest of England and then from the Mediterranean, began to challenge Blackpool’s dominance. Even when these changes really started to bite, the main sufferers were smaller northern resorts. But since the 1970s Blackpool has been on an accelerating treadmill, struggling to keep pace with changing trends in a political environment where local commerce has shifted toward international conglomerates. ⁴ This chapter addresses questions surrounding the contrasting fortunes of Blackpool and Coney Island since the original heyday of industrial saturnalia. We begin by comparing attempts to “civilize” the crowd in both places, especially in the interwar years.

Reformers never gave up hope that the plebeian crowd would embrace the sedate family group, develop a preference for tamed and controlled versions of nature, and even identify with a romantic past in settings that, as the urbanist Rem Koolhaas notes, could serve as a “remedy against the spontaneous urbanism of the masses.” This was true on both sides of the anglophone Atlantic, but in the twentieth century this agenda was pursued with greater intensity and didactic intent at Coney Island than at Blackpool. New York reformers tried repeatedly to replace the dance halls and amusement park novelties with parks, improved beaches, and even enlightened entertainment (like the aquarium that was eventually erected in 1957). Following the annexation of Brooklyn (and therefore of Coney Island) by New York City in 1898, and the burning of part of the amusement area in one of Coney Island’s regular fires, Bird S. Coler, the New York City Controller, made a gallant, if perhaps naïve, attempt to convince the city to purchase and transform the entirety of the West Brighton amusement zone into a public park in 1899.

Coler thought he saw an opportunity to transfer the idea of Olmsted’s Central Park in Manhattan to Coney and to imitate the success of the green spaces created along Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. His plan called for a series of concrete esplanades, lawns, fountains, and flowerbeds. It won the support of the Methodist clergy of New York and others in letters to the New York Times. One enlightened citizen argued that public control alone would prevent those “objectionable features” that were inevitable under the system of private ownership and allow “natural attractions” to be “developed to the maximum.” Another writer insisted that a rehabilitated Coney Island alone could create in city dwellers that idealism “roused by some nearness to nature, to the woods and fields, and most of all, to the ocean.” Despite popular support, City officials voted nine to five against Coler’s proposal, concerned about its estimated $15 million cost. Coney Island had been subsumed under New York City’s budget planning (as opposed to being an independent municipality representing primarily the tourist industry as in Blackpool). This guaranteed that a costly proposal for building a public park in Coney Island could not compete with politically popular spending on streets, sewers and police across metropolitan New York City. Nevertheless, while this attempt to gentrify Coney Island failed, middle-class efforts to “clean up” the Island dominated the politics of the area, contributing ironically to an eventual decline of the pleasure district by the 1950s.⁵

The more modest goal of constructing a boardwalk to rouse the “idealism” of New Yorkers and restore their access to the shore gained support in the early 1910s. For decades public access to the beach had been cut off by commercial bathing concessions, which posted guards to prevent anyone from approaching the beach except through their gates. Hotels had their own boardwalks, but they were accessible only to paying guests. As a democratic gesture, the city built the Municipal Bathhouse in 1911, which competed successfully with the private operators. In the same year a civic group called the West End Improvement League proposed a public boardwalk to make access to the shore a public right. The group’s plan required a state court to affirm public ownership of the beach from high to low tide zones. Tension heightened as discussion continued during the war years, when the private bathhouses dramatically raised their entrance fees. Many tenement dwellers sought cheaper alternatives (for example, by changing clothes in grubby side street houses for a dime). Bathhouse owners tried to enforce licensing requirements and prohibitions against appearing on the street in bathing clothes, but popular pressures for cheap access to the sea grew.⁶

Popular and elite demands combined to bring the public boardwalk to fruition. But it took eight years of lawsuits and debate before a plan could be forged, after which the work moved ahead rapidly. The new public promenade was two miles long and 80 feet wide and included tons of sand to deepen the beach. When the new boardwalk opened in May 1923 five days of celebrations included a baby show, a perambulator parade, fashion shows, a fancy dress parade, and a bathing beauty contest. For the time, these appeals to the charms of childhood and dignified female beauty were markers of respectability, antidotes to the plebeian mockery and garishness of Mardi Gras celebrations each September on Surf Avenue. Photos of opening day show throngs of men in dark suits and ties on the boardwalk, even under personal cabanas on the beach. Women were equally formal with fur collars on long coats and flowered hats. At the spring reopening of the boardwalk the next year, a gigantic “birthday” cake was cut and distributed to children. The boardwalk was expected to raise the social tone of Coney. The promenade offered opportunities for healthy family exercise and sociable communion with nature in the form of beach and sea, at a safe distance from the bars, stalls, sideshows, and rides of the old Bowery and amusement parks. When the scars of development healed, new buildings, fringing the boardwalk were built, with attractive features in granite and terracotta, as befitted an area that had been pulled up market by careful municipal investment.⁷

On a summer 1924 visit the French Prime Minister, Edouard Herriot, commented that “To understand the crowd, one must go to Coney Island.” In his enthusiasm for the new boardwalk, Herriot compared it with the elite French Riviera resort of Nice by describing Coney’s boardwalk as a “’Promenade des Anglais’ for the proletariat. Here there is no noise … a haven of relaxation and rest.” This was especially true on spring and even winter weekends, as the boardwalk filled up with quiet strolling couples and families while the stalls and entertainments remained in hibernation. The free beach and its boardwalk seemed to promise an opportunity for universal uplift or, at least, democratization of access.⁸

But the users of the boardwalk and its amenities did not always share the values of the city’s governors. Proletarian beach goers continued to break the rules. Many arrived via subway with swimming suits under their clothes or changed in the bungalows of locals for a small fee, avoiding the pricier bathhouses. They hid peddlers from police during periodic crackdowns (preferring the peddlers’ convenient services to the distant and expensive cafes and licensed vendors on the streets). While in 1900 exceptionally hot days attracted only 100,000 beachgoers, on a hot July Sunday in 1925, 750,000 beachgoers found that the 150,000-person capacity of the bathhouses was entirely insufficient. The shoreline was packed with humanity, utterly defeating the genteel dreams of reformers. Their efforts coincided with a massive increase in the popularity and accessibility of Coney Island. The mid-1920s appearance of five massive roller coasters lining the back of the boardwalk appealed to a youthful crowd that was looking for thrills and had little in common with the gentlefolk riding on roller chairs on the boardwalk.⁹

Despite the disapproving glances of the respectable when bathers changed in public on the beach or “dripped” on the subway ride home still dressed in swimming suits, they broke decorum and enjoyed themselves practically for free. Still, the City happily protected this site of democratic play for poor New York citizens. Municipal officials repeatedly extended and improved the boardwalk, provided competent life guarding, and eventually built sewage treatment plants on Coney Island Creek to reduce shoreline pollution. Here New York City, with all its limitations, was a long way ahead of Blackpool, where raw sewage poured directly into the sea from long outfalls along the bathing beaches. All this reflected a prevailing assumption within the New York elite that boardwalk and beach were places where mass play, social uplift, and the pursuit of health could coincide.¹⁰

The boardwalk development had made the beaches and sea freely accessible without mounting a direct challenge to the resort’s amusement parks and catchpenny shows. In the short run this improvement encouraged investment in sumptuous new theaters, a boxing ring, and the impressive, if ultimately ill-fated, Half Moon Hotel, as big business came into the resort. After about 1910, there was a rapid growth in bungalow vacation rentals. This trend reinforced the stable middle-class element even though, because these families provided their own meals, it also reduced demand for restaurants at Coney.

Nevertheless, the dreams of uplift and a democratized gentility at Coney Island were not to be. Even while the “natural” was promoted alongside the commercial at Coney, the automobile made alternatives to the crowded Island increasingly accessible in the 1920s for those who could afford it. Those seeking nature’s solitude, or at least a more select and less outrageously crowded pleasure environment, took to the wheel on Sunday drives to beaches out of reach to the nickel subway crowd. Thousands of cars journeyed further, as New York families visited the “Jersey Shore” (Long Branch, Bradley Beach, as well as the popular Atlantic City and Asbury Park). On one warm May day in 1926, while 450,000 were said to have visited Coney, 200,000 went to the middle-class beach at Rockaway.¹¹ To accommodate the growing demand for automobile touring, the Long Island State Park Commission began in 1924 an ambitious project of reclaiming coastal land and beaches for a chain of 14 parks accessible via new state highways. The largest of these public parks, Jones Beach, became the main rival of Coney Island, a popular rendezvous for the millions, sited an hour from the city by road. But these “millions” did not include families without cars. The overpasses above the new highways were deliberately made (it was said) too low for buses to pass under, and requests for railroad connections, with their democratic implications, were firmly denied.¹²

Even more frustrating to this dream of uplifting Coney Island was the persistence of the “Nickel Empire” and the decline of the middle-class family atmosphere at Coney Island amusements. Dreamland, with its genteel presumptions had never been rebuilt, while the Coney Island amusement district shifted subtly to a more youth-focused and down-market crowd. A boom in amusement technology, beginning with the Wonder Wheel of 1920 and following on with five big new roller coasters during the decade, brought a shift toward the thrill ride over the old dioramas, sideshow, and other performance attractions. The tension between the “Nickel Empire” of plebeian crowds dependent upon the subway ride and hot dogs (each costing five cents) and the attempts of reformers to uplift and refurbish the Island constituted a formula for disaster.¹³

Doubtless the Depression accelerated the downward trend. Even the ending of Prohibition in 1933, which brought beer out of the speakeasies and back to the bars and restaurants of Coney, failed to work its magic in the difficult decade before World War II. The economic insecurity of the masses who poured out of the subway made it more difficult to turn a profit, however crowded the streets and boardwalk might be. Prices for rides were halved and halved again, but this did little good. The subway crowds continued to evade the bathhouses, brought their own food, and went to the beach rather than the amusements. The shows themselves shrank in scale and ambition, and in 1933 Luna Park went bankrupt and had to open in receivership. The famous Feltman’s restaurant reduced its staff by two-thirds, as it resisted the pressure to lower prices. Five cent hot dogs and three cent sodas cut profit margins to the bone as did Steeplechase’s 25 cent combination ticket for 25 attractions. Sam Wagner, the freak show impresario had once attracted 20,000 customers on a good Sunday, but by 1939 he had to be content with 8,000, while only one tattoo artist now survived out of the nine or ten who had plied their trade at Coney’s peak. The resort had become a cheap playground for the impoverished masses, with disproportionately cheap, garish, and freakish attractions. The playful crowd had become a swirling, congested mass, seeking what enjoyment it could in the noisy streets, careening along the boardwalk and carving out tiny individual and family spaces amid the astonishing overcrowding of the freely accessible popular beach. In some people’s eyes the results of this took away any residual hint of populist magic: “A million people, treading gingerly among broken glass and filth that seemed never to be cleaned up, jammed the beach so full on a Sunday that they could hardly see the sand.”¹⁴

Coney Island still had magic enough to feature prominently in the popular entertainment of these years, as in films like “Manhattan Melodrama” and “The Devil and Miss Jones,” or songs by Rodgers and Hart (“Manhattan,” and “The Lady is a Tramp”) and Cole Porter (“You’re the Top”). It is also remembered as a safe place to live, with strong neighborhoods, a high level of mutual trust, and stable local businesses to cater for the resident population.¹⁵ But the writing was on the wall.

Meanwhile, Robert Moses came into the frame. His rise to a dominant position in the city planning of Long Island and Greater New York after 1924 brought sustained pressure on the old amusement zone without successfully transforming Coney Island into a modern genteel resort. From 1924 as President of the Long Island State Park Commission and chair of the State Council of Parks, he opened new beaches with “parkway” road access along the Long Island shore. His failure to provide public transportation facilities to any beaches other than Coney Island, however, drew this comment from a critical biographer: “[Coney Island was] the lone bathing beach reachable by public transportation, and therefore the one to which, because of Moses’ class-separating policies, the city’s poor were herded.” The municipality had off-street parking for 3,000 cars in 1932, half of it on the old Dreamland site, but it also charged 50 cents for parking there at weekends. When in 1934 the Board of Aldermen countermanded Moses by halving the charge, one member commented that most of these car owners at Coney were “poor people” who could not afford to pay 50 cents.¹⁶

Moses’ dislike of Coney Island’s crowds and amusement area was already no secret. He blamed itinerant candy and refreshment salesmen for the high levels of litter generated by what he saw as an essentially undisciplined, rather than, playful crowd. In a single June day in 1934, no fewer than 350 peddlers were arrested. His powers were extended to cover the boardwalk and beaches in 1938 and he was able to intensify his campaigns against the hundreds of fast food, souvenir retail, and cheap amusement businesses that still dominated the Coney Island scene. He banned advertising, human pyramids and gymnastics, speechmaking, and phonographs and loudspeakers near the beach. Moses also attempted to curb the “ballyhoo” of “barkers” for the shows and posted ostentatious signs listing rules and regulations. As the New York Times noted, some changes were cosmetic: “Beach attendants now wear sailor suits instead of drab khaki. Chair-pushers are garbed in special uniforms, too. A few of the millions visiting the beach have been fined $5 for sitting on newspapers on the sand. Others have paid small fines for undressing beneath the boardwalk, playing poker on the beach, walking on the Boardwalk in bathing suits.”¹⁷

But Moses’ longer-term agenda had already been laid out in a letter to the Mayor in 1937, which made clear his intention to squeeze out “catch penny” devices and mechanical amusements and replace them with parks, play areas and more extensive beaches. He also encouraged a transition from amusements to residential uses: “There is no use bemoaning the end of the old Coney Island fabled in song and story,” he noted. “The important thing is not to proceed in the mistaken belief that it can be revived. There must be a new and very different resort established in its place…. There must be more land in public ownership, less over-crowding, stricter enforcement of ordinances and rules, better transportation and traffic arrangement, less mechanical noise-making and amusement devices and side-shows, and a more orderly growth of year-round residents.” In effect, Moses declared war on the old Coney Island. And New York’s Mayor La Guardia endorsed this goal in 1939: “I feel that the present Coney Island layout is an anachronism. The best proof of this is that it is difficult for present holders of property and operators to make their investments pay under the old type method of resort amusement.” A chronic lack of investment in new rides and other facilities was becoming apparent, but Moses’ interventions were also accelerating an already apparent economic decline in the amusement business.¹⁸

To be fair, Moses was most concerned about the crowding on the beach: In a 1939 report, he complained that the 16 square feet per person available on many Sundays were about the “same as required for a coffin.” In his plans for pulling back the boardwalk and adding huge quantities of white sand to the extended beach, he insisted that a “civilized” community “might do a little more by way of recreation for its citizens between the tight places of the cradle and the grave.” In the grand genteel tradition, Moses demanded that New York not perpetuate “out of doors the over-crowding of our tenements.” His improvements at Coney, completed in 1941, pulled the boardwalk inland and added mountains of white sand to the beach, but also caused significant demolitions in the amusement zone. The two worlds of Coney Island, the boardwalk and the Nickel Empire, could never make peace or find a compromise.¹⁹

There was no hint of any similar crisis in Blackpool’s entertainment industry between the wars. The town’s situation contrasted sharply with that of Coney Island. As we have seen, its local government was master of its own municipal destiny, rather than being a remote outlier of a metropolis. Its rulers collaborated with local business interests rather than conflicted with them, and understood that continuing growth, especially of the middle-class housing of commuters and retirees, would require more planned development, but without posing any threat to the established amusement sector. Within a year of the passing of the national Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919, Ernest Lawson, a local politician and the manager of the Queen’s Hydro hotel at South Shore, had won popular support for the first systematic local government plan for a British resort town. Blackpool had more need of this than upscale resorts like Eastbourne, Llandudno, or neighboring St Anne’s, Lytham, and Southport. The town’s rulers embraced Lawson’s new thinking with enthusiasm. They hired the eminent landscape architect T. H. Mawson to plan a new park and extensions to the promenade. The 256 acres of Stanley Park, on an inland site that had been an area of wasteland and shanty towns, opened to the public in 1926, contrasting sharply with the inability of New Yorkers to do the same at Coney. Soon, the new park was surrounded by detached houses in spacious, tree-lined suburban roads. Meanwhile, the promenade extension south of the Pleasure Beach was carefully arranged so that attractive houses with neat front gardens would face the railroad, enhancing Blackpool’s image to visitors arriving by train.²⁰ While Coney Island floundered in finding a use for the abandoned Dreamland, Blackpool built a huge municipal open-air swimming pool near the Pleasure Beach at South Shore in 1923. This initiative also reflected another contrast with Coney Island: the declining use of Blackpool’s beach for bathing, as opposed to sitting on hired deckchairs while fully clothed. “Drippers” were not a Blackpool issue, nor was “mackintosh bathing,” wearing bathing dress under a raincoat and disrobing on the beach. That infamous eighteenth-century British institution, the bathing machine, was already in terminal decline at Blackpool by the 1920s.²¹

On the eve of World War II, Blackpool’s ambitions were running even higher. The Corporation was planning a central redevelopment scheme, which would sweep away the slum housing behind the “Golden Mile” and set back the Central Station to make way for boulevards and flowerbeds on the City Beautiful model; but this was overtaken by events. This civic determination to transform the resort’s image and environment stopped short at treating the town’s sewer system; but otherwise it provided a spacious and civilized setting for crowds whose behavior was expected to improve in step with this investment, and helped to ensure the town a good press in this period, as its Carnivals and (after 1925) autumn electrical Illuminations successfully extended the season and attracted the middle classes.

Where Coney Island lost the newly mobile middle and upper working visiting publics to new, more salubrious beach resorts in the 1920s and 1930s, Blackpool successfully attracted them with an environment designed to appeal at least in part to genteel values. The upscale north and south shores survived and were even extended in Blackpool after World War I while a similar affluent zone in Coney Island faded after the abolition of horserace betting in 1910, although Sea Gate and other residential areas remained. The planning policies of Blackpool Corporation between the wars not only averted the flight of the middle class, but also actively encouraged upscale new settlement, especially in the area around the new Stanley Park. At the same time, the continued domination of rail transport for all social classes in Britain through the interwar years meant that an older pattern of tourism survived at Blackpool. Here, different social strata congregated within walking distance of the train stations, sharing some amenities near the center even while lodging in distinct zones. Bus services expanded rapidly but also brought their passengers to a central coach station. While a large segment of the British middle class did not embrace the private car until the 1950s, it had become the norm in the middle strata of American families as early as the 1920s. This contrast explains the delayed impact at Blackpool of the new forms of holidaymaking that were associated with car ownership, although the town built its first multi-story car park in 1939. But the continuing, and indeed expanding, importance of the middle classes at Blackpool marked a widening contrast with Coney Island, and the general compatibility between the classes at Blackpool helped to assure the respectability of Blackpool’s playful crowd. ²²

The logic of Blackpool’s abortive 1939 central redevelopment plan ran parallel with Moses’ efforts to “reform” Coney Island, but with very different implications. The buildings of the “Golden Mile” that were threatened by the redevelopment scheme included both the greatest concentration of freak shows, waxworks, games of chance and stalls that existed in the resort, along with some of the earliest and most disreputable housing at the back. Removal of this “Whitechapel of Blackpool” (a common allusion to an infamous district of London’s East End that was associated with Jack the Ripper) was accepted as a desirable byproduct of the redevelopment; but in the meantime the local police and councilors were quite relaxed about the area and those who frequented it. When occasional complaints were made to central government about particularly controversial exhibits such as allegedly fasting young women, the Corporation reassured the Home office in London that local officials found these women to be in good health, with local homes to go to at the end of the working day. Not only was the Corporation not too worried about the petty deceptions practiced on customers, it made only a half-hearted attempt to regulate such shows. There was certainly no local equivalent of Robert Moses to drive forward the forces of control.²³ In the end, the Second World War, and the succeeding period of austerity in Britain, put the great redevelopment scheme on hold for over thirty years.

Again in contrast to Coney, there were numerous efforts at modernization in the Depression decade including the introduction of streamlined trams, a new Opera House at the Winter Gardens, the Derby Baths indoor swimming pool on the North Promenade, and the “world’s greatest Woolworth’s” opposite Central Station. The Pleasure Beach especially saw extensive upgrading in the 1930s in striking contrast with the lack of innovation at Coney Island. Here the impetus for change came from within, as Leonard Thompson, who had taken over the reins from his father-in-law, W. G. Bean, after his untimely death in 1929, aimed at confirming the respectability of the amusement park. In this he was following Bean, who had hired T. H. Mawson to remodel the Pleasure Beach in 1926. While Mawson’s plan never was realized, Thompson proceeded to make the Pleasure Beach look less industrial. It had lacked the fantasy architecture of Luna Park, and some of its rides bore an uncanny resemblance to the winding gear of coalmines. In 1933, Thompson hired the modernist architect Joseph Emberton to give the park a new, clean, tidy, modern look. The park had already introduced enduring attractions like the Whip, Noah’s Ark, the Virginia Reel, and the Big Dipper in the early 1920s at the same time as had Coney. But, unlike the New York resort, this continued after 1930 with the Ghost Train, Pleasure Beach Express miniature railroad, Fun House, Grand National roller coaster, Tumble Bug, Eli Wheel and Octopus.²⁴

Thompson had been able to take advantage of the cheapness of materials and labor during the Depression. But even more important was the creation, starting in 1934, of a completely revamped Pleasure Beach environment. After years of conflict, the Blackpool Improvement Act of 1932 obliged the Pleasure Beach’s boundaries to be clearly and attractively defined. Thompson brought in an American designer to provide new frontages and begin the redevelopment of the park’s interior. But the key appointment was that of Emberton, who imposed a distinctive flowing modernity on the whole site. Thompson took pains to distinguish the clean healthy fun of the Pleasure Beach from the enclave of freaks and occultism on the “Golden Mile.” In 1932, he issued a lofty dismissal of the defrocked Rector of Stiffkey’s request to move from the Golden Mile and exhibit himself on the Pleasure Beach. In 1936, Thompson invited eminent scientists conventioneering at Blackpool to try the rides and won endorsement from psychologists for their therapeutic value. By 1938, The Scotsman could even suggest that the Americans were now coming to Blackpool to look for new ideas about amusement parks. The Pleasure Beach’s success was firmly founded on an increasingly positive relationship with local authorities and on a determined drive for artistic and even intellectual respectability. It would be hard to imagine a sharper contrast with Moses’ relationship with Coney Island, and the pattern of development there.²⁵

The decades after 1945 confirmed earlier trends. Still the collapse of Coney certainly was not inevitable. During the late 1930s and through the 1940s Coney Island showed some symptoms of recovery from the Depression. While Frank Tilyou hoped to get “a sizeable share of … the bonanza” from the New York World’s Fair of 1939, by attracting out-of-towners with money in their pockets rather than the usual crowd who “come for the bathing dressed in their bathing suits and don’t spend a red penny,”²⁶ the World’s Fair proved disappointing. Even so, when it closed, Coney’s two amusement parks were able refresh their tired menus by taking new attractions from it. The Parachute Jump was a particularly striking landmark, installed at Steeplechase in 1941 on the site of a recent fire. To one local observer it was “The most exciting ride ever to hit the Island.”²⁷ Otherwise, Steeplechase stuck to its tried and trusted menu and prices. Luna Park, which had endured a second bankruptcy in 1938, purchased 15 rides from the World’s Fair. For Joseph Heller and his circle of local friends, who had plenty of opportunities to judge, Luna Park was always more enticing than Steeplechase.²⁸

It was, however, Luna Park that ceased operation first. On August 12, 1944 yet another of Coney Island’s fires, this time starting with an electrical fault in the washroom of the recently refurbished Dragon’s Gorge ride, destroyed half the park. Following another Coney Island tradition, a crowd estimated at 750,000 watched 62 fire companies try to restrain the flames. Also characteristic was the prompt reopening of the remains of the park, which carried on until the season’s end in mid-September.²⁹ But this was the end of the line. The syndicate that owned Luna Park sold the site back to the Prudence Bonds Corporation, which had taken it over during a previous bankruptcy. The company decided not to reconstruct. Instead, when they found in 1946 that “Reconstruction of the buildings and the elaborate network of rides would entail a heavy expenditure under high post-war construction costs,” they opted to sell. As the company’s president put it, Luna Park on choice land just north of Surf Avenue was destined for “a new and higher purpose,” that of housing 625 war veterans and their families in high-rise apartments. ³⁰ As we shall see, this development was entirely in line with Robert Moses’ vision of Coney Island’s respectable residential future.³¹

Meanwhile, despite the war and demolition of Luna Park, Coney’s beach was attracting unprecedented crowds. On summer Sundays in the 1940s up to a million people would throng its beaches and streets, and 400,000 was an average figure for an ordinary warm weekend. Coney Island was an inevitable calling point for servicemen on leave during the war years, while gasoline rationing made it more difficult to reach the more distant beaches. In 1943, Coney attracted 46 million, the best year since 1925. In 1946 Coney Island accommodated up to 4,800 bathers per acre, “an allowance of nine square feet per person,” far worse than the 16 square feet that Moses had found so uncivilized several years earlier. Photographs show astonishing expanses of people, most of them in swim suits and happy to play to the camera, stretching into the distance across sand made invisible by the sheer crush of tightly packed bodies. Holiday crowds on this scale were unique to Coney Island. Blackpool, with its seven or eight million visitors per year and up to half a million in the town on its busiest weekends, was far behind in the numbers game. The biggest crowd of all at Coney gathered two years after the war to watch a military air show and fireworks display. Otherwise, the Fourth of July 1955 took the prize with, it was said, well over 1.5 million.³² After the war, too, the surviving amusements received a long overdue coat of paint. At the start of the 1953 season the streets were full as well as the beaches, with crowds seven deep on the sidewalks and cars parked three abreast in the busiest streets.³³

But most of the crowd still provided disappointing patronage for amusement businesses. Steeplechase Park continued to take pride in its manicured lawns and gardens, uniformed employees dressed in white shirts and ties who ousted gangs of youth without parental supervision, and reasonably clean facilities. It dominated the entertainment section with its 11 acres of rides (including the new Parachute Jump, pool, ballroom, and pavilion). Yet while annual visitor numbers to Coney were said to be running at 40 million and beyond, as it entered its fifty-first season in 1947, Steeplechase welcomed six-year-old Patricia Lyons as only its 20 millionth visitor. Relatively little had changed in the 1930s and 1940s. Little investment was made, and although the down-market crowd seemed not to demand it, this certainly did not bode well for the future. While freak shows were in sharp decline in middle-class resorts, an August 1945 spread in Life Magazine about Coney, featured an Elephant Girl (with an unusually long nose), along with a headless girl, and a wax re-enactment of the death of the gangster John Dillinger. In the public eye, Coney represented a now fading carnival world.³⁴

In 1953 a concessionaire at Coney commented that there was, “Not much dough there. You can’t do much clipping any more. You clip a guy today and they call it grand larceny. See these barkers. They’re mostly guys with bum tickers. The old-style grifters they gave up. What’s the use? These people nowadays, they want their money’s worth.”³⁵ Such defeatist sentiments, expressed by one of the petty exploiters of the crowd, would have gladdened the heart of Robert Moses.

Part of Moses’ motive for pulling back the boardwalk in 1941 was undoubtedly to undermine the old entertainment economy.³⁶ And, while he certainly improved the beach, the project also displaced many amusement businesses. As the New York Times noted, “veterans of the island concede that the carnival is ended.” Many property owners saw the writing on the wall, and they were unwilling to invest and improve with the prospect of additional condemnations for redevelopment.³⁷

The pressure for change gained additional force in the 1950s when Moses dominated the New York City Housing Authority, enabling him to pursue his general agenda of “slum clearance” and of replacing most of the entertainment district with residential development. As the first new high-rise housing schemes got under way in the early 1950s, Moses secured the rezoning of most of Coney Island from commercial to mixed business and residential use, hoping to foster the building of apartment buildings near the seaside. The City Planning Commission assumed that Steeplechase and other “large amusement arenas” would “continue to thrive indefinitely at Coney,” but that rezoning would encourage the gradual disappearance of the more tawdry areas. Meanwhile, following an earlier proposal from the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce in February 1940, he moved the New York Aquarium, an uplifting recreation entirely compatible with his vision of a new Coney, to the former Dreamland site. Completed in 1957, this project required the demolition of amusement property on Surf Avenue, along with additional land for a parking lot. City plans also included beach and park development in the Manhattan Beach area. However, not only did local residents block parts of this plan, but also the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce opposed these attacks on petty amusement businesses. In 1953, a local businessman argued that, “It would be criminal to tear down the Bowery and Surf Avenue…. Where would the poor people go—to the Riviera?” The unresolved conflicts between the Nickel Empire and heavy-handed gentility of Moses could not be resolved.³⁸

Who won? In many ways, of course, “reformers” did; they destroyed the seedy side of Coney, but without creating an uplifting residential or natural setting. Moses’ maneuvers of the 1940s and early 1950s cleared the way for some of the urban renewal he sought. High-rise redevelopment began in earnest in the late 1950s, hemming in the shrinking amusement district. Renewal also generated speculative rack-renting in the time period between proposed and actual demolition, precipitating the departure of established residents who could not afford the new rents in the new high rises. Jewish and Italian neighborhoods were broken up, and the 1960s saw a migration of black and Hispanic welfare tenants to western Coney Island, paving the way for wholesale demolition in this “slum” district. In 1967, the West End of Coney was declared a Poverty Zone and slated for what became very spotty renewal.³⁹

Three years earlier Steeplechase, the last great amusement park, closed for what turned out to be the last time at the end of the 1964 season, after the patriarch Frank Tilyou died and his elderly sister Marie chose to close rather than to try to bring her feuding family together on a plan. Critics have suggested also that underlying this decision was an unwillingness to adapt to the changing ethnic and racial character of Coney Island crowds. Although James Onorato, son of the long-time manager of Steeplechase, insisted that the park had welcomed blacks since the 1930s, the “whites-only mentality” of patrons of Steeplechase’s mammoth pool led to an informal exclusion of racial minorities. In 1964, complaints about this policy in the context of racial conflicts at Coney that summer, plus costs of a required water filtration system, led to the closure of the pool, an important money-maker at Steeplechase and thus a contributing factor in closing the park. In 1965, Marie Tilyou described her park as a “gorgeous rosebud in a garbage can,” complained about the “horrible types one sees in the summer,” and worried about even more change with “urban renewal.”⁴⁰

After various attempts to salvage Steeplechase as a going concern, the developer Fred Trump, already active in the area, bought the park for a housing development and demolished it. Failing to gain legal permits, he abandoned the project, selling it to the city, which left the site a vacant eyesore. In sharp contrast with 1939, Coney was left out of the planning for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, whose president was Robert Moses. The beginning of the 1968 season saw a frightening riot on a hot April Sunday when there were 600,000 people at Coney, and the violent scenes attracted extensive media coverage. Coney Island had finally lost the reputation for security of person and property that was essential to its success.⁴¹

The 1970s were disastrous. The loss of Steeplechase had eliminated one of the keystones of Coney’s appeal to families. Further destructive and disruptive redevelopment accompanied an epidemic of arson and the loss of ride after ride and building after building. The John Lindsay administration tried to move Harlem residents into the West End, many of whom ended up in the old bungalows that lacked adequate heating for winter use. Muggings drove away revelers and shop owners complained that police would not patrol after 2 a.m. Drug addicts stole even the copper wire on the boardwalk. A shrunken entertainment zone remained, while Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs survived proudly amid the ruins and a new amusement park, Astroland, had developed from 1963 onwards. The Cyclone roller coaster survived a series of demolition threats, not least from the New York Aquarium, but these were isolated landmarks among the rubble and vacant lots. Gangs ran riot and Coney became unsafe for the elderly to visit the remaining shops. Proud cinemas were given over to pornography. In 1976, one resident of Coney commented of his neighborhood: “It is a great dumping ground.”⁴²

Persistent efforts have been made to revive Coney, including a flirtation with the idea of casino gambling in 1979 (opposed by the Trumps with their holdings in Atlantic City and by others fearful of additional crime in the area). An effort beginning in 1985 by black entrepreneur Horace Bullard to buy out remaining commercial lots secretly in order to build a massive theme park failed when his scheme was discovered by remaining owners in 1991. “Nothing gets off the ground,” complained a resident in 1986. Rivalries (some based on old ethnic and family disputes) stood in the way of corporate-led renewal. What remained of the old Bowery was mostly closed in 1998, by which time all but one roller coaster and Ferris wheel had disappeared. In 1985 Coney Island USA revived the freak show tradition and opened a museum and in the late 1990s a minor league baseball park was built on part of the old Steeplechase vacant land. But Coney Island in the new century had become a shadow of its former self.⁴³

By contrast, Blackpool’s popular vitality would be sustained in the postwar generation. At Blackpool, as in Britain generally, the crowd’s spending power was further increased by the belated general introduction of holidays with pay after 1945. The rationing and short supply of consumer goods, which persisted into the early 1950s, also left more in the budget for leisure and holidays; and the 1950s and 1960s brought full employment and a consumer boom. The domestic seaside holiday continued to dominate, and competition from cheap flights to Spain and Mediterranean resorts did not yet present a challenge. Blackpool was especially fortunate immediately after the war. As Paul Axel Lund remarked, “Blackpool was one of the few seaside places which wasn’t mined and barbed-wired, so it was packed with holiday-makers all having their pockets stuffed with money and not enough to spend it on.”⁴⁴ Under these conditions, Blackpool’s playful crowd became more cheerful and more affluent than ever. The Ward Lock guide to the town in the mid-1950s expressed the conventional sentiments: “Blackpool is an astonishing place … tourists from all over the world have come—and continue to come in ever-growing numbers—to see what it is all about…. Blackpool romps through the superlatives … the happy faces and ready friendships of the holiday multitude are a fine ‘mixture as before’ … Blackpool is no longer an all-wakes resort. Far from it. The catholicity of its appeal is one of its chief attractions. It is one of the most cosmopolitan towns in the world, and every taste is provided for.”⁴⁵ However excessive this rhetoric may have been, postwar Blackpool was certainly a national resort with an international leavening and a regional core, and at ease with itself in this guise.

In retrospect, however, clouds can could be found on the horizon. Novel attractions in the postwar generation were almost confined to the Pleasure Beach; and even here very little happened during the decade of austerity, given the building materials shortages that followed the war. A sudden spurt of new rides began in the late 1950s with the Hurricane, Wild Mouse, and Derby Racer, continuing steadily through the 1960s with an average of one significant innovation per year, with the Monorail (1966) and Log Flume (1967) standing out for their novelty value.⁴⁶

Elsewhere the great burst of creative investment in the late 1930s was not resumed after the war. The Tower Company did replace its sumptuous Ballroom in all its late Victorian glory after a fire in 1956, but this expressed confidence in the enduring continuity of popular taste rather than any quest for innovation. In 1961, indeed, the adjoining Palace, originally the Alhambra, gave way to a department store, providing a strong marker of changing tastes and priorities.⁴⁷ The Corporation’s autumn electrical Illuminations returned in 1949, a powerful symbol of the transition from postwar austerity, and later even introduced Disney characters. Blackpool’s pleasure palaces were still able to pull in guest appearances from international stars like Frank Sinatra in the early 1950s.⁴⁸ But Harold Tunstall, an “artist” for the Blackpool Tower Company, was correct when he lamented in 1961 that, “I’m afraid at present the Town …tend[s] to live in the reflected glory of the great ideas of the past.”⁴⁹ Tunstall’s attitude was probably shaped by the fact that he was seeking work on a “Themeland” project that was investigating the possibility of building a Blackpool version of Disneyland that ultimately failed to materialize (see chapter 6). This was not the only failed proposal for an integrated corporate entertainment zone. A few years later municipal proposals for a central redevelopment, to include “a casino, elevated walkways and skyscraper hotels,” fell foul of the skeptical fears of elements of the established entertainment industry, and had to be shelved.⁵⁰

Despite these failures, Blackpool was able to thrive without major innovation. The expectations of its visitors in the 1950s and even 1960s had changed relatively little from those a generation earlier. They spent their increased wages and longer holidays on the things that their less wealthy parents had enjoyed. By contrast, the children of those who thronged Coney Island in the 1920s and 1930s not only expected innovation, but some of them abandoned Coney for Disney.

While Blackpool prospered without renovation, it still had to face the first stirrings of an assertive new youth culture that threatened to divide the generations in potentially disruptive ways. The advent and influence of the Teddy Boys, with their sideburns, “quiffs,” and distinctive dress, is visible in photographs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, as groups of roving adolescents and young men adopted aggressive postures at the Pleasure Beach, roamed the central promenade, and petted ostentatiously with young women on the beach and in the streets. Still, Alfred Gregory’s photographs put this challenge into perspective by showing adolescents in multigenerational family groups as well as hunting in packs and revealing a persistent formality in dress (with sweaters replacing suits among younger men, while most women continued to wear skirts rather than jeans). Children were more in evidence than previously, too, as improved living standards meant that even working-class families with youngsters could afford a Blackpool holiday. Far from becoming a hangout of gangs and youthful rebellion, Blackpool had actually become more of a family place.⁵¹

Gregory’s published photographs are slanted toward the more downscale parts of town, the crowded central beach and adjoining “Golden Mile.” Still, despite the incipient changes, the persisting respectability of the crowd on the beach is captured convincingly in Gregory’s own description: “They sunbathed fully dressed; collars and ties were seldom removed. Early in the decade [1960s] not many people wore swim suits and when the bikini made an appearance here it was only for the young and daring. Most kept on their dresses and suits and only went into the water to paddle…. Often I would see a gentleman, conservatively-dressed with cap, waistcoat and gold watch chain dangling on his chest, roll up his trouser bottoms, take off his socks and shoes and quietly walk into the shallows…. Women still wore stockings and fashionable young teenagers, hair rollers covered by a scarf, would frolic together playing with a ball, full skirts swaying over frilly petticoats, their stockinged feet pounding the sand.”⁵²

The journalist Graham Turner underlined Blackpool’s enduring stability and respectability in 1967: “Blackpool is also, for all its gigantic paraphernalia of fun, an extraordinarily staid and puritan town. The hatches, one feels, are battened down very tightly to scotch any possible impropriety…. One result of the conservatism of both the town and the majority of its visitors is that teenagers have made relatively little impact on its character…. The town seems to be run by and for the over-forties and the under-fourteens…. It is there to entertain the millions without causing offence, to feed them efficiently, to jolly them up a bit, whiz them round a couple of times, blow their frocks over their heads and send them down the dual carriageway towards Preston and the night shift.”⁵³

In the mid-1960s, then, Blackpool was still prospering, and its “traditional” playful crowd was still recognizable. More of them now arrived by road than rail, and the town’s Central Station, the great hub of tourist arrivals as recently as the early 1950s, closed in 1964, reflecting the rising importance of the bus as well as the private car. A growing proportion of the crowd was probably drawn from the working class, and perhaps from the “unskilled,” while many erstwhile middle-class visitors were seeking quieter or sunnier climes in southwest England or on the European Continent. But Blackpool’s heart was still beating strongly, despite the central entertainment companies’ failure to innovate and a general dependence on habit and tradition. This enduring culture of the English North survived despite greater affluence and generational change. The Blackpool experience in the 1950s and 1960s points out that the American cycle of innovation and decline need not be the only way that the playful crowd coped with change.

As early as 1939 Henry R. Lieberman identified “at least four factors” that explained why “Coney Island’s star has been growing dimmer gradually for more than a decade.”⁵⁴ Its customers’ spending power had declined, a trend recognized by concessionaires whose prizes took the form of “hams and cans of coffee” rather than “kewpie dolls and crockery.” Secondly, it had been damaged by changes in public taste, as the rides now had to compete for thrills with “the automobile and the airplane,” the exhibitions “pale by comparison with actual newsreel shots and newspaper photographs,” and even the children had become skeptical about what they had formerly accepted with wonder. Thirdly, the visitors now came for the bathing rather than the amusements, undermining the commercial foundation of Coney Island. Finally, there were the campaigns for regulation and “improvement” undertaken by those whom Lieberman called the “M-Men,” Robert Moses and the New York City License Commissioner, Paul Moss, with their ever-tightening restrictions on ballyhoo, advertising signs and games of chance.

During and after the war the balance between these adverse influences shifted, and others came more strongly into the frame. Continuing technological advances, especially TV made the exhibitions less novel and sophisticated. Far more than Blackpool, Coney had flourished on novelty and caught between the jaws of corporate disinterest and down-market crowds, it could no longer deliver innovation. Instead, the “new” appeared elsewhere along the parkways of Long Island and the Jersey Shore, and, with air travel more distant sites like Las Vegas and Disney World promised not only sparkling novelty, but a warm respite from New York winters as well. The continuing push toward residential development and rational recreation on the Jones Beach model, with the beach as a strictly regulated public park, did most to undermine the distinctive character of Coney Island. Since the 1840s, Coney had combined, often in tension, commercial entertainment with natural beauty and recreation. As Coney’s commerce moved down-market and was burdened with racial and social conflicts, Coney’s natural beauty was compromised and the beach became more ordinary in a world where fun-seekers had far more choices. The readiness to abandon threatened or outdated assets, and to leave them to decay if alternative uses were not forthcoming, was a damaging aspect of American business culture in this and other resort settings. The capacity of amusement parks to sustain wonder was destroyed by the vacant lots, torched buildings, and mundane new high-rise apartment blocks that literally put the roller coasters in the shade. Moses certainly did not want this, but his policies were partially responsible for what occurred. After the closure of Steeplechase, whose land then laid fallow and derelict, followed by the riots of 1968, there was no hope of returning to old glories. The brave rhetoric of a new Coney Island for the new century, founded on a new baseball stadium and some revived amenities, has yet to find fulfilment.⁵⁵

Not that Blackpool had an easy ride during the final third of the twentieth century, despite the continuing commitment of its local authority to the entertainment industry and an easier transition from trains to cars, planes, and buses. But it was not until the very end of the century that a sense of serious crisis began to pervade the British resort. Even then, the symptoms of decline were far less advanced than those exhibited by Coney Island or Atlantic City in the late 1960s. In the early twenty-first century local government was returning to its traditions of enterprise and innovation, in partnership with business, to try to turn the ship round. The contrasts with Coney are revealing.

By the late 1960s Blackpool was encountering troublesome changes to its visitor base and entertainment industry. The decline of its core visitor catchment area in the industrial North of England was beginning to accelerate, and the traditional “Wakes” holidays of the cotton manufacturing towns were disappearing. The spread of working-class car ownership made new areas of the country more accessible, and the better-off Blackpool visitors were being drawn to smaller resorts in the sunnier climes of the south and west. The rising generation was particularly susceptible, and some were already being drawn to package holidays on the Mediterranean coast and elsewhere in Europe, although many of these people also continued to take short breaks in Blackpool, especially during the Illuminations.

By the 1970s, the fuller development of a separate youth culture made it more difficult to recruit a rising generation for whom family traditions held less appeal. This was hardly unique to Blackpool (in fact, something very similar occurred at Disney). Still, the lack of investment in new attractions during the 1950s and 1960s, apart from the Pleasure Beach, gave the town’s pleasure menu an increasingly tired air. At the same time, control over the central entertainment businesses passed from local to national firms and Blackpool’s ability to recruit national and international star entertainers was increasingly compromised by the higher payments demanded in the television age. It was difficult to meet rising expectations about accommodation quality in Victorian boarding houses which lacked in-room bathing facilities.⁵⁶

These were all long-term problems, but by the end of the 1960s Blackpool was facing an immediate traffic crisis. While the Corporation’s Traffic and Transport Plan of 1969 assumed that more than 8 million people still visited Blackpool every year, crowd patterns had drastically changed. The railroads’ share of the traffic had fallen from 3.2 million in 1937 to 630,000 in 1966 and the traffic load was shifting from the summer to the Illuminations season in September and October. Continuing growth in motor traffic had resulted in increasing congestion on the Promenade, which already “seriously detracts from the environment of the sea front and presents hazards and frustrations to both drivers and pedestrians…. The people who visit and holiday in Blackpool enjoy a crowded atmosphere…. The presence of motor vehicles, however, detracts from the enjoyment of the crowded holiday atmosphere.”⁵⁷

The Blackpool Corporation faced a daunting problem: How to preserve in the era of the car a crowd culture based on what was now an obsolete urban layout centered on railroad depots? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, proposals included extensive central demolitions to make way for an elevated inner relief road. High costs and local opposition led to this scheme being abandoned, and a new route into the town center followed the line of the old railway to the demolished Central Station, where the old carriage sidings offered ample space for parking lots. ⁵⁸ This willingness to retreat from the planners’ excess stood in sharp contrast to the inconsistent, but bureaucratic response to Coney Island’s problems.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Blackpool Corporation also promoted the innovations that too long had been neglected. It sought, and obtained, permission from Parliament for a long list of initiatives, including a zoo, a golf course, roller-skating rinks, various entertainments in the municipal parks, and a hoverport to provide a high-speed water transport link to other coastal towns in northwest England and North Wales, although this particular futuristic scheme never came to pass.⁵⁹

Nothing of this kind could happen in Coney Island. The Aquarium had been imposed externally and took more than a generation to become popular on its new site, while Blackpool’s Zoo occupied an accessible vacant site on the urban fringe that met the needs of its intended clientele. Blackpool’s eventual redevelopment of the “Golden Mile” area, though controversial, was also less damaging than the changes that New York’s City Hall forced on Coney Island. The main period of demolition and replacement, removing some of Blackpool’s oldest housing from the 1830s and 1840s, took nearly ten years, and the new seafront architecture was corporate and concrete, with a large parking lot and a police station, in the “brutalist” style that was currently in favor, lurking behind the entertainments. Comment in the local press was critical, but the new “Golden Mile” still drew in the crowds.⁶⁰ Meanwhile, a spokesman for EMI, the big conglomerate that now ran much of Blackpool’s established entertainment industry, concurred with those who condemned local planners for wanting “neat well behaved buildings that had nothing to discriminate one from the other,” when the essence of the area’s attractiveness should be “haphazardness” and the capacity to surprise. Even so, he concluded that “the showmanship is still there” and “it is still a fun place.”⁶¹ There were elements here of the critiques that had been directed at Moses, but in practice the “Golden Mile” had been updated rather than abolished, as the “Horror Crypt,” “Devil’s Den” and other new delights made clear.⁶² This kind of entertainment remained entirely acceptable as part of the Blackpool scene.

The changes on the “Golden Mile” prompted a measure of nostalgic comment, as old landmarks disappeared and some critics lamented a perceived “Americanization” of the new attractions, including displays of space technology and references to science fiction cartoons. It was even possible to look back wistfully at the innocence of the 1920s and 1930s, when the “tough cigar-smoking liquor lads” who ran the “starving bride” shows took care to hide their intrinsic kindness behind a brusque exterior. “But all the razzmatazz is as dead as a dodo, and nothing can revive it. Nowadays it is all pubs, clubs and cabaret and what’s on telly.” Blackpool no longer “rode the crest of the entertainment wave,” and one commentator asked, “Is it just nostalgia that makes one wonder why people don’t enjoy themselves in the same way as they did in the past, when there was plenty of horseplay, but no mugging, drugging, stabbing and senseless violence?”⁶³

This was a very dangerous kind of talk to surface in a popular resort, although in practice Blackpool remained a relatively safe environment for vacationers at this time, especially when compared to Coney Island. By the early 1970s, however, the Corporation was becoming sufficiently worried about its future to commission its first professional visitor survey. Its social profile of the visitors found only 4 percent from professional and managerial occupations, and 13 percent from white-collar and supervisory workers, while five-sixths came from skilled (predominantly) and unskilled manual workers and state pensioners. The visitor profile was also significantly more elderly than the national pattern, provoking worries that Blackpool was sliding down the social scale and failing to recruit a new generation. In what sense, if any, could a crowd of British pensioners be “playful”? This might have marked the beginning of a crisis to match those experienced in the 1960s by Coney Island and Atlantic City.⁶⁴

Remarkably, this proved not yet to be the case. At the very point where competition from the Mediterranean package holiday began to damage British resort economies, especially in the North, Blackpool’s holiday season revived. A regional plan written in 1987 treated Blackpool as an asset, stressing the Victorian themes of its new Hounds Hill Shopping Centre and other sites along with the new Sandcastle pool complex as important tourist attractions.⁶⁵ Further Corporation surveys at the end of the 1980s found that visitor numbers had actually increased since 1972 (although the average stay was only three or four nights) and that the relatively lucrative middle-class, white-collar and supervisory cohorts now accounted for one-third of the visitors. This move upscale was assisted by a growing gay presence, as local entrepreneur Basil Newby began to cater to this lucrative market whose delight in kitsch and tackiness made Blackpool an unexpectedly attractive venue. There were already 150 small gay or gay-friendly hotels by 1991, and growth continued as Newby expanded his own entertainment network and its success drew others into the field. Blackpool also became a “big night out” destination for weekend clubbers and stag and hen parties, generating occasional tensions where assertively gay and straight cultures collided. More troublesome for the authorities was the danger of alienating the family and retiree market when the daytime culture of the elderly and family collided with the “evening” culture of gays and clubbers. As the new crowds became more numerous and notorious, the more “respectable” ones faded. From the mid-1990s especially, Blackpool’s future became increasingly problematic and a matter for debate. The tone of outsiders’ comments on the Blackpool crowd in general shifted from (at worst) condescension and amused tolerance to outrage and disgust: Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson were among those who found Blackpool’s mainstream visitors to be flabby, vulgar, ill-dressed, ill-mannered, and even threatening. By 2000, the town’s reputation as a safe visitor venue was compromised, and the long-postponed crisis seemed finally to have arrived.⁶⁶

Several related sets of problems were coming to a head. Despite the reassuring visitor statistics of the late 1980s, parts of central Blackpool close to the Promenade were beginning to experience the sort of serious poverty and unemployment, with associated violence and drug abuse that had undermined Coney Island in the previous generation. Small hotels competing on price rather than amenity for what remained of the old working-class market found it easier to take in welfare tenants, often from outside the town, at guaranteed year-round rents. Inevitably, this practice brought disruption and disturbance to the surrounding area. Blackpool consistently had the highest rate of unemployment in Lancashire, a county of many seriously deprived areas. To make matters worse, the town’s identity as a seaside resort was challenged by growing awareness of the polluted state of the sea, although this began to be addressed in the late 1990s. Expenditure on the Illuminations became controversial as the holiday industry carried declining weight in the town’s politics. Rumors of municipal corruption became a stronger theme in the 1970s and 1980s, and, in 1991, the Labour Party took over control of the Town Hall from the Conservatives for the first time in Blackpool’s history. The Corporation’s failure to develop the airport after taking it over in 1961, or to provide a new conference center like its competitors, began to look increasingly damaging, and the crisis of confidence outlasted the change of ruling party.⁶⁷

The Corporation struggled to spearhead innovation through a plan to capitalize on the proposed liberalization of the casino gambling laws, using gambling revenues to drive a Masterplan for resort renewal. Blackpool seemed to be taking a leaf from the experience of Atlantic City, which had used casinos as a route to recovery from a desperate situation, with mixed results, from 1976.⁶⁸ Fittingly, the plan itself envisaged new green spaces, a conference center, covered walkways, a revolutionary new approach to the Illuminations borrowing from techniques used in Las Vegas, a new Aquarium, and the rehabilitation of many Victorian guesthouses (in hopes of maintaining Blackpool’s distinctiveness) alongside enormous new casino hotels. This showed that the spirit of enterprise was not dead and that the tradition of public/private collaboration could be revived. It all depended not only on getting special casino concessions from the central government, but also on the attractiveness to outsiders of the proposed mix of “heritage” and innovation.⁶⁹ Blackpool’s problems were undeniable, but so was an underlying vitality that made it well worth investing in and turning around. And it was clearly in a much better situation than Atlantic City had been when the casinos arrived in the late 1970s.⁷⁰

The local government’s sustained, if recently checkered, support for Blackpool’s popular holiday industry played a large part in the town’s success in catering to a changing playful crowd. Perhaps the most important single influence, however, remained the Pleasure Beach, the most popular free-entry attraction in Britain, with a sustained record of innovation that was unchallenged elsewhere in the town. It was edgier, more excessive, more threatening, and there was more litter and untidiness than Leonard Thompson or Joseph Emberton would have liked to see. Some of its participants were also experiencing it as post-tourists, savoring the ironies of its artificiality in knowing ways while enjoying the sense of nostalgia and kitsch that some were associating with the whole Blackpool experience. The British seaside in general, and Blackpool in particular, was beginning to live partly on the recycling of versions of its past for consumption in the present; and this helped to preserve the distinctiveness of place identity that might otherwise be under threat from globalizing redevelopment.⁷¹ This was very different from the industrial saturnalia that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Contemporary Blackpool also stands in sharp contrast to other alternatives to the playful crowds of the old Blackpool and Coney—the late-twentieth-century fantasy associated with Disney and other theme parks and the pleasurable didacticism of the open-air museum at Beamish. We shall explore these alternatives in the next two chapters.