Chapter

NINE

AS MUCH AS I LOVE TRAINS AND CITY BUSES, MY FAVORITE form of public transportation is the carousel.

The first time I sat on a painted horse, I felt overcome by emotion. I was an adult woman in my twenties. As soon as the organ in the hundred-year-old carousel in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park started playing, there were tears. As my horse moved, I was, too.

New York City, where I live, has as many as twelve carousels, most of them antique, most of them located in parks. The one nearest to me is the Prospect Park Carousel, which contains not only fifty-three hand-carved horses but also a lion, a giraffe, a deer, and two chariots pulled by dragons. It was created in 1912 by Charles Carmel, a master carver of carousels. This was the golden age of the carousel, just before it ended with the First World War. Since 1912, the Prospect Park Carousel has gone through many ups and downs, falling into disuse and mechanical troubles before eventually being restored.

Going up and down and up and down is a very carousel movement. The horses that move up and down on the poles with all four feet in the air are called “jumpers.” A carousel may also have “prancers,” which have their two front feet in the air, the back two on the ground, as well as “stargazers,” which have their heads raised at a forty-five- or ninety-degree angle, as if they are looking skyward.

Carousel history is also full of ups and downs. The carousel started as a war-training game in the thirteenth century. Imagine the moment eight hundred years ago. The Khmer Empire is building Angkor Wat. Tuareg nomads have just founded a trading post called Timbuktu that will soon grow into the cultural capital of West Africa. A boy called Jalaluddin is leaving his home in Balkh to journey to Anatolia in search of a home and learning. And in the Mediterranean, Muslim and Christian soldiers are participating in one of the most intense cultural-exchange programs ever, known as the Crusades. This is how some European crusaders noticed that the Arab and Turkish warriors played a combat game that involved riding around in circles and throwing perfumed clay balls at one another. The idea was that you would catch the ball and throw it at someone else. But if the ball hit you, you left the game and bore the scent for weeks. When the Spanish and Italian soldiers returned to Europe, they brought back coffee, sugar, and this game.

Although, what was Europe? The most glamorous city of the twelfth century was Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, modern-day Istanbul. Europe was a bunch of feudal entities at war with one another, riddled with disease and poverty. Chunks of Spain and Portugal were in Muslim hands. And stretching from Eastern Europe to China, Siberia to South Asia, was the Mongol Empire.

Garosello: This is what the soldiers called the game. In Italian it means little war.

What marvelously twisted irony that the empires that the men of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fought for are gone but the horse-riding game thingy they happened to exchange is still around.

What was a game of skill in the Seljuk Turkish world transformed into pageantry in Italy and France. Riders on lavishly decorated horses performed to music, often in circular arenas, while royals watched. Carousels became a popular tournament event at which knights showed off their horsemanship skills. A simple machine was devised so that they could practice lancing a dangling ring with a sword while riding.

In 1662, a particularly fabulous equine demonstration took place in a public square in Paris to entertain Louis XIV. The square got renamed Place du Carrousel. In 1789, the royal palace at the Place du Carrousel was burned to the ground by members of the Paris Commune.

By the nineteenth century, carousels began to appear at country fairs. They were no longer involved in pageants or tournaments. They had turned into simple machines containing a central post with roughly carved horses and benches made of scrap wood, powered by a single live horse. By the mid-nineteenth century, the live horse was replaced by a hand-cranked machine with various wooden animals on wheels or arms extending from a rotating center post.

Then the steam engine came along. The steam-driven carousel was just what the country fair of the mid-nineteenth century needed. Trains had made travel far easier than ever before and, in order to stay relevant, the fairs had to offer more spectacle and entertainment. Flush with buying power, the prototypical consumer-tourist of the era was ready to be entertained, and soon carousels became showcases of engineering skill and imaginative fantasy. They also became bigger and stronger and included multiple rows of animals, and they began moving to music. The festive calliope music of the carousel started ringing out at the seaside resorts that were mushrooming in Europe.

The steam engine also powered the ships that were sailing across the oceans with immigrants. One of those immigrants was Gustav Dentzel, a young German woodworker, who sailed down the Rhine and across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States with the parts of a carousel in the hold of the steamboat. Over the next fifty years what was once a Turkish military-combat game became a full-scale popular entertainment in North America.

An idea for a novel that I don’t have time to write: how Gustav Dentzel, a twenty-year-old furniture-maker from Kreuznach, Germany, who landed in the United States just as the Ottoman Empire was beginning its slow cookie crumble, would go on to establish a carousel empire on the East Coast.

Opening scene of this novel: Dentzel is in Richmond, Virginia, with a simple carousel he is testing out on the American market. It consists of a few benches suspended from chains. So far it has been a hit at the many fairgrounds he has taken it to. But in Richmond, the town’s boys throw stones at him and insult him. Why? He does not understand. His feelings are hurt.

It is the local police who explain to him that playing “Marching Through Georgia,” a Union song of the Civil War, as the musical accompaniment for his carousel is not the path to popularity in the American South. It is a mistake Dentzel will never make again. He is not only an expert wood-carver; he is also an entrepreneur.

Country fairs are in his blood. In Germany, his family would travel around fairs during the summer and retreat to their town to carve carousel animals during the winter. But unlike in Europe, carousels are rare in the United States. Dentzel sets up G. A. Dentzel, Steam and Horsepower Carousel Builder in Germantown, Philadelphia.

The Carousel Museum in Bristol, Connecticut, has faithfully replicated an early-twentieth-century carousel workshop. Pasted on the wall of the workshop is the master carver’s drawing. The drawing was important because many of the immigrant carvers did not speak English. Dentzel’s drawings were probably sketched in charcoal, either directly on the wall or on large sheets of paper in his workshop.

Dentzel’s workshop was always a welcoming place for immigrant carvers. My favorite story is that of Salvatore Cernigliaro, a twenty-three-year-old from Palermo, who arrived in the United States in 1902 “full of energy and corragio,” as he described it in a letter. Cerni, as he would come to be known, made his living as a wood-carver, but the work was never reliable. One day, down on his luck and unemployed, he went to meet Dentzel and mustered all his English and said to him: “Me, wood-carver, job?”

Dentzel spoke to him in German, and Cerni understood that there was no work for him. He went away disappointed. A week later, hungry and tired, he was praying at Saint Stefano Church in Germantown. “Mr. Lord, I have only $4 in my pocket—it is my last pay for board and if I don’t find a job now, they will throw me out,” he wrote later about his prayer.

After he prayed, he felt thirsty. He remembered then that there was a well in the courtyard of Dentzel’s workshop nearby. So he went to drink water there. He met Dentzel again, who invited him inside. Inside the workshop there was a Tyrolean immigrant who could manage a few words of Italian. “Why didn’t you come last week?” he asked Cerni. Dentzel had offered him a job then, but Cerni had misunderstood.

Dentzel and Cerni were part of an influx of skilled and eager European craftspeople eager to make their way. The Danish immigrant Charles I. D. Looff worked in a furniture factory in New York, and at night, with scrap wood brought home from his job, he began carving carousel animals in his apartment. Looff opened the first carousel at the trolley park in Coney Island.

The trolley parks were so named because they were at the end of trolley lines. They were recreation areas, with Ferris wheels and swimming pools, roller coasters, and games and boat rides. Many of them were constructed by the trolley companies themselves, to increase their revenues by luring people to ride to the end of the lines on the weekends and holidays. There were hundreds of trolley parks in the United States before the First World War—some of these turned into permanent amusement parks.

Over the next fifty years, carousel maestros would create roughly four thousand carousels. American carousels were much larger than their European predecessors. Many of them were populated with fantastic creatures unheard of in European carousels. While European carousels ran clockwise, American carousels ran counterclockwise, as if to say pointedly, look, we are going in another direction. But, in one respect, carousels did not change: they brought with them the fairground music of Europe.

Carousel music is often called the happiest music in the world. In February 2021, the satirical newspaper The Onion headlined: “If It Weren’t For Covid, You’d Be On A Carousel Right Now.” Quoting a fictitious report by the United Nations Development Programme, The Onion wrote: “We found irrefutable evidence that in a hypothetical scenario in which the coronavirus outbreak has never occurred, a gentle breeze blows through your hair, the smell of freshly popped popcorn wafts through a park, you’re seated on a beautiful historic merry-go-round, and you’re truly, truly happy.”

For years now, since my first carousel ride, I have wondered about this happiness, the way it is a shorthand for the complex of feelings that surge in me when I ride a carousel. I have fumbled through the felt senses and muscle memories of my body. This rush in my heart, this feeling of being alive, the way the rhythms inside me and outside me are in sync. This is the closest I have come to understanding the carousel emotion—belonging; be-longing.

Fairground organ music belongs to the nineteenth century. For centuries before, pipe organs had provided music in the cathedrals and courts of Europe. But in the decades in between the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Berlin Conference, organ music wandered out of palaces and places of worship and into dance halls, streets, and fairgrounds, where it turned into a loud and mechanized secular symphony. It became louder and faster because it had to work harder to cut through the clutter of carnival noise.

It seems to me that carousel music has never quite moved outside this time warp. It captures a moment in time when everyday life stood poised to be transformed. Already the forces of capitalism and colonialism were at work, and machines would be put to their service. But here in this brief bubble of time, machines had made life easier, and time itself was more plentiful. For a few moments in history, we had machines but they didn’t have us.

It is from the cultural and social ferment of this moment that modern tourism emerged. This is why the carousel is a perfect metaphor for tourism in all its seductions and complications. What is a metaphor, after all? In Athens, the mass transit system is called Metaforas. Meta means “across”; phero means “carry.” A metaphor is a form of transportation, whether in place or in meaning. The carousel is a metaphor in more ways than one.

Like a modern tourist, the carousel rider moves in a tightly circumscribed circle. There is nothing new to see or hear, whether it’s the Grand Tour or the hajj, whether it’s the backpacker trail or the walking tour. Yet every time the music begins and my horse starts moving, I forget that it is not going anywhere. The Earth spins thousands of kilometers per hour, but we do not feel it because we, too, are spinning. Who is to say what movement is?

Carousels also remind me that we live in a multi-temporal world, that history will compost itself. We know this. But we keep this knowledge at the edge. We divide our stories into eras, and we imagine we have come so far from our ancestors. But when I am riding a painted wooden horse dancing around a centrifugal axis, this knowledge surges in, so forcefully that it is not even awareness; it is pure consciousness.

This meeting of mystery and materiality is also why I look forward to airport carousels. Once, at a baggage carousel in Istanbul, where some of my fellow passengers were returning from the hajj, I saw a box of zamzam water and a box of whiskey, both marked fragile, coming down the carousel together. The carousel handles with care these contradictions. The profound and the profane in one perfect circle.

Every circle of the carousel is just that—one perfect circle. Then it is gone forever. Look, the man who was sitting outside on the grass reading a book is gone now. A bird takes off from a tree and the world will never be the same again. The café where you were once young is now a phone store. The museum is a mosque. The elephant’s bones have become mushroom. Where one empire has dissolved into nothing, another rises.

When we travel, we are not moving from place to place. We are moving from one moment in time to another moment in time. We are tricking ourselves into paying attention to the thing that is hardest to pay attention to. On the carousel and on the tourist trail, it is time that reveals itself. The present does not exist. Only the past and the future do. But on the border between those two, a border that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword’s edge, there is a moment. To call it the present would be to overstate it. But it is there: a microworld of galloping horses, overheard conversations, and bits of song. There is no now but now.