Wonderland Amusement Park Was a Sight to Behold. in a City Lit Only By
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KATIE THORNTON ARCHIVING SEX PROFESSOR PABLO MITCHELL AMERICA IN WONDERLAND: DEFINING THE NATION IN THE EARLY AMUSEMENT PARKS OF MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL Wonderland Amusement Park was a sight to behold. In a city lit only by dim gaslight when the park opened in 1905, the park’s 25,000 light bulbs were a shock to the system, an awesome feat of modernity. The electric tower alone was covered on all sides with over 7,000 bulbs, making it the park’s most prominent feature, visible from over five miles away, shining on amusement devices as yet unseen in this part of the country, and beckoning curious city residents to engage in the new entertainment of amusement parks. The attractions themselves posited physical sensation, pleasure, and even fear as a means of enjoyment—a new, mechanized “relaxation” at high speeds. Bought only eight months prior, the four square block area displayed shiny red and white buildings of enamel and tin, demonstrating the new speed and aesthetic of modern urban construction. Built just blocks away from a major trolley hub and along a major streetcar line on the popular industrial and residential corridor of Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Wonderland was easily accessible from virtually anywhere in the Twin Cities. Residents came to this place of bright lights, physical exhilaration, modern architecture, and public leisure all via the trolley, itself representing modernity, and here they encountered a shocking coalescence of the modern and the industrial.1 Among such attractions as the 45 mile per hour “scenic railway,” the “Air Ship Swing,” the “House of Nonsense,” and the “Shoot-the-Chutes” water ride (second in height only to that at New York’s Coney Island), the park’s most popular attraction was housed in a nondescript two story building. Here spectators and thrill-seekers would witness the 2 modern spectacle and main event: the Infant Incubator Institute. At a time when premature babies were not received at hospitals and had minimal chances of survival, Wonderland provided both a space and an audience for the demonstration of a new and controversial incubator technology to keep these babies alive. Amusement park guests, eager to witness what were largely considered to be nature’s mistakes become healed by the miracles of modern science, would pay 10 cents to witness the spectacle. Some spectators returned week after week, checking on the growth of the “tiny patients,” with a few even going on to adopt those babies that had been abandoned by their mothers.2 Here, in the center of the amusement park that many newspapers, advertisements, and public maps referred to as “the Coney Island of the Twin Cities,” the fascination with the modern and scientific, the glorification of machinery, and the consumption and spectatorship of the modern age collided fully. This collision was uneasy, and in many ways embodied the clashing, controversial, and provocative nature of amusement parks in turn of the century America. In the confusion and newness of American urbanization and industrialization, amusement parks represented a broader shift in American priorities from homemaking, craft, and conservatism to urbanism, industry, and leisure. This new type of gender integrated (and to varying degrees racially integrated) leisure was made possible in part by the formation of a working class prepared to play for their own amusements, amusements that at once satisfied a strictly modern curiosity and often opposed the longstanding Victorian denial of physical pleasure. But they emerged, too, out of temporal social and political necessities: amusement parks, while often defined as the liberal playgrounds of the working class, also helped to define a modern, industrialized America that simultaneously liberalized previously held sexual norms but defined a heavily 3 racialized “appropriate Americanness” for the emerging urban classes. In these modern locales of sensory overload, social integration, and contestation, social, sexual, and racial norms were being pushed and strained, but revealed also the limits of their emerging liberalness. In these amusement spaces countless Americans negotiated and confronted modernity, changing social and societal norms, and the entire notion of what it meant to be American.3 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: A NATION’S OBSESSION By the early 20th century, amusement parks were ubiquitous across the nation. Preceded most notably by the 1893 Columbian Exposition of Chicago, in which urban residents celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and posited Chicago as the fulfillment of his imperial and modernizing legacy, early American amusement parks also sought to demonstrate the feats of modern technology and industry with a distinctly nationalist flavor. The Exposition linked expansionism to modernity through the simultaneous display of modern technology and racialized depictions of those nations under America’s continuing control. Gaining mythic and near sacred memory in the minds of late 19th-century Chicagoans and Americans more broadly, the Exposition, or “White City,” as the grounds were colloquially known, directly inspired the creators of New York’s Coney Island, America’s first large amusement park. Opening four years later in 1897, Coney Island too was awe-inspiring in its excessive size, overstimulation, and mechanization, and carried on the tradition of nationalist and expansionist display. Coney Island and Chicago’s White City quickly became the two aspirational prototypes for small town amusement entrepreneurs, thus solidifying into the blueprints of American amusement parks a glorification of such urban hubs as Chicago and New York.4 4 Some of the most popular attractions at Coney Island and the countless smaller parks across the country were explicitly patriotic. Huge crowds gathered to watch live performances or cinematic exhibitions portraying historical and contemporary American war victories. Exhibits like the “Battle of Manila,” wherein American victories in the Spanish-American War were reenacted, and other films depicting military success in imperial battles were crucial to gaining sustained support for American expansion (particularly into the Philippines), conflating the new excitement for modern amusement technology with support for the actual event depicted. Exhibits recalling other American military, civil, or technological feats also were often a park’s largest attraction, with “disaster shows” recreating the destruction and subsequent (presumably exaggerated) rebuilding in historical events like the Johnstown flood (popular at Minneapolis’s Wonderland) and, eventually, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The technical innovation and skill of the exhibits themselves, combined with the depiction of historical and contemporary victories of American technology over nature, served to doubly illuminate the glory of American industrial technology, both at home and on the warfront. 5 The physical landscapes of the parks also served the purpose of US patriotism and advancement. The mechanical, industrial, sensory, and overwhelming nature of amusement parks promoted the idea that industrialization and mechanization were not to be feared, but to be embraced. Historian Lauren Rabinovitz writes that early American amusement parks “represented new kinds of energized relaxation that also functioned to calm fears about new technologies and living conditions of an industrialized society.” In this description she acknowledges the intentionality of this new kind of leisure as further honing a burgeoning American identity that was inseparable, even in relaxation, from 5 industrialization. So, too, did the thrill of the space and the implicit danger become an important point of leverage in the changing society; though rides were generally safe they entailed some degree of risk, and thus mandated trust in new American technologies. By normalizing danger in leisure, amusement parks implicitly normalized it for the workplace—an important strategy given that manufacturing injuries were far from infrequent. We can attribute the success of the amusement industry, then, in part a need to pacify fears and fabricate a unified sense of American camaraderie in the changing and alienating period of urbanization, industrialization, and expansion. By creating a multitude of uniquely American sites of amusement accessible by the local trolley, itself representing both modernization and urbanization, amusement entrepreneurs reinforced on multiple levels the modern nature of their work.6 By the early 20th century, the American landscape was overwhelmed with amusement parks. With the 1910 census showing for the first time that urban dwelling was more common than rural dwelling in the United States, the bustle of the city was becoming the norm for Americans. But even rural residents had easy access to amusement parks; by 1910, every American town with a population of greater than 20,000 had at least one amusement park, with some cities boasting a nearly ten. Indeed, a reporter from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, apologized on behalf of the city in 1909, saying, “We regret that we are, possible the only city in the country of any consequence, that will go through the coming summer season with only three amusement parks.” Almost all parks were located on trolley lines, and with the ubiquity of local railroads at the turn of the century, nearly everyone in the nation had easy access to an amusement park, regardless of their place on the urban/suburban/rural spectrum.7 6 As