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Roller Coasters : Amusement Parks
Amusment park histories, guide books and information.
Pennsylvania is home to many classic amusement parks, several of which began operating as early as the late nineteenth century. Some of these parks maintain rides and amusements from their early years, preserving an atmosphere of nostalgia. Others have evolved with new trends in the industry, adding high-tech rides and water parks. This book begins with a concise history of the amusement park, and then surveys the industry in Pennsylvania. A comprehensive guide to 13 parks in the state and a selection of smaller ones, complete with information on rides and attractions, follows. Packed with vintage postcard images and photos. Featured parks: Williams Grove Amusement Park, Mechanicsburg Idlewild and Soak Zone, Ligonier Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom, Allentown Conneaut Lake Community Park, Conneaut Lake Lakemont Park, Altoona Waldameer Park and Water World, Erie Kennywood, West Mifflin Bushkill Park, Easton Hersheypark, Hershey DelGrosso's Amusement Park, Tipton Knoebels Amusement Resort, Elysburg Dutch Wonderland, Lancaster Sesame Place, Langhorne
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A model history of popular culture, Amusing the Million is a study of Coney Island, not as an object of nostalgia but as a harbinger to modernity. Illustrations, notes.
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Coney Island Author: Professor Solomon Publisher: Top Hat Press; (May 1, 1999)
Once renowned as a funspot, Coney Island has been largely forgotten. Does it still exist? What has survived of the place? And what was it like? In his new book CONEY ISLAND, Professor Solomon takes us there to find out. Roaming about, he interviews old-timers' searches for antiquities, explores what is left of the amusement area. (Among his finds: a man who remembers seeing the first human cannonball, shot into the air at Coney Island; the remains of Steeplechase Park; and a ride the Wonder Wheelthat began as a perpetual-motion machine.)
He also provides a history of Coney Island, from its Canarsie Indian days, to its era as a lawless, Tijuana-style resort, to the rise and fall of its amusement parks. On this historical tour, you'll meet such personages as John Y. McKane (notorious mayor of Coney Island); George Tilyou (amusement-park pioneer); and the Wild Man of Borneo (actually, an actor from the Bronx). And you'll visit the Pavilion of Fun, French Nudi! st exhibit, Elephant Hotel, Trip to the Moon, Insanitarium, Tunnel of Love, flea circus, Feltman's restaurant (where the hot dog was invented), and other vanished attractions.
Coney Island Author: Harvey Stein, David Lindsay (Introduction) Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company; (June 1998)
Veteran photographer Harvey Stein sees Coney Island, New York, as an oasis of decay, funkiness, hope and joy, uninhibited behavior, and visual stimulation. After an initial enchanting visit to the island as an adolescent, Stein has returned there countless times with his camera. For this book of photographs, he turns his lens on Coney Island's amusements--the neon-ringed Wonder Wheel and famous Cyclone roller coaster--and the boardwalk, where lovers cavort and an elderly man leans against a graffiti-littered wall, holding a reflector under his chin to catch the sun's rays. Stein's film documents the annual Mermaid Parade, in which flame-haired little girls and bejeweled grown men hit the streets in their deep-sea best--sequined bikinis, saran-wrap tails, and body paint. Stein also photographs the area's workers, including the men who sell Pirate Ship tickets and hot dogs and the women who charm snakes and oversee the shooting gallery. And, of course, he turns his camera on the beach-goers--tattooed, dark, light, cavorting, and asleep. Together, these color images convey the sense of Coney Island as an exaggerated amusement park with a broad spectrum of happy visitors. There is a time line in the front of the book that documents fascinating trivia about Coney Island such as the date of the frankfurter debut and the opening of its first roller coaster, but the photos are the star attractions.
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Growing up on Coney Island in the ?50s and ?60s, Charles Denson experienced legendary amusements and attractions like the Cyclone and Thunderbolt roller coasters, the Parachute Jump, and Steeplechase Park. In CONEY ISLAND: LOST AND FOUND, Denson gives us an insider?s look at one of New York?s best-known neighborhoods, weaving together memories of his childhood adventures with colorful stories of the area?s past and interviews with local personalities, all brought to life by hundreds of photographs, detailed maps, and authentic memorabilia. CONEY ISLAND is a heartfelt chronicle that stretches from colonial times to the island?s heyday in the early 20th century and through its subsequent decline and revival, culminating in the 2001 opening of the new ballpark that brought baseball back to Brooklyn.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coney Island was the uncontested epicenter of America's emerging mass culture. It was the quintessential American resort: the birthplace of the amusement park, the hot dog, and the roller coaster. Its history is one of breathtaking transformation and re-invention. Celebrated for its glittering amusement parks and its enormous crowds, it was in times past a mecca of grand hotels, race tracks, beer gardens, gambling dens, concert saloons, and dance halls. A new mass culture began to take shape there. Its harshest critics decried it as Bedlam by the Sea, but others deemed it a necessary outlet for the masses where the democratic spirit was granted free rein. Despite its precipitous decline, Coney Island remains a metaphor for the American amusement industry and the hundreds of honky-tonk resorts and amusement parks it has spawned.
Coney Island: The People's Playground is the first new history of Coney Island in almost half a century, tracing its evolution and cultural impact from its earliest development as a seaside resort to the present day Mermaid Parade. Presented in a photo-documentary format featuring more than one hundred vintage photos, archival material, personal accounts, and contemporary sources, the book evokes the atmosphere of the resort as experienced by those who visited it during its heyday. Through the reminiscences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, literary figures, and amusement historians, Michael Immerso traces Coney Island's remarkable evolution and subsequent decline, while at the same time examining the remarkable individuals and complex social forces that contributed to its rise and fall.
Coney Island is not merely a documentary of the amusement industry or the story of a fabled amusement park, but rather a narrative of the way Americans, and particularly immigrants and urban Americans, came to regard the pursuit of leisure as part of their national birthright.
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