ONE LAST GO-ROUND
Soggy summer forces cash-strapped owners to sell Centre Island’s 110-year old carousel
As a kid growing up in Toronto, Scott Goodyear may have visited Centre Island only two or three times, but each time felt like a big summer adventure.
“It felt like you were going to a different country,” said the retired Canadian race car driver. “You’d see the carousel from the ferry and you’d just get that feeling.”
So Goodyear got a wistful feeling when he heard that the carousel is moving to a new home in Carmel, Ind., where he now lives with his family.
“It’s a part of history leaving Toronto, and a part of Toronto history coming here,” he said.
Originally used at Bushkill Park in Pennsylvania, the carousel moved to Centreville Amusement Park in 1966. Built by the Dentzel Company in 1907, it is one of 150 of its type that has survived, and one of 125 large park carousels still in operation in North America.
The carousel features 52 hand-carved animals, including ones not usually seen on carousels today — domestic cats, ostriches, pigs and rabbits.
This carousel was purchased for about $20,000 in1964 by Beasley Amusements; today, its sale price is an estimated record-breaking $3 million — about $2.25 million (U.S.).
Bill Beasley, president of Centreville owner Beasley Enterprises, calls it one of the company’s most valuable assets. Guernsey’s auction house in New York has approached them twice — once in early 1990s and more recently in October 2016 — with clients looking to buy an antique carousel.
After excessive flooding closed the island this year and led to the company losing more than $6 million, Beasley said yes.
“We’re closed, and we have no revenue . . . therefore we needed to sell some assets.” BILL BEASLEY CENTREVILLE OWNER
“We’re closed and we have no revenue. And we have expenses. Therefore, we needed to sell some assets,” Beasley said.
One of eight siblings, Beasley said that, as a child, he would race to the carousel to beat his sister to the ostrich — his favourite animal on the ride.
“It will be a loss,” he said. “But it’s going to go to a home that will lovingly restore it in a central part of a city.” Carmel Mayor James Brainard wants to make the carousel a focal point in the downtown area of the growing suburb.
“It’s an iconic piece of American memorabilia,” he said. “Imagine all the people who have ridden it who were children and now adults. It’s such a great community amenity.”
The carousel will stay at Centreville Park until November and will open for Carmel residents in the spring of 2018 or 2019.
Beasley is in talks with a manufacturer about a new Toronto Island carousel for spring 2018.
Al Cochrane, a local carver who has restored and refurbished the original Dentzel carousel twice before, will design replicas of the hand-carved, basswood animals, but with a Canadian theme — similar to the horse he added to the original design with a Canada goose on its chest.
There’s a history of carousels moving from place to place. The King Arthur carousel at Disneyland used to be at Sunnyside Amusement Park in Toronto between 1922 and 1955. And the Ferris wheel at Centreville Park today used to be at a park in Fort Erie, Ont.
Kaitlin Wainwright, director of programming at Heritage Toronto, says carousels have a nostalgic value. In fact, when Beasley was approached by Guernsey’s in the early 1990s, the talks sparked a public outcry.
“There are privately managed spaces that are very much part of our public memory and I would say that amusement parks are definitely one of those,” she said, citing Honest Ed’s and Sam The Record Man as other examples.
Wainwright would like to see a process to encourage private businesses to maintain spaces that have historic and cultural value.
“If the CNE opened and some of the rides we had known for 40 or 50 years weren’t there, there would be a great sadness to it,” she said.
There is sadness to see the carousel go, but there is also opportunity.
“It’s bittersweet,” Cochrane said, “but maybe this will give opportunity to new carvers to reproduce the carousel.”
Patrick Wentzel, the census chairman of the National Carousel Association in the U.S, is both shocked and excited by the prospect.
“We don’t see many big carousels move anymore, not in the last10 to15 years,” he said. “Maybe now that it’s moving, we can learn more about it.” Do you have a memory or photo of the Centre Island carousel? Email me at fsyed@thestar.ca