Amusement parks receive in-depth look
Detailed new book explores their history and includes several with ties to Chicago
There is a new roller coaster at Six Flags Great America. It is the Maxx Force and is said to be “the fastest launch coaster in North America,” capable of reaching a speed of 78 mph in less than two seconds. Big deal.
Though I may one of these summer days take a trip north to sample the Maxx Force, I am quite content with my memories of the Bobs, Fireball, Comet and other dangerous delights of Riverview, the bygone but fondly remembered North Side amusement park that closed in 1967.
I have been thinking about Riverview thanks to Stephen M. Silverman, the author of a spectacular new book. “The Amusement Park: 200 Years of Thrills and Spills and the Dreamers and Schemers who Built Them” (Black Dog & Leventhal) is a lavishly illustrated, deeply researched and wildly enjoyable 430-some pages.
A former newspaperman, magazine editor, journalism professor and the author of a dozen books, many of them about movies, Silverman’s affection for amusement parks goes back decades.
“I have always loved them,” he said by telephone from his home in Manhattan. “I worked selling ice cream at Disneyland one summer when I was 18 and I kind of knew that Disneyland was a sort of cleanedup version of Coney Island. I became curious about that place and, well, one thing led to another and led to this book.”
But where to begin? “Some people suggested I start with the activities of the Roman Coliseum,” he said. “But that was a circus and a circus is vastly different from an amusement park.”
Silverman toyed with the idea of starting the book with Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which famously featured the first Ferris Wheel. But he chose to begin further back in time — a lot further back.
It was August 1133 when Henry Iof England allowed his court jester, “an obsequious yet opportunistic young man named Rahere,” to stage the Bartholomew Fair, which not only “lay the foundation for the communal spectacle known as the amusement park” but, in various and ever-expanding form, took place every summer for the next 700 years.
Silverman takes us on all sorts of travels — from Bakken in Denmark, in business since 1583, to Lake Compounce in Connecticut, named for a drowned Indian chieftain and operating since 1846 — until forcefully bringing us home.
“In the history of amusement parks, Chicago is all over the place,” he said. “If not for Chicago, the world would be no fun.”
Yes, the 1893 Columbian Exposition had its Ferris Wheel, but it also, more influentially, had the Midway Plaisance, an area of diversions set apart from the more serious attractions of the fair.
“And for the naughty child in everyone,” Silverman writes, “there was the Midway Plaisance — isolated from the fair’s two hundred main buildings, and pulsating to a honkytonk rhythm all its own.”
In the years following the fair, Silverman writes, “Chicago led the nation in its number of amusement parks.” He introduces us to such places as Paul Boynton’s Water Chute Park (1894-1907), Ferris Wheel Park (1896-1903), White City (1905-1934), Luna Park (1907-1911), Forest Park (1908-1923) and, naturally, Riverview, which opened in 1904.
Some time ago, I wrote that Riverview was “a place like something from a colorful dream. It was a melding of heaven and hell, seedy and serene, glitzy and garish. But for all its blemishes and, indeed, because of many of them, it maintains a special place in the minds of Chicagoans.”
The native Chicagoan and playwright David Mamet once described its appeal: “The great thing about Riverview was that you could die there.”
Silverman understands, saying, “A book publisher friend of mine lives in New York and is from Chicago, and all I have to do is mention the word ‘Riverview’ and tears come to his eyes.”
Tears have been shed by some of those visiting the Elmhurst History Museum (elmhursthistory.org) and its “Worlds of Wonder: Remembering Chicagoland’s Amusement Parks” exhibition, which runs through Aug. 18. It is a gathering of videos, artifacts and photos from many of the area’s vanished parks, from Riverview to Kiddieland in Melrose Park.
Silverman devotes a great deal of space to New York’s Coney Island, and justly so. Its flashy history and the colorful characters who shaped and shared it are worthy of a separate book.
“(Today) modern economic realities may have dulled the historic spirit of Coney,” Silverman writes, “but the fact that an amusement park exists at all is something of a miracle.”
Silverman is an artful writer and peppers his book with interesting short sections on such surprising but germane people as H.H. Holmes, the serial killer — “Devil in the White City” — who preyed upon female visitors to the 1893 fair, and such things as the film “Strangers on a Train,” with its spooky Hitchockian amusement park scenes and the invention of cotton candy.
Other captivating characters are the master huckster P.T. Barnum, for whom Silverman has great if slightly grudging respect, saying, “he never cheated the public”; Lamarcus Adna Thompson, a burnedout garment maker who became the father of the roller coaster with his Switchback Railway at Coney Island in 1884, 6mph, 5-cents-a-ride; Paul Boyton, whose daredevil aquatic adventures in the 1880s made him “the Evel Knievel of his time”; and Chicago-born Walt Disney who was well, you know …
What you don’t know is that when he made his first proposal for Disneyland, “The (Burbank City Council) rejected it … fearing it would create a kind of carny atmosphere” and even Disney’s wife Lillian “wondered why Walt wanted to become involved in something as filthy as an amusement park.”
That was then (1955) and this is now, and Disney’s creations helped sanitize the public amusement business while becoming “the diamond standard of theme parks.”
Amusement parks are now called “theme parks” and corporations have replaced most mom-andpop operators. Popularity is not in question.
“Some one thousand fun parks span the globe, generating an annual $220 billion from visitors who total more than 475 million,” Silverman writes. “(They) are now the expected norm in a range of far-off places from Azerbaijan to Desaru, Johor to Darwin City, where the park’s theme is crocodiles.”
In this process, we have lost something. With “wonder” as near as your smartphone, the need to collectively, communally share spectacle is diminishing.
“Once people visiting amusement parks were surrounded by the environment, the shared experience of it all,” says Silverman. “Modern amusement parks are not about adventures and atmosphere but about thrill rides.”
He has not had a chance yet to visit the Maxx Force at Great America. But he has been to the United Arab Emirates, where he saw the fastest roller coaster in the world. It is at a place called “Ferrari World of Abu Dhabi” and is the Formula Rossa. It reaches its top speed of 150 mph in five seconds.
He did not ride. He just looked.
“When it comes to roller coasters,” he said. “I’m a chicken.”