Luna Park was a large privately-owned amusement fair at Coney Island from 1903 to 1944. Putting aside the parade of baby elephants, the entire park had an ornate architectural style that transformed at night when the lights were turned on:
Those buildings were not the stone they appear to be: they were wood-framed and covered with stucco; some were nothing more than wood studs, lath and stucco. The park’s end, predictably, was a fire that destroyed about half of it. Fantasy can be great, but unrealistic building, not so much.
The buildings surrounding the central lagoon contained rides and exhibits. Here’s the promenade on one side:
The gable-roofed pavilion at the left end has a ride/exhibit based on Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. The tower pavilion on the far right has something that, to us, seems bizarre: infants on display in incubators. This is a distant reminder that the fun fairs at Coney Island and elsewhere were echoes of the big international fairs of the nineteenth century, where new technology was displayed. An early promoter of incubators as medical devices displayed them at fairs to get public attention at a time when they were not yet standard treatment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.