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Wonderland, Revere’s Brief, Brilliant Million-Dollar Amusement Park

In 1903 and 1904 the face of American public amusement changed with the successful opening of two new parks in Coney Island: Luna Park, which replaced Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park, and Dreamland, originally to be called Wonderland. Together with Steeplechase Park, they gave the relatively small Brooklyn district a high concentration of state-of-the-art attractions and rides.

Entrance to Wonderland through the Administration Building on Walnut Street, as it appeared in 1906.

Entrepreneurs in other cities saw the large crowds drawn by such parks and the potential profits. And so they started to construct their own amusement parks. They often named them after the Coney Island parks, with the result that Luna Parks, Steeplechase Parks, Coney Islands and Wonderlands blossomed across the country.

Because they all wanted the same high-draw popular rides, the parks were superficially very similar. Most had more than one of the popular attractions from the Coney Island parks. Those included a Shoot the Chutes water ride plunging into a central lagoon. They also had a LaMarcus A. Thompson Scenic Railway, a Tower of Light, a Fighting the Flames show and a Wild Animal Show.

The Wonderland Park that went up in Revere was another of these enterprises that hoped to cash in on such appropriated glory. Revere’s Wonderland, however, was larger and more impressive than most.

Revere’s Wonderland

It got its start with John Joseph Higgins, a real estate agent and a recent transplant to Chelsea, Mass., from Savannah, Ga. Higgiins managed to obtain almost 25 acres of land near Revere Beach. Located near the new narrow gauge railway, it was easily accessible from Boston – much more so than Norumbega Park to the west or the newly-opened Paragon Park on Nantasket Beach in Hull.

There were already amusements going up along the recently refurbished Revere Beach Boulevard, and Coney Island had shown the advantages of concentrating the amusements in one central location.

Somehow Higgins made the acquaintance of Floyd C. Thompson, who had spearheaded an attempt to build the largest amusement park in the world in Coney Island. Thompson bought up Steeplechase Park and nearby property. He intended to tear down most of the amusements and construct a completely new park.

The deal fell through when the consortium he put together could not raise enough funding to complete the purchase. This left Thompson and his co-investors on the edge of bankruptcy. But the experience left Thompson with contacts for performers, crowd-pleasing acts and architects of rides. He threw himself into the construction of Wonderland Park in Revere, lining up railroad and mining magnates as investors and contacting ride inventors.

A photograph of the Shooting the Chutes ride from the Wonderland Souvenir Book. You can see how the boat leaps into the air.

The Rides

The centerpiece of the park was, as in many of these parks, a Shoot the Chutes ride. A light skiff was drawn up a long ramp to a tower at the top, then released with a lubricating base of water. The boat would achieve such a high speed sliding down the ramp that it would skip across the surface of the lagoon like a stone. Thompson managed to acquire the largest Shoot the Chutes ride in the world, built for the 1904 St. Louis exposition. It had two tracks, so that boats could be released alternately from each side.

The front of the LaMarcus A Thompson Scenic Railway (which was next to the Beautiful Orient).

Revere Beach already had a Scenic Railway ride, but it was not constructed by the originator of that ride, LaMarcus Adna Thompson (no relation to Floyd). Floyd Thompson visited the Thompson Scenic Railway company and arranged to bring the first Thompson Scenic Railway to Massachusetts. The ride featured a railway track that undulated up and down with a gentle sinusoid rather than the high plunges and sudden turns that characterized later roller coasters. It took passengers to a separate building that housed dioramas of scenes from Venice and Vesuvius and other places around the world. Then it returned them along the undulating track to their starting point.

Descent Into Hell Gate

One of the most popular attractions of the St. Louis exposition had been the ride Creation, invented by magician-turned-ride inventor Henry Roltair. Dreamland at Coney Island had installed a somewhat reduced version of the ride. Wonderland attempted to obtain the rights to a copy of Creation, but the deal fell though.

The front of the Descent into the Hell Gate Ride.

They ended up with their own copy of another Dreamland attraction instead: Attilio Pusterla’s Descent into the Hell Gate. This ride took the passengers on a boat through a spiral track toward a center point where it dropped suddenly down into a lower level. The lower level was decorated as a cave populated by demons and mythological creatures. The riders disembarked and were brought to the throne of Satan himself, before emerging back into the sunlight.

Top view of the Descent into the Hell Gate ride from Attilio Pusterla’s patent, showing the spiral track the boats ran on (and, in dashes, the “underground” path they took after they dropped down).

Fighting the Flames

Another feature, virtually essential in amusement parks, was the Fighting the Flames show. This, too, had been a hit at the 1904 St. Louis fair. Both Luna Park and Dreamland at Coney Island imitated the show. They opened their copies within a few weeks of each other.

The “Fighting the Flames” postcard. This color postcard is a drawing, but it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the “set”, judging from photographs, and it depicts the show as it must have appeared during a night show.

Thompson contacted the leading theatrical agent in New York to get the talent to build his own. The show featured an entire city square constructed in an amphitheater with 3,500 seats. Twice a day, actors would stage a street scene, in the midst of which a fire would break out. Real retired and off-duty firemen would then rush in with examples of the latest fire-fighting and rescue gear to put out the faux conflagration.

Wonderland also had a Hale’s Tours, a sort of virtual reality ride. Patrons sat in a replica of a Pullman railroad car and watched a motion picture of a railroad journey, seen from the point of view of the engine, projected on the front wall. The amusement park also had a ballroom and restaurant, a wild animal show, a circus ring and an infant incubator exhibit. It had a Japanese Village, complete with a miniature Mt. Fuji, and a Beautiful Orient Near Eastern attraction with camels, a bazaar and belly dancers).

The Japanese Village, including its own miniature Mt. Fuji. The attraction features a Japanese torii gate, several bridges, tea shops, a jiu-jitsu demonstration, and a lecture on the recent Russo-Japanese war.

Changes

The attractions at Wonderland didn’t stay static. The circus acts changed every week, for example. The theater that housed Gillette’s Dog and Monkey Circus the first month was used for the musical revue The South Before the War for the rest of the summer.

The Beautiful Orient attraction as it appeared in 1906. If you look closely you can see a camel in front (the exhibit had a camel barn in the back). The banners hanging in the archways read “Turkish Wrestlers”. The attraction also featured “muscle dancers, which we would call “belly dancers,” and were considered scandalous at the time.

Even larger changes occurred from year to year. Although the large attractions – Shoot the Chutes, Hell Gate, the ballroom – remained every year, many of the others changed. So for the second year The Beautiful Orient gave way to the Florida Alligator Jungle (despite keeping its domes and minarets). The South Before the War became Willard’s Temple of Music, an attraction called The Fatal Wedding (a magic illusion) was replaced by a giant glass-walled water tank called Under the Sea.

The next year Willard’s Temple of Music became Paradise – The Show Beautiful. Under the Sea became Pilgrim’s Progress (a funhouse), and the Florida Alligator Jungle became Darktown. For that third season, the Fighting the Flames show was replaced by Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show.

Panic of 1907

By the end of the third season, however, Wonderland was virtually bankrupt. A large part of the reason was the Panic of 1907, a recession on the same scale as the more recent one of 2008. It sapped discretionary income and many amusement parks around the country, their business drying up, were forced into bankruptcy as well. Revere’s Wonderland was able to keep going with some financial sleight of hand. With some severe belt tightening, they were able to keep Wonderland going, and actually turned a profit in 1909. But the park continued to decline, possibly because so much of the park had to be shuttered, but also because it was not directly on Revere Beach, and was losing business to attractions along the Boulevard. Wonderland closed at the end of the 1910 season.

Cover of the 1906 Souvenir Book. The painting on the cover is from early 1906 and represents the park as it was then visualized, not as it was when built. But it’s very close in appearance. Things such as the large fountain in the foreground and the large round building on the right were never constructed.

It was not an uncommon fate. Of six amusement parks named “Wonderland” that had opened in the United States in 1905 or 1906, five had closed by 1911. The original park that gave these their name – Dreamland in Coney Island – was in financial straits in 1910. It finally closed when a fire started, ironically in that park’s Descent into the Hell Gate ride. The resulting conflagration destroyed the entire park.

Fireproof

That would not have happened at Revere Wonderland’s Hell Gate ride. Revere’s park had been especially constructed to be fireproof. It had non-flammable materials where possible, asbestos sheeting between walls, fire-resistant roofing materials and plenty of fire hydrants. It also had its own in-house fire department, separate from the one used in the Fighting the Flames show.

The leading fire insurance magazine of the day wrote those features up as an example of safe and fireproof construction. In its five years of operation Wonderland never suffered a serious fire. But that still couldn’t preserve it from bankruptcy.

The author of this story, Stephen R. Wilk is a scientist, engineer and author who lives in Saugus. His previous books include Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon and How the Ray Gun got its Zap!, both from Oxford University Press. He also writes genre fiction and a semiregular column for the Optical Society of America.

Check out more pictures of Wonderland at www.lost-wonderland.com. You can purchase Lost Wonderland: The brief and Brilliant Life of Boston’s Million-Dollar Amusement Park by Stephen R. Wilk from the University of Massachusetts Press or from book stores like bookshop.org.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Panic of 1907 and the Maine Man Who Caused It

You might suppose the Federal Reserve banking system was begun in response to the great stock market crash of 1929, but it wasn’t. The system has its roots in the financial panic of 1907, caused by a Maine man whose wealth was only exceeded by his ambition – and tragically so.

Charles W. Morse of Bath, Me. had many titles. Ship builder, banker, freight magnate. But it all started with ice.

Cartoon of J.P. Morgan taking over the banking industry following the panic of 1907.

Morse’s father and grandfather were both towboat captains on the Kennebec River. They did a lively business in pulling ships up from the busy port at Bath to points inland on the river, an important trade corridor for Maine.

One of the products that Maine exported to the rest of the world, along with lumber, was ice. Ice houses dotted the banks of Maine river towns. During the long winters, men would cut and harvest ice, pack it in the ice houses and ship it south to the cities in the summers where it was in great demand.

Charles Morse

Charles Morse’s father and grandfather taught him the first lesson that would direct his business career: the value of monopoly. Despite occasional challenges, the Morses managed to control the lion’s share of the freight towing business on the Kennebec.

Morse’s father gave his son a salary to become bookkeeper at the towing company. Part of the Charles Morse legend is that he took the $800 salary and immediately hired someone for $300 to do the actual bookkeeping while he attended Bowdoin College.

All the while Morse made a study of the shipping business. In addition to towing freight on the Kennebec, the Morse family invested its money in the schooners that ran up and down the coast hauling coal and other freight in the coasting trade.

What particularly interested Morse was ice. He saw an opportunity to take advantage of any ship that had arrived in Maine carrying coal and then headed on a return trip empty. It could be filled with ice to drop off on its return trip, he realized, and he soon was making a tidy profit off his shipping of ice.

Kennebec Ice

Morse was by no means the first person to see the value of ice from the Kennebec, which had been shipped south since well before he was born. But he did see the potential in creating a monopoly in it. Gradually Morse purchased the ice houses on the Kennebec. During a cold summer when ice was cheap, he would buy the ice houses from men who were tired of the business, adding to his empire.

By 1900, he had become the “Ice King.” Morse reached this pinnacle thanks to his ability to marry together the vagaries of stock markets, politics, shipping and ice. His company issued stock and used the proceeds to fund its expansion. He was perfectly positioned in 1896 when the eastern United States was hit with a 10-day heat wave that had unprecedented effects. Thousands of people died and the price of ice rose to new heights.

Heat Wave

Morse moved to New York City. In the wake of the 1896 heat wave, the city was in a panic to prevent a repeat of the carnage it caused, and ice was the answer. Morse offered to share the wealth with the leaders of the city’s Tammany Hall political operation and soon the price of ice was fixed to his liking.

Political guile and stock manipulating skills helped him corner the market on New York ice. It didn’t hurt that he also knew the tow boat business. When his competitors’ deliveries were hampered by the vagaries of tide and wind, Morse towed his loads of ice into New York Harbor and up the river for distribution.

Morse’s price fixing and stock manipulation schemes eventually caused great controversy. Reformers railed against him for using political connections to fix the price of ice. Shippers and independent ice producers accused him of forcing them to sell at desperately low prices if they wanted to access the city markets where he held control.

By 1901 when he more or less exited the ice business, Morse’s name was tarnished but not his finances. He had accumulated more than $12 million. He set his sites on an even bigger monopoly: freight.

Conquering Freight

Over the next seven years, Morse would consolidate ownership of nearly all the freight shipping lines on the east coast. Morse had a simple formula for his acquisitions. He would buy a controlling interest in a bank, and borrow money from it. With the borrowed money he would buy stock in the steamship company. The bank would hold the stock as collateral for the loan, and he was left in control of the company.

As long as stock prices went up, Morse’s arrangements worked perfectly. In the months prior to the panic of 1907, Morse seemed poised for success. With one eye-popping purchase of a steamship line controlled by J.P. Morgan – for $10 million – Morse put together his Consolidated Steamship Company.

By Bain News Service - http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?pp/PPALL:@field(NUMBER+@1(ggbain+11662)), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4769062

Charles Morse (center), with two unidentified associates around 1915.

With one or two exceptions, anyone wanting to ship anything to any city between the northern tip of Mane and New Orleans would have to pay a Morse steamship. The goose seemed finally right for the plucking.

But there were two key differences between Morse’s experience in shipping and his ice business. There was no heat wave to drive the price of shipping higher. And he had not purchased his shipping companies on the cheap as he had his ice houses. While he could fix the price of shipping he could not ensure demand, which began faltering thanks to a recession.

Had he been able to maintain his monopoly for a few years, Morse might have weathered whatever economic cycles came his way and prospered as inflation improved the value of his assets. But that’s not what happened. Instead, an obscure investment would prove his undoing.

Augustus Heinze

The financial panic of 1907 started with Charles Morse’s decision to invest in copper mining. One of his investment partners was a man named Augustus Heinze. A brash risk-taker, Heinze had made a small fortune in copper mining.

Heinze had managed to get the better of H.H. Rogers and John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, then assembling a monopoly on American copper mines under the umbrella of Anaconda Copper. Heinze had a small mining company, United Copper. But his real strength lay in understanding the laws that governed mining in Montana.

A miner whose claim followed a vein of copper that led underneath his neighbors’ land was allowed to mine that vein wherever it led. So even with a relatively small footprint on the ground, Heinze terrorized the neighboring mines.

Heinze’s competitors grew fed up with his tactics and bought him out. He left Montana for New York with $12 million in his pocket.

Copper and the Panic of 1907

Heinze and Morse teamed up. Between them they had partial control of six national banks, 10 state banks, five trust companies and four insurance companies. With the formidable pile of cash these institutions held, the two decided to take a fling on copper stocks.

They then amassed an enormous holding in United Copper stock, the company Heinze helped build. Working with Heinze’s brother Otto, Morse and Heinze devised a scheme to corner the market in the stock.

With intelligence from their banking holdings, Morse and Heinze believed that many investors were selling the stock short. In other words, they would borrow shares to sell at the present price – say $35 – with the expectation that they could then buy more shares at a lower price – say $10 – to replace the ones they had borrowed. The short seller would pocket the difference and make out well.

Morse and Heinze believed they controlled so much of the stock the short sellers wouldn’t be able to find any stock to replace their borrowed shares. They would then have to buy from Morse and Heinze at whatever price they demanded.

The Panic of 1907 Starts with a Whimper

Through the summer of 1907, the plan seemed to work as the prices of United Copper shares continued increasing. As rumors of the squeeze made the rounds on Wall Street, speculators jumped in driving the price of shares ever higher, peaking at $60. Some short sellers took their losses and closed out their positions.

But by late October, the price of United shares began to falter. Large blocks of stock came onto the market. Most likely H.H. Rogers and his Rockefeller friends sold the shares – quite possibly at a loss. They had not forgotten Heinze and were happy to assist in collapsing his scheme. Using friendly reporters, the Standard Oil group circulated the story that the Heinze/Morse scheme to corner the market in United Copper shares had failed.

With the price of United shares plummeting, Morse’s banks started to look shaky. Depositors began demanding their money. For several days Morse was able to prop up the banks, but one by one the dominoes began falling.

Morse was forced out as director at his banks and trust companies, and they turned to J.P. Morgan for help. Would he help prop them up? He would not. He preferred to see Morse, his old adversary in the shipping business, collapse. By the time Morgan finally relented and helped recapitalize some banks, making himself an enormous profit, the panic of 1907 had crippled the entire world’s economy.

Prison and Beyond

1922 political cartoon of attorney general Harry Daugherty showing the skeleton of the Morse scandal escaping the closet.

Morse’s shipping company would wind up in receivership. And Morse, the ice king, would wind up in federal prison in Atlanta for violating the banking laws. Sentenced in 1910, he would soon con his way out of prison.

Morse paid future attorney general Harry Daugherty $50,000 to plead his case with President William Howard Taft. Morse suffered from tuberculosis, he told Taft, and would die if not released. Taft pardoned Morse in 1912. The poor man only had a year or so to live, the public was told. Later the con was revealed.

Morse finally died in 1933, but not before one final run at business. In 1916 he used the remnants of his steamship company to establish several shipyards to build government ships for World War I.

He later went to trial for war profiteering, but avoided conviction. He did forfeit $11 million to the government in a civil suit.

Morse died in 1933 in Bath, Me., the same city where his legend started. His greatest legacy is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act that established the system of federal reserve banks designed to prevent the banking system from collapsing as it did in the panic of 1907.

This story was updated in 2024.

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