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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 2022.

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The Rolling Thunder Revue Visits Jack Kerouac’s Gravesite

Bob Dylan returned to some of his most important roots when he came to Massachusetts, particularly Cambridge and Lowell, with his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

Once the king of folk music, he reunited with the queen, Joan Baez, during the rollicking, improvisational concert tour.

Rolling Thunder Revue played Cambridge, where Dylan had once haunted coffeehouses, and Lowell, Mass., so Dylan could visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Critics called the Rolling Thunder Revue some of the best live music Dylan ever performed.

Before the Rolling Thunder Revue: Dylan and Baez sing a duet.

Joan Baez

According to the popular legend, Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minn., at the age of 19 for New York City. He fell in love with Joan Baez, already a star who helped him rocket to fame. But he took an important detour to Massachusetts, where he fell under the influences that shaped his music.

Joan Baez came to Boston when her father, Albert Baez, moved the family there to teach physics at MIT.

(He’s credited with co-inventing the x-ray microscope.) She enrolled in Boston University but got so bored she dropped out after six weeks.

In the late ‘50s, every college town and city seemed to have a coffeehouse scene, where, as writer David Hajdu wrote, ‘coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outposts of intellectual and sensual dissent.’

The folk revival began in such coffeehouses, as did the protest movements of the 1960s.

Cambridge featured coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Tulla’s Coffee Grinder. Across the river, Boston had the Salamander, The Turk’s Head, the Yana, the Unicorn and the Golden Vanity. They featured such young folk musicians as Tom Rush, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal.

Baez started out at the Club 47 in 1958 and quickly achieved stardom, the first of the iconic young folk singers. Later she brought the boy she was dating – and singing duets with — to Cambridge. Club 47 was so well known for launching careers that Dylan played there for free.

Bob Dylan in Cambridge

In Cambridge, Bob Dylan met Eric von Schmidt, Richard Farina and his wife, Carolyn Hester. Farina would later marry Joan Baez’s younger sister, Mimi.

Von Schmidt exposed him to many traditional folk songs, all of which Dylan remembered when he returned to New York.

The Boulevard at Revere Beach

One summer day, von Schmidt invited Dylan and the Farinas to Revere Beach, just north of Boston. According to Hajdu, they talked about coming up with a new kind of music.

“We should start a whole new genre,” Farina said. “Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man. Music with a beat. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry!”

Dylan, stunned by the comment, did exactly that six months later. He played harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album, which gave him an entrée to Columbia Records and to his manager, Albert Grossman.

Eventually he broke up with Baez and married another woman. He famously became known as the ‘voice of his generation,’ something he didn’t want. At the height of his fame in 1966 he had a motorcycle accident and didn’t perform for another seven years.

Dylan and Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. By Elsa Dorfman.

Rolling Thunder Revue

In 1975, Bob Dylan haphazardly recruited musicians like Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Mick Ronson to play the Rolling Thunder Revue. Playwright Sam Shepard joined the tour, as did Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and actress Ronee Blakley.

They held the first concert at the Plymouth War Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 30-31, then played at Southeastern Massachusetts University in North Dartmouth. Then the Rolling Thunder Revue went on to Lowell, where Dylan wanted to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Twenty years earlier, Kerouac had written a long poem called Mexico City Blues. According to Ginsberg, Dylan told him someone handed him Kerouac’s poem in St. Paul in 1959. “It blew my mind,” he said.

He said it was the first poetry he read that spoke his own American language, and Beat writing influenced his own.

On November 2, 1975, the Rolling Thunder Revue crammed 14,000 into a gym at the University of Lowell, recently formed from the Lowell Technological Institute and Lowell State College.

Dylan ambled onstage and sang about five songs, dedicating A Hard Rain.to Kerouac. Larry Sloman, who documented the tour, wrote that after the intermission,

…the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years.

They sang Blowin’ in the Wind to a thunderous response. Then more songs, and a finale with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Dylan’s mother onstage singing This Land Is Your Land.

Ginsberg, who frequently visited Lowell, hung out with Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies. He tried to educate the Rolling Thunder Revue about Jack Kerouac.

The next day, Dylan, Ginsberg and various band members visited Kerouac’s gravesite.

Watch it here.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Dylan and Ginsberg By Elsa Dorfman – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1724930.

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Maurice Prendergast Paints New England at Play

The much-loved American artist Maurice Prendergast once wrote in his notebook,

Art is the great stimulus of life -I find it year by year more rich, more desirable, and more mysterious.

Revere Beach, ca. 1896. Private collection.

He found much richness outdoors in New England, especially during the summertime.

His art featured familiar scenes of parks and beaches, holidays, festivals and picnics. But his paintings resembled delicate mosaics more than the representational art then popular in the United States.

Marblehead, ca. 1914-15. Courtesy of the Williams College Museum of Art.

Maurice Prendergast was one of the first American painters to paint in a manner inspired by the French Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Paul Cezanne.

Maurice Prendergast

He and his twin sister Lucy were born in a subarctic trading post in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Oct. 10, 1858. (Perhaps that’s why light and summer attracted him so.) The trading post failed and the family moved to Boston’s South End. He then left school at 14. Prendergast was apprenticed to a commercial artist who painted show cards – advertising point-of-sale displays. By the time he reached 24, he could support himself painting flat, colorful advertisements — much the way his art would look.

Boston, Snowy Day. ca. 1910. Private collection.

His brother Charles, an artist with whom he was close, said he always knew he wanted to be an artist and he didn’t let anything get in his way. Back then, one generally studied in Europe if one wanted to pursue art. The brothers in 1886 worked their way to England on a cattle boat.

Nantasket Beach, ca. 1896. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Maurice then saved enough money to go to Paris, where he studied for four years. He was exposed to James McNeill Whistler, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Edgar Degas and Claude Manet.

When he returned to Boston in 1895 he had some modest success. By 1897 he acquired patrons who sent him to Italy to work for several years. But he suffered from poor health, and he’d lost nearly all his hearing by the time he returned home.

Maine Beach, ca. 1913. Private collection.

Back in New England, he painted in watercolor on the coast in summer, then recast his work in oil in the winter. He especially liked Revere Beach, Marblehead, the South Boston Pier and the Boston Public Garden.

Salem Willows, ca. 1904. Terra Museum of American Art.

His naïve, cheerful paintings sold well, and he began to exhibit in New York to find a wider audience. But not everyone liked his work.

Autumn in New England, ca. 1913, Private collection.

The Eight

In 1908 he exhibited with a renegade group of artists called The Eight. One critic dismissed his paintings as ‘artistic tommy-rot, unadulterated slop, the show would be better if it were that of The Seven rather than The Eight.’ Another compared his work with ‘an explosion in a color factory.’

Merry Go Round Nahant, ca. 1901. Springfield Museum of Fine Arts.

Eventually he moved to New York City, where he often painted Central Park scenes. He continued to work in New England in the summers.

Low Tide at Beachmont, ca. 1905, Worcester Art Museum.

Maurice Prendergast died on Feb. 1, 1924.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Eastern Heat Wave of 1896: 10 Days of Death

When the heat wave of 1896 finally ended on Aug. 13, 1896, it left behind a record of suffering and death “long to be remembered,” reported the Boston Globe.

But the heat wave mostly felled the working poor, and its impact was largely ignored. So was its role in launching Teddy Roosevelt as a progressive politician.

Until, that is, Edward Kohn wrote Hot Time in the Old Town, which credits the heat wave with shaping Theodore Roosevelt’s political career.

The Boulevard at Revere Beach, which offered relief for city dwellers during the heat wave of 1896.

Having a Heat Wave

The heat wave, which lasted nearly two weeks, ranked as one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

For 10 days, the temperature soared to 90 degrees and higher, while staying above 70 degrees at night. Humidity hovered at 90 percent, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Millions suffered without refrigeration or air conditioning from Boston to New York to Chicago.

Reported the Globe,

…No warm wave which has visited this country in recent years has held out longer, has been more continuous in its intensity, or more fatal in its results. Not only has it piled up the death rate to alarming proportions, but it has kept all humanity sweltering in perspiration and maddening heat.

Killer Heat Wave

At first the scorching weather only seemed to kill people who had to work outside all day — mostly Irish laborers who worked as teamsters, longshoremen, blacksmiths and railroad workers.

Then the death toll began to alarm New Englanders. On Monday, August 10, five people died in Providence. On Tuesday, August 11, the Boston Globe reported a “startling list of fatalities from the excessive heat.” Ten died in Boston that day, 20 on Wednesday and 15 on Thursday.

In Holyoke, Mass., some boys playing around a barn noticed a body inside. It belonged to Patrick Curran, a log driver who had probably gone into the barn to sleep. Officials believed the heat killed him and caused his body to decompose after only one day.

Death certificate of a man killed by excessive heat.

Farmers left their fields, public works projects suspended and factories closed. Horses dropped dead in the street, 120 in one day in Boston. (As if the smell of horse manure wasn’t bad enough.) People were found unconscious in coal sheds, in the woods, on the pavement.

There were 19 cases of heat prostration in just one department of a big Waltham, Mass., watch factory on August 10.

No Relief

“No relief yet,” read one headline during the middle of the heat wave. “The sun still continues its terrible work.”

Deaths were reported in Hartford, Providence and New Haven. Temperatures of 97 degrees were registered in Providence, 100 degrees in Springfield, Mass., and 104 degrees in Webster, Mass. It got so hot in Haverhill, Mass., a thermometer burst.

A 48-year-old Boston woman went to visit a neighbor who was overcome by the heat in his blacksmith’s shop. She herself collapsed a few hours later and died.

“All records broken,” reported the Boston Globe. “Almost unbearable on Cape Cod.”

Strange Behavior

People behaved strangely before the heat wave overcame them. Kate Carley, a mill girl in Holyoke, Mass., suddenly lost the power of speech and collapsed. She was taken to the hospital and not expected to recover.

Annie Deckman, a cook at Lander’s restaurant in Boston, was serving dinner when she suddenly dropped an order. The startled patrons watched her walk out of the kitchen. She then went to a room where she used to live. There she was found unconscious. Taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, Deckman died there.

The children of the poor suffered especially in the crowded tenements with little or no air. “The choking, deadening heat was something terrible to experience,” reported a newspaper.

One consolation was that Revere Beach had opened just weeks before the heat wave enveloped New England. Tens of thousands of working-class and immigrant families from Boston took the narrow gauge railroad to seek relief at the 4.5-mile long beach.

Another consolation: In Connecticut, the oyster and blue crab populations soared due to the heat, though the lobster fisheries were devastated.

Free Ice

Finally on the morning of Thursday, August 13, hope arrived in the form of a little breeze, increasing gradually toward night. In some places it rained. By morning, the heat wave had broken.

By the time it was over, the carnage had shocked the civilized world. As bad as the heat wave was in New England, it was worse in New York City, where an estimated 1,500 people died.

N.Y. Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Roosevelt was a 37-year-old police commissioner who decided to give out ice to New York City’s poor.

The price of ice was artificially high in New York because Charles Morse kept it that way. Morse was a Bath, Maine, businessman, known as the “Ice King,” who controlled the production of commercial ice in Manhattan.

Roosevelt personally supervised the distribution of the free ice. In a letter to his sister, Roosevelt wrote:

The heated term was the worst and most fatal we have ever known. The death-rate trebled until it approached the ratio of a cholera epidemic; the horses died by the hundreds, so that it was impossible to remove their carcasses, and they added a genuine flavor of pestilence, and we had to distribute hundred of tons of ice from the station-houses to the people of the poorer precincts.

A Progressive President Is Made

Toward the end of the heat wave, Roosevelt toured the tenements to see how the poor families used the ice. He watched as fathers chipped off ice and gave it to their children to suck.

Roosevelt’s experience during the heat wave shaped his thinking as a progressive, said Kohn in an interview.

The heat wave also helped doom William Jennings Bryan’s candidacy for president of the United States. The Democratic Party held its convention that year in Madison Square Garden, where the temperature soared to 100 degrees. Delegates left in droves during his speech, which the press declared a failure.

Republican William McKinley won the presidency. During his second term in office, Teddy Roosevelt served as his vice president. Roosevelt became president after McKinley’s assassination.

If you enjoyed this story about the 1896 heat wave, you might also like to read about the 1911 heat wave that drove people insane here.

Revere Beach photo by Picasa, licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2023.

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