Third Places Lost to Racism: Urban Amusement Parks
Did you know, urban amusement parks used to be a popular and affordable third place for America's working class?
Americans had more money to spend and more time to spend it—thanks to rising wages, and the introduction of the five day work week. Their surge in popularity came from a growing demand for accessible “low cost entertainment near major cities”.
And they were everywhere. By 1910, “every American municipality with a population of 20,000 or more had at least one amusement park.”
I’m not talking about sprawling complexes like Disney World that operate their own zip code, utilities and emergency services. I’m referring to city amusement parks that emerged in the late 19th century, often at the end of trolley lines. The main attractions were wooden roller coasters, carousels, fun houses and a Ferris wheel. Other popular amenities included “swimming pools, dance halls and roller-skating rinks”. Urban amusement parks offered “low cost entertainment”—less about risk-taking and more about socializing, romance, entertainment and youth culture.
You know the type: the perfect spot to catch up with friends, or sneak a first kiss away from prying parental eyes. Ask your grandparents! If they are white, chances are they have a core childhood memory tied to a urban amusement park. Not so much for Black elders. That’s because urban amusement parks were racially segregated and deeply racist.
If we’re being honest, that’s also why they’re no longer around.
So let’s get into it.
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Building America’s Second Favorite Third Place
In a recent article, we talked about racially segregated public pools and the absolute chokehold they had on white America from the 1920s until 1964. They were easily America’s favorite third place. Well, urban amusement parks weren’t far behind. Let’s take a look at the origins of America’s second favorite third place.
In the early 20th century, Coney Island in New York City drew over 1 million visitors a day in season to its three world-famous attractions: Luna Park, Dreamland Park and Steeplechase.
Luna, built in 1903, thrilled visitors with 250,000 electric lights, rides and legendary shows like “A Trip to the Moon”. It inspired 44 franchises around the world to include locations in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Seattle.
Dreamland, built in 1904, offered free weekday admission. It boasted a 375-ft tower covered in 100,000 lights, a dance hall, a human zoo, a Japanese theater, Venetian canals, and its incubator building with actual premature infants housed in neat rows.
Steeplechase, built in 1897, had a ferris wheel, a roller coaster with mechanical horses, a private beach, and the Helter Skelter which “titillated by revealing women’s legs and underclothes”. It charged a 25 cent admission.
Coney Island, like urban amusement parks across the country, captivated audiences with “the intense sensations of being jolted, whirled, and thrown together. [It] gave a sense of freedom and exhilaration missing from most people's lives.”
Segregating America’s Second Favorite Third Place
From the 1890s through 1964, America’s amusement parks were mostly “segregated by race, with white-owned parks often banning Black patrons except on “Jim Crow Days.”
Coney Island’s world famous attractions relied on violence and intimidation to keep out Black patrons while other parks posted whites-only signs or relied on Jim Crow laws and police to maintain the color line.
Glen Echo Park, located at the end of a trolley line just outside of Washington DC had a strict whites-only policy. So did Fontaine Ferry Park in Louisville, Kentucky.
Tom Owen, a University of Louisville archivist, fondly recalled childhood memories at Fontaine, riding wooden roller coasters, and competing in the shooting galleries and side shows. He briefly hinted at its darker and often untold history in an interview with WHAS11: “I’ve heard the testimony of African Americans in our community who had their faces pressed up against the fence…seeing there’s fun every minute inside the park but it was closed to them.” But that wasn’t really on his radar as a white teenager happily celebrating birthdays with friends in the park.
Like many other types of outdoor recreation, the “safe” and “clean” fun advertised at urban amusement parks was racist doublespeak for ‘No Negroes allowed’. If you were going to—reluctantly, let your daughters out of sight, public safety required that, at the very least, their virtue be kept safe from ‘predatory’ Black men.
This again? Were white Americans really that obsessed with this oddly-specific fantasy of Black men assaulting their daughters?
Yes.
In a 1903 copy of Good Housekeeping, physician Dr. Ellen Ligon reminded readers that “the white woman is the coveted desire of the negro man.”
Then there was the 1907 book, The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization written by Dr. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, an active member of the National Geographic Society married to the granddaughter of John Audubon. He claimed that “no white woman, no white girl, and, in fact, no white child can, with any safety at all, venture out alone in those districts and places where negroes have more or less full sway.”
This was not an isolated belief, judging from the success of racist propaganda books and films like The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 Hollywood blockbuster. Like Dr. Ligon and Dr. Shufeldt, many white Americans shared their beliefs that racial integration would ultimately make white women less safe:
“‘Social equality’ is battering on the walls that protect her, and for what purpose?” concluded Ligon in her Good Housekeeping article. “To make a breach where the negro may climb up and over.”
It wasn’t just about safeguarding the sexual and racial purity of white women, however. During the Jim Crow era, working-class white Americans viewed swimming pools and amusement “parks as their own private domain”, according to Andrew Kahrl, author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.
If you’ve ever been stared at, stared down or questioned about why you’re in a predominantly white space, you know what this feels like. White Americans don’t own the outdoors and yet…
But back to the story.
At Coney Island and many parks across the country, Blacks were not customers; they were the spectacle that customers paid to see. In minstrel and plantation shows, white men used blackface to mock African Americans as “[s]imple minded, irresponsible, and childlike.” The same stereotypes were echoed in the news media of the day. There was “the Negro pickpocket, the Negro drunk, the thieving Negro, [and] the lazy Negro.” Sound familiar? If you’re Irish, they should be. Except that Black Americans never got the chance to shed their ethnicity in exchange for white privilege. They were and are America’s permanent underclass, with the promises of Emancipation long since forgotten.
And racial underclasses were not welcome at urban amusement parks.
Minstrel shows drew laughter and also a “‘what can you expect from these people?’ kind of attitude”, reassuring white onlookers of their own racial superiority and of the rightness of American inequality. After all, if Negroes simply “didn’t have the brain power or the moral compass to do better”, then of course they would “need to be taken care of, one way or another.”
Asians—especially Chinese immigrants, were also mocked through “yellow face”. Even though Chinese immigration and naturalization were effectively banned between 1882-1943, they were still subject to “perpetual foreigner” stereotypes. Orientalism was also the driving force behind urban amusement park attractions across the country including Luna Park’s Great Durbar at Delhi, and the Japanese tea garden on Coney Island.
Similarly, racist ideas about Indigenous people drove the public’s fascination with Luna Park’s Ifugao (Igorot) village. According to the Coney Island Museum, “exaggerated displays of “primitive” Filipino culture” at Luna Park’s exhibition village acted as propaganda, justifying U.S. colonization of the Philippines to a white American public.
Luna Park understood its theatrical role and delivered: falsely claiming animal bones to be “human remains”; staging a fake ‘dog feast’; and rewriting Igorot culture to insert racist caricatures like a village “witch doctor”. The Indigenous Filipino actors were also underpaid, overworked, underfed and not allowed to leave.
White sunbathers enjoy the artificial sand beach at Glen Echo Park outside of Washington DC. The park maintained a strict whites-only admission from 1911 until 1961, when it was forcibly integrated by U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy. Photo credit: Library of Congress Digital Collections
White families enjoy the beach at Coney Island. Photo credit: Library of Congress Digital Collections
Despite being banned, African Americans worked as singers, jockeys, bathroom attendants and more to serve white patrons. One such role was that of the African Dodger for a game called ‘Hit the Coon’ or ‘Hit the N*gger Baby’. A Black child or man would stand with their body hidden away behind a canvas curtain and only their head visible. White contestants would throw eggs or baseballs at their head while they attempted to dodge. At Coney Island, the cost was three throws for a nickel. This was a well known game at amusement parks across the country. An August 28, 1907 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle ridiculed a local white assemblyman by comparing him to “the Negro at Coney Island who sticks his head through a hole in the wall to be thrown at.”
According to a 1910 edition of Popular Mechanics, the game was eventually replaced with Drop the Chocolate, or a Black man in a dunk tank, after white patrons began to lose interest.
When New York Governor Charles Whitman banned the African Dodger game in 1917, a writer at the Brooklyn Eagle joked that while “you can’t throw balls at a negro’s grinning face this summer…Dodgers out of an easy job may enlist in the negro infantry regiment. That is some consolation for them.” Military-age Black men in New York City were headed to Europe to fight on the Western Front, which suddenly made the role of African Dodger less suitable for the latest victims earmarked for the meat grinder of trench warfare.
However, fighting for one’s country didn’t exactly translate to equality back home. When the decorated Harlem Hellfighters marched up Fifth Avenue during their 1919 homecoming parade, New Yorkers of all races turned out in droves. However, that didn’t mean the returning war heroes were welcome at Coney Island or at most of the other urban amusement parks in the U.S.
Integration was still 45 years away.
By the 1940s, the Brooklyn Eagle had changed its tune. “The Negro is going to get something out of this war if we win it…” wrote Arthur Pollock in an August 1942 op-ed. “[…] the Negro has got the worst of it in this free country and a good many people who never thought to notice that fact are noticing it now”.
That same year, the largest Black newspaper in America, the Pittsburgh Courier launched the Double V campaign, advocating for victory over fascism abroad and racial inequality at home. Its message resonated with the over 1 million Black military service members and the 6 million Black defense industry workers who labored on the homefront.
Despite surviving D-Day, tank battles in the Ardennes, bomber runs in the Mediterranean and grisly hand-to-hand combat in the South Pacific, Black GIs returned home, largely, to the same Jim Crow laws and domestic terrorism (lynchings)—stubbornly unchanged by the toppling of fascist regimes abroad.
The glaring contradictions in American democracy were no doubt part of the pressure cooker threatening to erupt over America’s deep-rooted racial inequality
But change wasn’t too far off.
The Igorot exhibition village at Luna Park, Coney Island created a fantasy of Indigenous Filipinos that played directly to white American prejudice. Beyond the wooden fence, you can spot white patrons of the park. Photo credit: Library of Congress Digital Collections
Luna Park’s Great Durbar at Delhi was another attraction that was fueled by orientalism and that cast South Asians into the role of “perpetual foreigner”. Photo credit: Library of Congress Digital Collections
Integrating America’s Urban Amusement Parks
“Well before the Montgomery bus boycott, mothers led their children into segregated amusement parks,” wrote Victoria Wolcott, author of Race, riots, and roller coasters : the struggle over segregated recreation in America. “[…]But too often white mobs attacked those who dared to transgress racial norms.”
Like most equality movements, the people in power—white Americans—were largely determined not to cede ground. “[S]ome whites defended what they saw as their “rights” to segregated leisure by greeting African Americans at the park and on the shore with chains and baseball bats,” noted Kahrl, history professor at the University of Virginia.
A 1943 race riot in Detroit, Michigan that left 25 African Americans and nine whites dead, began when Black beach goers attempted to enjoy a day of picnicking and sunbathing at Belle Island Park. I use the word ‘race riot’ reluctantly. It doesn’t fully capture the fact that Black families were outnumbered by white men with weapons. And when police intervened it was usually to arrest African Americans and anyone who came to their defense.
Some parks desegregated all at once, others did so in stages with a lot of backtracking. The Coney Island franchise in Cincinnati, Ohio began admitting African Americans in 1955 after a successful NAACP legal challenge. However, they were still barred from swimming in the park’s 80,000 sq ft Sunlite Pool and from dancing at the Moonlite Garden pavilion until 1961.
In June 1961, anti-segregation protesters picketed outside of Fontaine Ferry park, Louisville Kentucky. In response, 300 white residents threw rocks. That prompted police to arrest “30 Negroes” while only “four or five” of the counter protesters were detained, according to a June 20, 1961 article in the Oakland Tribune.
“Once upon a time, public third places in the U.S. belonged to hardworking, middle class white Americans—or at least that’s how they saw it…So, desegregation was met with anger, violence and eventually white flight. ”
Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore Maryland was also the site of major civil rights protests. It refused admission to African Americans from 1893 until August 28, 1963 when a Black child rode the merry-go-round for the first time in park history. But the path to integration was not easy. Just a month earlier there were large peaceful protests which resulted in the arrest of 283 civil rights demonstrators, including many religious leaders. The media was less interested in the arrests of Black protesters but the arrests of prominent white Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy from all over the East Coast made headlines.
After years of protests, Riverside amusement park in Indianapolis finally abandoned its whites-only admissions following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—61 years after it first opened. The park shut down a few years later in 1971—another casualty of white flight as white Americans continued to abandon cities and urban amusement parks in droves.
The final holdouts were forced to integrate under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial segregation of public accommodations, including recreational facilities. Some held out longer, depending on where in the country they were located. Private membership-based clubs also continued to discriminate.
What happened next should shock no one.
Abandoning America’s Urban Amusement Parks
Once upon a time, public third places in the U.S. belonged to hardworking middle class white Americans—or at least that’s how they saw it. Wealthy white Americans had the option of retreating behind gated country clubs to avoid mingling with people they viewed as beneath them, and they often did so. They could more easily maintain the ‘color line’ without resorting to violence, argues professor Kahrl.
Meanwhile, working class white Americans viewed “desegregation as the theft of “their” beaches and parks at the hands of privileged white public officials.” So, desegregation was met with anger, violence and eventually white flight.
A wave of park closures swept across the country following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act including Coney Island’s famous Steeplechase Park, Chicago’s Riverview Park and Olympic and Palisades parks in New Jersey.
The timing was all too familiar. White American families responded to the integration of public pools and urban amusement parks in the exact same way—by collecting their children and going home, for good.
This wasn’t just a “personal choice”, this was economic warfare. At the time whites were 84% of the population and possessed the highest median income. This calculated retaliation meant the end of America’s second favorite third place.
Desegregated parks were swiftly abandoned by white parkgoers. Once bustling attractions fell silent along with the roller coasters that had defined America’s second favorite third place for generations. Ticket sales dried up leaving owners in dire straits.
Their response was to neglect parks into disrepair before selling the land back to the city or to the highest bidder, wrote Wolcott. In other cases, fires mysteriously broke out, allowing owners to collect insurance—and all because little Black children wanted to ride the carousel and tilt-a-whirl.
In 1964, concessionaires at Coney Island attributed a 30-90% drop in profits and empty roller coasters to “the growing influx of Negro visitors to the area.” A New York Times article from July 1964 reported that, “Once a small minority, they now comprise half the weekend tourists, and the concessionaires believe that the presence of Negroes has discouraged some white persons from visiting the area.”
Glen Echo was a small urban amusement park located just outside of D.C. at the end of a trolley line owned and operated by the federal government. The park maintained a strict whites-only policy for fifty years until protests and political maneuvering by local residents finally got the attention of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy—who promptly threatened to revoke federal funding. The park opened its doors to “any patron, regardless of skin color” in 1961 and then permanently closed them in 1968.
“Once considered one of the nation's finest urban parks, Belle Isle suffered serious budget cuts and deterioration after being mostly abandoned by whites,” wrote Kahrl, in an article for the Harvard University Press. The Detroit, Michigan park had been the site of recent protests and racial violence. If white patrons couldn’t have the park to themselves, no one would have the chance to enjoy Belle Isle.
Fontaine Ferry Park, which opened in Louisville, KY in 1905, maintained a strict ‘No Negroes’ policy for 60 years—even after the surrounding neighborhood integrated in the 1960s and swiftly became majority-Black due to white flight and blockbusting. That meant its “over 50 rides and attractions, as well as a swimming pool, skating rink and theatre” remained off limits to nearby residents until it was forced to integrate under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Fontaine was vandalized during racial unrest in 1969, and sold that same year. It reopened under another name in 1972 before closing permanently three years later. After being damaged in multiple fires, it was sold to the city in 1981.
“By the early 1970s, most of America’s urban amusement parks like Cleveland’s Euclid Beach and Chicago’s Riverview were closed for good,” wrote Victoria Wolcott, history professor at University at Buffalo, SUNY. She added that “Some white consumers perceived the newly integrated parks as unsafe and in turn park owners sold the land for considerable profit.”
The combination of desegregation and white flight also shuttered other third places like “public swimming pools, bowling alleys and roller-skating rinks” as “white consumers fled cities for the surburbs.”
Photo by Younho Choo on Unsplash
Jim Crow-era urban amusement parks were replaced by unaffordable, inaccessible suburban amusement parks
Wait, but amusement parks haven’t disappeared. We’re on social media and we’ve seen Disney adults—they’re everywhere!
Yes, that’s right. The death of urban amusement parks was beneficial for the growth of the suburban amusement park.
These new third places were located hours outside of cities, not accessible by public transit and no longer within financial reach for most working class Americans.
Wait—they actually don’t sound like third places at all.
Hint: they’re not.
As Professor Kahrl pointed out, “those who could afford it instead retreated to new, commercial theme parks, safely located in remote outposts of suburbia, accessible only by automobile.”
Disneyland in Anaheim, California opened in July 1955. The $17 million attraction was built in just one year and its Main St, U.S.A. concept evoked good ole fashioned “American values”, capitalizing on the racial hysteria that prompted white flight away from cities and urban amusement parks. Disney also relied on racist depictions of Black, Asian and Native Americans—in its parks and children’s films.
After the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned racial segregation in recreational facilities, white Americans also got creative in maintaining segregation by other means.
Public beaches—a major attraction in many urban amusement parks across the U.S.—also adopted entry fees and added higher entry fees for non-residents, as a way to keep out “undesirables,” while “remov[ing] amenities like public locker rooms” to add another barrier for nonresidents. These measures were specifically designed to exclude African Americans but because racism has never been a precision tool, they also restricted access for working-class people of all races.
Conclusion
Let’s face it, regardless of your race, if you are below the age of 70, you will most likely do not possess a core memory tied to an urban amusement park, and never will—thanks to the pervasive anti-Blackness at the center of America’s 248-year history.
Working class white Americans were unwilling to share America's second favorite third place with the lowest-ranking members of this country’s rigid racist hierarchy: Black people.
It’s that simple.
“When integration came whites devalued those facilities and fled to private pools, suburban theme parks, and their own backyards,” concluded Wolcott, history professor, University at Buffalo, SUNY.
But don’t worry, Disney World prices are $89-$109/day per person. You’ll be fine.
Hope you have fun this summer! Don’t forget to pour one out to another third place lost to racism.
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White American families responded to the desegregation of public pools and urban amusement parks in the exact same way—by collecting their children and going home, for good. White flight wasn’t just a “personal choice”, it was economic warfare.