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Gary Cross - The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

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Book:
The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century
Author:
Gary Cross / John K Walton
Publisher:
Columbia University Press
Genre:
Books / Home and family
Year:
2005
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During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment and relaxation. However, by the middle of the century, a new type of park began to emerge, providing well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment. Contrasting the experiences of Coney Island and Blackpool with those of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton explore playful crowds and the pursuit of pleasure in the twentieth century to offer a transatlantic perspective on changing ideas about leisure, class, and mass culture.

Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an industrial saturnalia.Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these Sodoms by the sea flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions.

The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britains industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.

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The Playful Crowd

Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

Gary S. Cross & John K. Walton

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York, Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50283-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cross, Gary S.

The playful crowd : pleasure places in the twentieth century / Gary S. Cross, John K. Walton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0231127243 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Amusement parksSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. Amusement parksSocial aspectsEnglandHistory20th century. I. Walton, John K. II. Title.

GV1851.A35C76 2005

791.068730904dc22

2005045786

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Contents

J ohn Walton and Gary Cross met for the first time on a rainy June day in 1987 - photo 4

J ohn Walton and Gary Cross met for the first time on a rainy June day in 1987 at the Preston (England) train station. They had arranged to rendezvous there on their way to Blackpool where John would show Gary this extraordinary relic of the Victorian seaside, on which John was already the leading authority. Gary had journeyed up from Brighton where he was working in the Mass-Observation archive on a book based on reports of Blackpool crowds in the 1930s, which he found while writing a book about the reduction of worktime in Britain and France. They had a wonderful day despite the heavy rain as John told amazing stories about the piers, Tower, shops, and Blackpool landladies and as Gary with his generic American accent amused elderly couples at the Tower Ballroom asking them about their experiences there in the 1930s.

This was the beginning of an enduring transatlantic friendship, with intermittent meetings in Preston, Lancaster, and at various conferences in England. In 2000 and 2001, John arranged for Gary to be a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, and Gary spent two late springs and early summers in Lancashire, taking part in two international conferences at Preston and being introduced to some of the finer points of cricket. In turn, in the spring of 2003, Gary persuaded John to come over for a visit to Coney Island and showed him around Victorian Bellefonte in rural Pennsylvania near where Gary lives. Over these years, they shared stories of life changes and new projects. Gary raised a family and went on to publish broad comparative histories of leisure and consumption, eventually shifting from European to American topics. John lived through challenging times with partners in Preston, Lancaster, and the old industrial town of Accrington, and developed interests in the early Spanish seaside and the comparative history of tourism. Although their interests diverged as Gary got involved in the consumer culture of children and Johns interests became more European in scope, they kept a lot of common ground. Neither got bitten by the postmodernist bug, but they both moved on from the social history of the 1970s and 1980s to ask new questions.

Despite their very different approaches, backgrounds, and personalities, they decided in 2001 to write what became this book. They came upon the idea of a comparing American and British pleasure places and the crowds that they gathered across the twentieth century. This was a natural given Garys growing fascination with fresh thinking on Disney and Coney Island, and Johns interest in the Beamish Open Air Museum and why Blackpool survived the twentieth century when so many of its rivals faltered. They shared ideas across the Internet and made joint visits to the sites they were to write about.

Historians do not usually write books together. As a group, they learn to be original by working on their own. It is not so much that John and Gary are so different, although both are experienced in the art of the joint literary enterprise. Writing this book at this time brought new challenges, not least in reconciling contrasting academic cultures. Although many may refuse to believe this, they enjoyed the experience and had no disagreements worth mentioning. To be sure, pace and styles of writing clashed a bit at points. John had to put up with a lot of translating his British prose into American English, for example. But, in the end, this did not matter. This is not because they are particularly selfless and saintly (as anyone who knows them will attest), but because they appreciated how they complemented each other and simply would not let anything get in the way of the pleasure of the project and their friendship. They also began with a strong outline, clear division of labor, and a willingness to accept each others editing as they passed drafts back and forth by e-mail, with layer upon layer of rewrites in contrasting colors.

Not only has their friendship survived and been enhanced by the experience, but the resulting book also stretched them both as historians. The Playful Crowd may or may not be a model of historical collaboration for other historians, but it is a rare example of a genuine and sustained transatlantic collaboration on a transatlantic theme, and neither of the authors could have written it without the other.

The Playful Crowd Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century - image 5

About 1500 New Yorkers gathered in the dead of winter on January 3 1903 to - photo 6

About 1,500 New Yorkers gathered in the dead of winter on January 3, 1903 to witness the execution of Topsy, the elephant. A 28-year veteran of the traveling American circus, Topsy had for two previous years developed a mean streak, killing three trainers (the last after he fed her a lighted cigarette). Topsys current owners, Skip Dundy and Frederick Thompson of Coney Islands newest amusement park, Luna Park, had finally had enough of the temperamental beast. They decided to make a moral lesson of her and win in the process valuable publicity by executing the elephant.

At a time when public hangings were being banished from most of the civilized world, the spectacle of hanging the elephant first caught the promoters fancy. But it was not merely the logistics of such an act that frustrated them but the objections of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Instead Luna Park teamed up with Thomas Edison to electrocute the offending pachyderm. Edison, who had only recently promoted the electric chair as a humane form of capital punishment, found Luna Parks offer an opportunity to once again show the dangers of alternating current (a rival to his preferred form of electricity, direct current) by arranging for the execution. As significant, a team from Edisons movie studio eagerly filmed the event for the millions who could not attend. Luna Park staff secured the beast and fitted her with wooden sandals lined with copper to which they attached electrodes. On a signal, a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan. While the

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