The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

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  We burst through the clouds, which seem to rush above us in streamers of vapor, and see below a valley, broad and deep, sun-slashed—dazzle of green, splash of yellow and scarlet—patches of mist like smoke. Swords of sun strike from the clouds. We have drifted over a steep hill, bristly with pine. A flock of birds below us, black-blue, flying over their lagging shadows. I look at Vallard, who meets my gaze. An understanding passes between us. Has he felt it too? It’s time. He pulls the valve rope, we begin the descent. Shadows like dark lakes lie on the autumn woods and fields. A stream or river, coppery brown, flashes fish scales of sun. On the far hill a tiny farmhouse with a slate roof. Friend or foe? We have been aloft for four hours and thirty-five minutes. It is time. Our compass is crazed, useless, but the wind has shifted so often that no compass could have helped. Are we safely beyond the German lines? Have we reached the north? The west? What is this place? Have we blown as far as Brittany? Is it possible we’ve drifted east, crossed the border into Belgium? We don’t know. So be it! As we descend, I scan the woods for tents, horses, a stray patrol. I see only the play of cloud-shadow on field and wood, the farmhouse silent, a field of stubble, pinewoods. The fat shadow of our balloon glides below, dragging after it the disturbingly small shadow of our basket. Now open meadows appear, tan and yellow among the trees. Mauve shadows. Copses, fields, an outcrop of gray rock. The land rises to meet us as we come slanting down, grows larger, breaks into detail. I begin to make out high straw-colored grass, wild-flowers purple and white in a sloping field. I look up at the sky, at blue air and drifting cloud, up there where the wide spaces cleave the spirit like an axblade, I bid the whispering and too-high heavens farewell, then I cast my eyes downward, toward the rising earth, toward the solid place, the human turmoil.

  PARADISE PARK

  PARADISE PARK, which was destroyed by fire on May 31, 1924, except for a number of steel and concrete structures that rose eerily from the blackened ruins until they were torn down the following year, first opened its gates on June 1, 1912, on eight and two-thirds acres of the former site of Dreamland, across Surf Avenue from Luna Park. In an era noted for the brilliance and extravagance of its amusement parks, the new park seemed to be presenting itself as a culmination. Even the diminished acreage, with its mere 652 feet of ocean frontage, proved responsible for many of the park’s most striking features, for it was immediately clear that Paradise Park was striving to overcome the limitations of space by a certain flamboyance or excess that pushed it in directions never before undertaken in the architecture of amusement parks.

  The first sign that the new owner was prepared to respond boldly to the challenge of his rivals was the four-hundred-foot-high white wall that rose about the newly acquired property, dwarfing Luna’s main tower, casting its late-afternoon shadow all the way to Steeplechase, and surpassing even the legendary tower of Dreamland, which was said to have been illuminated by one hundred thousand electric lights. In that early era of enclosed amusement parks, Paradise Park was the most visibly and radically enclosed of all. The soaring white wall, composed of staff over a lath-and-iron frame, suggested on the one hand a defiant act of exclusion, an outrageous assertion of privacy, and on the other an invitation, a deliberate titillation or provocation—the latter most clearly in evidence at the towering top of the unadorned wall, which only there, high in the sky, broke into a profusion of colorful towers, minarets, domes, and spires.

  Two openings pierced the mystery of the great wall: an ocean entrance, across an iron pier and through the grimacing mouth of an immense clown’s face, and the Surf Avenue entrance, through a soaring arch flanked by sixty-foot dragons. The openings did not reveal the inside of the park but ushered visitors into a broad, meandering tunnel that wound its way parallel to the wall for hundreds of feet before turning abruptly inward to the park itself. Lit with red, blue, and yellow electric lights, the winding tunnel was lined on both sides with ball-and-milk-bottle booths, carnival wheels, Moxie stands, curtained freak shows, gypsy palmist tents, hot roasted corn stalls, phrenology shops displaying maps of skulls divided into zones, tattoo parlors, penny arcades, shooting galleries—all of it ringing with the mingled din of tumbling bottles, rattling balls, Graphophone music, the shouts of barkers (“And a jaunt for joy it is, ladies and gentlemen!”), and the muffled clatter of unseen rides. Scattered among the familiar pleasures of Paradise Alley, as the entrance tunnel came to be called, were a number of new and exciting ones that proved highly popular, such as the Sky Cars, small electric-traction elevators lined with black velvet and operated by masked female attendants in scarlet livery who took customers up to the top of the wall for a sudden, magnificent view of the park.

  Since secrecy was part of the allure of Paradise Park, the elusive creator-manager, who from the beginning surrounded himself with a certain mystery, permitted no publicity photos in the course of an otherwise vigorous promotional campaign. The historian must therefore rely on a scattering of amateur photographs that focus on particular attractions but give no reliable view of the whole. Despite the absence of a definitive map or plan, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct the early form of the park in some detail from the many reports, sometimes conflicting, of early witnesses.

  What struck the first visitors, as they emerged from Paradise Alley into the park itself, was the powerful upward or vertical thrust. In the bewildering assault of first impressions it was immediately apparent that the park consisted of several levels, to which access was had by numerous stairways, escalators, and electric elevators. Each of the two upper levels was a system of wide iron bridges that intersected at one or more points to form broad plazas, large enough to house booths, cafés, brass bands, and mechanical rides, as well as a variety of exotic attractions: a Zulu village, a Chinese temple, a Javanese puppet theater, a replica of the marketplace of Marrakech, and a reconstructed village of Mbuti pygmies from the Ituri Forest, including forty-five Mbuti tribesmen living in reassembled native huts. The bridges were supported by a system of openwork iron towers, many of which were supplied with stairways and elevators; the entire structure of bridges and supports left a feeling of openness, so that at any point on the ground one could see big slices of blue sky. Fifty-five elevator shafts in the inner walls gave access to every bridge at both levels, and all around the inner wall rose the spiral of an immense railed stairway, which quickly became known as Paradise Road and led to the top of the wall. There people could walk four abreast along a balustrade lined with game booths and food stands and look down at Paradise Park itself, with its crisscrossing bridges, its festive plazas, its roller coaster and Ferris wheel, its exotic villages, its enticing spectacles with casts of thousands, such as the Destruction of Carthage and the Burning Skyscraper; or they could gaze outward at the great beach stretching east and west with its domed and towering hotels, its double-decked iron piers, its bathing pavilions—out beyond the lighthouse at Sea Gate in one direction and the sailboats on Sheepshead Bay in the other, and farther still, much farther, for it was said that on a clear day you could see sixty miles in any direction.

  Although from the beginning there were critics of the new park, who argued that the vertical emphasis was reminiscent of the world of skyscrapers and elevated railroads from which the urban visitor longed to escape, the response of the public was decisively enthusiastic. Those who frequented the park began to say they could no longer enjoy single-level parks, which seemed too close to the ground; and so successful was the park that a single ride called the Sidewinder, which cost $86,000 to build, drew $375,000 in receipts in the first three seasons.

  If the most striking and immediate fact about Paradise Park was its multilevel verticality, its continual invitation to half-glimpsed excitements high overhead, the crowds soon noticed that the park offered, along with familiar amusements, a number of new attractions. One sensation of the opening season was a brand-new mechanical ride called the Nightmare Railway, a development of the scenic railway and Old Mill in th
e direction of the House of Horrors. Delighted visitors discovered that the great white wall contained an elaborate set of tracks that rose and fell sharply along a dark, twisting tunnel which presented a series of frights: the car, which held twelve people on six benches, went rushing toward immense boulders that collapsed upon contact, approached another car that suddenly swooped overhead on a second set of tracks, experienced a landslide, a flood, an avalanche, and a raging fire, passed through a dragon’s den, a mummy’s crypt, a haunted graveyard, a cave of malignant dwarfs, and a vampire’s castle, and emerged at last in a bright opening two hundred feet above the ground of Paradise Park.

  Even more popular than the new mechanical rides was an entirely new group of amusements called Adventures. An Adventure, according to the promotional material, was not a ride but a carefully re-created real-life experience: for ten cents one could enter the Dark Forest and be attacked by a gang of bandits, or step into the Streets of Lisbon and experience the famous earthquake, or wander through Old Algeria and experience the thrill of being surrounded by angry Moslems, tied up in a burlap sack, carried off on the back of a camel, and dangled over a cliff above crashing waves. One of the more popular Adventures was Lovers’ Leap, a three-hundred-foot-high rocky cliff (staff over lath and iron) that rose at one corner of the park and offered to daredevil couples a fearful ledge jutting out over a thundering waterfall that threw up great clouds of spray; the sound of the roaring water was produced by machines concealed in the artificial cliff and the thick spray was sent up through dozens of holes in the staff. The couples who jumped shrieking into the thundering mist were caught ten feet below in a concealed net that broke their fall lightly and carried them eighty feet down into the swirling mist, where muscular attendants released them and guided them into a descending elevator.

  But the single most popular attraction of the 1912 season proved rather surprisingly to be an immense model of the resort itself, done in precise scale and measuring thirty by twenty-five feet. Located on a plaza of the third level and surrounded by roped pedestrian walks supplied with coin-operated telescopes, the model showed Coney Island in May of 1911, just before the fire that destroyed Dreamland. In brilliant detail it replicated the heart of Coney Island from Steeplechase Park to Dreamland, including Surf Avenue, Mermaid Avenue, the host of side streets with their saloons and music halls, their dance pavilions and hotels, their shooting galleries and souvenir shops, and the beach itself with its double-decked iron piers and its bathhouses, all populated by tiny automatons (the brass band played, the man in the straw boater shot the tin duck in the row of moving ducks, the girl on the roller coaster opened her mouth and rolled her eyes). The detail was so scrupulous that the model was said to duplicate every tie in every track of every roller coaster, every waxwork in the Eden Musée, including the pastework pearls of Jenny Lind, and every slat in every rocking chair on the porch of every hotel; and it was rumored that with the aid of a penny-in-the-slot telescope you could see not only the precise replication of every ornate machine in every penny arcade and the minuscule letters of every peepshow entertainment (Actors and Models, After the Bath, Bare in the Bear Skin, What the Book Agent Saw) but, through the elegantly duplicated peepshow viewer, the flickering, teasingly vague black-and-white pictures themselves. The highly popular model was the work of Otis Stilwell, a carver of carousel horses who as a hobby made lovingly detailed miniature merry-go-rounds, roller coasters, and fun-houses that he sold in a shop on Surf Avenue and who, along with the inventor Otto Danziker, was to prove one of the owner-manager’s closest advisers. The miniature Coney Island, which attracted amazed attention as a kind of wondrous toy, served a deeper purpose: by reducing the entire resort to a miniature within his amusement park, the manager was enhancing the size and power of his park, which became a gigantic and marvelous structure stretching away in every direction; at the same time he was inviting the admiring crowds to experience a subtle condescension toward all rival attractions, which were reduced to charming toys.

  Like other amusement-park entrepreneurs at the turn of the century, the owner-manager of Paradise Park was confronted by the problem of attracting a mass audience hungry for pleasure and excitement while excluding any threat to the supposed values of that audience, such as the prostitutes, gamblers, and gangsters who flourished on every Coney Island side street. By enclosing their parks and hiring enforcement squads, the entrepreneurs were able to exercise unprecedented control, but the astute manager noted a new problem: the new, safe pleasures of the enclosed parks threatened to make them too tame and predictable, to push them in the unfortunate direction of the genteel beer garden. This problem he solved brilliantly by hiring a troupe of eighteen hundred specially trained actors to imitate the rowdiness and vice whose exclusion had left a secret yearning. Hence the park included among its attractions a number of dark saloons, seedy roadhouses, and crooked alleys lined by dubious shops, in which customers could mingle with prostitutes, pickpockets, cutthroats, drunken sailors, pimps, con men, and gangland thugs, assured that the racy language, the shocking costumes, and the terrifying fights which periodically erupted were part of the show. Actresses playing the part of prostitutes were particularly admired by male and female visitors, who enjoyed seeing at close range the disturbing, thrilling streetwalkers with their invitation to forbidden pleasures that were strictly and safely imaginary. Patrons who themselves became rowdy or offensive were swiftly removed by the very efficient park police, who roamed the grounds in uniform or in disguise. Because the distinction was not always clear between an actor dressed like a sailor with a false tattoo on his forearm and a real sailor with a real tattoo, or an actress with rouged cheeks and brazen eyes strutting along the booth-lined alleys and a factory girl from Brooklyn wearing a new chinchilla coat and a straw hat with a willow plume, a certain heady confusion was experienced by the park’s patrons, who began to feel that they too were actors and actresses disguised as seamstresses, schoolteachers, department-store clerks, typists, and shopkeepers—roles that they no longer took as seriously as they did in that other world of work and tiredness.

  Among the many disguises in Paradise Park were those of the owner-manager himself, for it quickly became known that the secretive proprietor liked to mingle unseen with the crowds in order to observe the operation of his park at close range, overhear responses to his amusements, and imagine rearrangements and improvements. Disguised as a park workman in cap, shirtsleeves, and vest, an Irish shopkeeper in his Sunday bowler, a uniformed trombone player in epaulets, a city swell in striped pants, bow tie, and straw boater, a bearded Jew in a long coat of black gabardine, the manager would make the rounds of his park, studying the crowd and devising ways to improve congested areas. Once, overhearing a couple complain that the Lovers’ Leap was disappointing because the concealed net broke the fall too soon, he had the net lowered by ten feet and discovered that revenues increased. As rumors of his presence persisted, visitors began to search for the disguised owner-manager among the throngs; and people began to wonder a little about the man who walked among them unseen, listening to them, observing them, and seeking to increase their delight.

  They knew only that he was an outsider, from Manhattan, who had come late to the amusement-park business and who, it was said, had money to burn. Then a journalist named Warren Burchard wrote a long article that appeared in a special Coney Island supplement of the Brooklyn Eagle (August 10, 1912). In the course of analyzing Coney Island amusements, calculating trends, reporting revenues, and discussing patterns of crowd behavior, Burchard devoted several paragraphs to the latest proprietor of “marvelous Coney,” Charles Sarabee. Sarabee, Burchard reported, was a native New Yorker who was yet another instance of that peculiarly American phenomenon, the self-made man. Sarabee’s father had sold cigars in the shop of a small Manhattan hotel. As a boy Charles had worked long hours in the cigar shop, where by the age of nine he had not only mastered the bewildering array of names, prices, and cedarwood boxcovers, but had begu
n to arrange cigars in eye-catching displays, the most successful of which was a three-foot-high wire tree hung with Christmas ornaments and high-priced Havanas. At thirteen he went to work as a bellhop at the hotel. There his efficiency, industry, and cleverness endeared him to the manager and earned him a series of promotions starting with desk clerk and ending, when Charles was twenty-one, with the post of assistant manager, in which capacity he introduced a wide variety of improvements, including fruit trees in every lobby and, in every bathroom, up-to-date fixtures in stylish settings: mahogany-hooded shower-baths, heated brass towel-rails, and Ionic pilasters of Siena marble. His big break came several years later when as manager-owner of the hotel he decided to enter a partnership in a new downtown department store. He soon had the controlling interest in three other department stores, but his fortune was made at the age of thirty, when he introduced in his stores a revolutionary idea called the “leisure spot.” Sarabee had always had a sharp eye for the behavior of customers, and he had noticed that many of them grew tired and irritable after an hour or two of strolling from department to department and riding elevators and escalators in search of something they thought they wanted but probably didn’t need. He knew it was important to keep his customers cheerful and in a free-spending mood, but even more important than this was simply to keep them in the store for as long as possible. Thus arose the idea of leisure spots: small oases of comfort located on every floor, where customers could relax in pleasant surroundings and recover from the tremendous assault on the nervous system represented by the modern department store with its countless treasures temptingly displayed. The leisure spots would attempt to simulate the atmosphere of a cozy living room, with thick armchairs and couches, crocheted pillows, lace antimacassars, mahogany lamp tables on which stood porcelain lamps with tasseled shades, and in one corner a smiling, apple-cheeked young woman in a crisp blue uniform who sold steaming cups of tea and coffee and a variety of tarts, cakes, cookies, and gingerbread. Although the leisure spots took up valuable floor space and proved forbiddingly expensive to install, they turned out to be immensely popular, and after a month it was clear that customers were staying longer and spending more. Rival stores quickly imitated the new device, but Sarabee’s leisure spots were always more appealing, and he took care to vary them in order to overcome monotony: in quick succession he introduced leisure spots in the style of an English pub, a Dutch cottage, a Victorian parlor, a Japanese tearoom, and an Alpine chalet. Inspired by his successes, he soon began to introduce more fanciful decors, such as the Amazon jungle, the Italian plaza, the Puritan village, and the hold of a whaling ship, all designed with extreme fidelity, if not to History herself, then to the public’s romantic idea of each exotic place. His search for new ideas led him to visit world’s fairs and expositions, where the reproduction of exotic places had become fashionable, as well as the big Eastern pleasure resorts that borrowed themes and purchased properties from defunct expositions; and in 1908, on a trip to Coney Island, which he had not visited since his childhood, and where he attempted without success to purchase the old three-hundred-foot-high Iron Tower that had once been the showpiece of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, he was struck by the festive architecture of the three new amusement parks—Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland—as well as by the immense, lively, and free-spending crowds. He had been growing a little stale in the department-store business; he needed a new outlet for his energies. The destruction of Dreamland Park by fire in the spring of 1911 was decisive. As the city hesitated to purchase the ruined grounds put up for sale by the Dreamland Corporation, who proposed that the fifteen acres of Dreamland and the fifteen additional acres destroyed by fire should be turned into a public park, Sarabee was able to arrange for the lease of eight and two-thirds acres of the former amusement park, with the stipulation that the lease would be terminated when public development began, an event that was delayed until the administration of Fiorello La Guardia in 1934, while the remaining acres, during the intervening years, were operated as a parking lot.