The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  With the instinct of a true showman, Sarabee understood that the fatal enemy of amusement is boredom, and he was tireless in his search for new mechanical rides, new spectacles, new thrills and excitements. Working closely with the inventor Otto Danziker, who had designed the Nightmare Railway, Sarabee introduced at least five major rides each season, dismantling any that failed to prove successful. Of the thirteen new rides presented at Paradise Park in the second two seasons (1913 and 1914) before the breakthrough of 1915, one of the most popular was the Swizzler, a three-hundred-foot-high openwork iron column containing a spiral track down which cars holding ten people rushed at terrifying speeds, only to crash through a floor straight into a twisting black tunnel that suddenly burst into light around a bend and revealed that the car was about to rush into a brick wall. At the last second a door in the wall sprang open to reveal a track plunging into a lake, which proved to be an optical illusion projected by tilted mirrors reflecting a movie of rippling lakewater; at the bottom of the track the car slowed and entered a small room that rose into the air—the room was a hydraulic elevator—and released the car into a tunnel that led through suddenly opened doors into a sunny opening at the base of the column. Other successful rides created by Danziker were the Tumbler, the Spider, the Whim-Wham, the Flip, the Lightnin’ Lizzie, and the Crazy Wheel—this last a gigantic horizontal ring of steel over one hundred feet in diameter, balanced on a pivot so that it turned like a great, wobbling coin, and supplied with hanging, swinging seats on the inner and outer rims. Danziker also designed a special Ferris wheel that slowly rotated like a top while turning vertically, and he placed a medium-sized roller coaster on a plaza of the second level, some three hundred feet in the air, which Sarabee promptly advertised as the world’s highest roller coaster.

  By the end of the third season the box-office take made it clear that Paradise Park had achieved an unprecedented success and had begun to attract a significant portion of the Steeplechase and Luna crowds. The exciting new rides, the lure of the upper levels, the eighteen hundred actors, the sense of being in a place that was unlike any other place on earth but also reassuringly familiar, all this promised a triumphant future, and the outbreak of the European war, which some had feared might harm the amusement business, proved only a further impetus to pleasure. People speculated on the rides already said to be under construction for next season, and a journalist reported, on dubious evidence, that Sarabee was going to unveil an entirely new kind of ride. The rumor was in fact mistaken, for Sarabee and Danziker were planning a number of sophisticated mechanical rides that broke no new technological ground; but in a broad sense the rumor proved to be true, for it was during the last week of the 1914 season that a small incident occurred which led to a startling new development in Paradise Park.

  A workman called Ed O’Hearn, who had been sent into the tunnel beneath the Swizzler on a routine check of the track, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe some dirt from his face. He dislodged a dime, which began rolling down a packed-earth incline beside the track. O’Hearn had been planning to spend his dime on a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut, and he hurried after it with his electric lantern. He saw the dime come to a stop some fifteen feet below him, but when he reached the spot, the dime had disappeared. O’Hearn crawled about on his knees and patted the hard earth with his palm. As he did so he was surprised to feel a current of cool air streaming upward. He lowered the lantern and saw a fissure in the earth about two feet long and the width of a finger. When he dropped a flat stone sideways into the crack he counted to twenty before he heard a faint sound. He immediately returned aboveground to report to his boss, who sent a message to Sarabee.

  An hour later a team of three engineers investigated the crevice and determined that a small limestone cavity existed far beneath the Swizzler but posed no danger to the ride or to the park itself. Sarabee, disguised as one of the engineers, withdrew into a kind of somber brooding. When one of his men tried to reassure him that the park was perfectly safe, Sarabee is reported to have said: “It’s all clear now. What’d you say?”

  Thus was born the idea that was to give to the history of the amusement park a certain swerve that some found dubious but that no one was able to ignore. All fall and winter the great plans were laid; in his park office on Surf Avenue, Sarabee met daily with Otto Danziker, Otis Stilwell, and the engineer William Engelstein. The project was carried forward with characteristic secrecy, and indeed it remains one of the remarkable facts about Sarabee that he was able to elicit from everyone who worked for him an unfailing loyalty. Two weeks before the start of the new season, red-and-black posters appeared in the windows of restaurants and dance halls, on hoardings and telephone poles, on hotel notice-boards and the walls of bathhouses, announcing a NEW PARADISE PARK: You Have to See It to Believe It. On opening day the great entrance remained closed; a barker with cane and striped derby announced from a platform sixty feet high that the park would open one week later, on May 29. Rumor had it that the delay was a promotional gimmick aimed at increasing the air of mystery that surrounded the park; there was talk of a new kind of roller coaster, a more thrilling funhouse; and some said that Sarabee himself, with cane and striped derby, had announced the delay from the platform between the heads of the great dragons that flanked the closed entrance.

  The gates opened on May 29, 1915, at eight in the morning; by noon the crowd had exceeded one hundred thousand. People who had visited the park before were puzzled and disappointed. Apart from three new rides, including a splendid Haunted Mountain, and a new sideshow consisting entirely of midgets (a midget Fat Lady, a midget Ossified Man, a midget Wild Man of Borneo, a midget Bearded Lady, a pair of midget Siamese twins), nothing about the park seemed new enough to merit the publicity campaign. Visitors did, however, notice a number of odd-looking structures scattered about. Each structure was a rotunda composed of columns with grotesque capitals—grimacing devils, weeping clown faces, winged lions and horses, struggling mermaids fondled by hairy monkeys, three-headed chickens—roofed with a gilt dome, on top of which sat a miniature Danziker merry-go-round turning to barrel-organ melodies. Each of the dozen rotundas contained a central pole, a circle of wooden benches, and a uniformed attendant. When people were seated on the benches, which held as many as forty, the attendant pulled a lever in the pole, causing the platform to descend rapidly through a cylindrical shaft. At the bottom of the shaft the benches suddenly flattened out, the floor began to turn, and whirling, laughing, frightened people began spinning off the edge down any of fourteen chutes that led to a red curtain—and as they passed through the curtain they saw, all around them, as an attendant helped them to their feet at the bottom of the slide, a vast underground amusement park.

  This immense subterranean project, with its roller coaster and funhouse, its tents and pavilions, its spires and domes and minarets, all lit by electric lights and alive with carousel music, the shouts of barkers, the rattle of rides, and even the smell of the sea, had been designed by Engelstein with the help of engineers who had worked on the Boston and New York City subway systems, and had been carried out by a force of nearly two thousand Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrant laborers lowered into shafts with pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows, as well as by teams of trained workers who laid charges of dynamite to blast through boulders or operated a hydraulic tunnel-shield designed by Danziker for boring through clay and quicksand. In the course of excavation workmen discovered the jaw of a mastodon, a casket of seventeenth-century Dutch coins, and the rusty anchor of a Dutch merchant ship. The final structure appears to have been a skillful mixture of broad tunnels serving as fairground midways and high, open stretches roofed in reinforced concrete lined with dark blue tiles to resemble a night sky in summer. The completed park included at one end a great beach of white sand and an artificial ocean—in reality a great shallow basin filled with ocean water and containing Danziker’s wave machine, which caused long, perfectly breaking waves to fall on the flawless beac
h. Two immense hotels, a band pavilion, and half a dozen bathhouses lined the beach, and a great iron pier with shops and restaurants under its wooden roof stretched twelve hundred feet into the water. Five hundred seagulls brought down from the upper shore added a realistic touch, though later it was discovered that the birds did not prosper in the subterranean world and gave birth to sickly offspring with wobbly walks and crazed flight patterns, who frightened children and had to be replaced by fresh gulls and hand-painted balsawood models. High above the beach, and the piers, and the park, and the always burning electric lights stretched the night sky of blueblack tiles, supplied with thousands of twinkling artificial stars and a brilliant moon emerging from and disappearing behind slow-moving clouds beamed up by hidden projectors.

  The creation of an underground amusement park with an ocean setting may have been a triumph of engineering, but Sarabee was too shrewd to rely solely on first impressions. His underground park had features that distinguished it clearly from his upper park, so that customers, after the first shock of delight or admiration, did not grow impatient, did not feel cheated. In addition to four new rides, including the wildly popular Yo-Yo, an immense steel yo-yo suspended by a thick cable from a tower and supplied with seats, visitors to Sarabee’s Bargain Basement, as the new park good-naturedly came to be called, discovered that many rides and attractions were playful or fiendish variations of familiar amusement park pleasures. Thus the merry-go-round included an all-white horse that turned out to be a bucking bronco, around a high curve the roller coaster left the tracks and soared over a twenty-foot gap to another set of tracks (such at least was the thrilling sensation, although in fact the cars were supported from beneath by hinged beams attached to the coaster frame), the funhouse mirrors turned people into hideous, frightening monsters, and the Ferris wheel, at the climax of the ride, dropped slowly from its stationary supports and rolled back and forth along a track that left room for the bottommost cars to pass unharmed. In the same spirit the architecture was more extravagant—the front roller-coaster cars were supplied with carved dragon’s heads, the Old Mill began in the sneering mouth of an ogre, a papier-mâché mountain called the Haunted Grotto opened at a cave flanked by thirty-foot naked giantesses whose legs and arms were encircled by giant snakes—and the stage properties for the actors were more sinister, the actor-drunks rowdier, the false prostitutes more brazen, some going so far as to lure customers into back rooms that turned out to be part of the House of Mirth. The sense that the rides were, in a controlled way, out of control, that they were exceeding bounds, that they were imitating nightmarish breakdowns while remaining perfectly safe, all this proved intoxicating to the crowds, who at the same time were urged to a feverish carnival spirit by the winking electric lights, the artificial night sky, the crash of artificial waves, the sense of a vast underground adventure not bound by the rules of ordinary parks.

  Despite the enthusiastic reception of Sarabee’s New Paradise Park by Coney Island pleasure-seekers, by journalists, and by a number of distinguished foreign visitors, several critical voices were raised during the first months, and not only from the ranks of observers who might be expected to cast doubt on the new institutions of mass pleasure such as the dance hall, the vaudeville theater, the movie house, and the amusement park. An article in the August 1915 issue of Munsey’s Magazine praised New Paradise Park for the boldness of its design and the ingenuity of its rides but paused to question whether Sarabee had not pushed the amusement park beyond its proper limit. Such developments as the leaping roller coaster and the rolling Ferris wheel, though of undoubted technological interest, threatened to make people bored with traditional rides and to encourage in them an unhealthy appetite for more extreme and dangerous sensations. It was in this sense that technology and morality became related issues, for a mass audience accustomed to violent mechanical pleasures was in danger of growing dissatisfied with the routines of everyday life and especially with their jobs, a dissatisfaction that in turn was bound to lead to a desire for more extreme forms of release. For finally the carefully engineered mechanical excitements and sensual stimulations of Sarabee’s park were not and could not be satisfying, but were in the nature of a cheat, an ingenious illusion that left people secretly restless and unappeased. The unsigned article concluded by wondering whether this abiding restlessness was not the true aim of the great amusement-park showman, in whose interest it was to create an audience perpetually hungry for the unfruitful pleasures he knew so well how to provide.

  Even as such questions were being raised by voices skeptical of the new mass culture in general and of New Paradise Park in particular, it was rumored that Sarabee and his staff were at work on new plans, and there were those who said that Sarabee would never rest until he had carried the amusement park to its farthest limit of expression.

  The new stage in the evolution of Paradise Park was not completed for two years, during which attendance increased even as war threatened. Unlike the upper park, the underground park was not required to close after the summer season, and Sarabee was able to run it at a profit through mid-November, after which the thinning crowds forced him to close for the winter. In the profitable season of 1916 three new rides appeared in the underground park, including a Ferris wheel supplied with paired carousel horses instead of seats, while in the upper park small signs of a disturbing development first became noticeable. The rides, although still in operation, were no longer replaced by new ones; the high roller coaster suffered a mechanical breakdown and was shut down; here and there a booth stood empty. Although the lawns and paths around the famous rotundas were kept clean and neat, grass grew wild in far corners of the park, and occasional patches of rust appeared on brightly painted steel frames.

  It was in the expanded park of 1917 that Sarabee achieved what many called the fulfillment of his dream, although a few voices were raised in dissent. Visitors to the famous underground park discovered, in scattered and unlikely locations—on the beach, in bathhouses, behind game booths, under the roller coaster—some two dozen escalators leading down. The simple escalators led to a second underground level where a puzzling new park had been created—a pastoral park of oak and beech woodlands, winding paths, peaceful lakes, rolling hills, flowering meadows, babbling brooks, wooden footbridges, and soothing waterfalls: a detailed artificial landscape composed entirely of plaster and pasteboard (except for an occasional actor-shepherd with his herd of real sheep), illuminated by the light of electric lanterns with colored glass panes, and inviting the tired reveler to solitude and meditation. This deliberate emphasis on pleasures opposed to those of the amusement park was not lost upon visitors, who savored the contrast but could not overcome a sense of disappointment. That carefully arranged dissatisfaction was in turn overcome when the visitor on his ramble discovered an opening in a hill, or a doorway in an old oak, or a tunnel in a riverbank, all of which contained stone steps that led down to another level, where at the end of rocky passageways with mossy mouths a brilliant new amusement park stretched away.

  Here in a masterful mingling of attractions visitors were invited to ride the world’s first spherical Ferris wheel; experience the thrilling sensation of being buried alive in a coffin in the Old Graveyard; visit a Turkish palace, including the secret rooms of the seraglio with over six hundred concubines; ride the exciting new Wild Wheel Coaster; visit an exact reproduction of the Alhambra with all its pillars, arches, courtyards, and gardens, including the seventy-five-foot-high dome of the Salo de los Embajadores and the Patio de los Leones with its alabaster fountain supported by twelve white marble lions; enter the world’s most frightening House of Horrors with its unforgettable Hall of Rats; witness the demonic possession of the girls at the witch trials of Salem; fly through the trees on the backs of mechanical monster-birds in the Forest of Night; ride a real burro down a replicated Grand Canyon trail; visit a bustling harbor containing reconstructions of a Nantucket whaling ship, a Spanish galleon, Darwin’s Beagle, a Viking long ship, Olive
r Hazard Perry’s flagship Lawrence, a Phoenician trireme, a Chinese junk, and Old Ironsides; see a departed dear one during a séance in the Medium’s Mansion; ride the sensational triple-decker merry-go-round; visit a medieval torture chamber and see actor-victims broken on the rack, crushed in the iron boot, and hoisted on the strappado; descend into a replica of the labyrinthine salt mines of Hallstatt, Austria; ride the death-defying Barrel, a padded iron barrel guided by cables along a white-water rapids and down a reconstruction of the Horseshoe Falls composed of real Niagara water; ride the Swirl-a-Whirl, the Hootchie-Kootchie, and the Coney Island Sling; and pay a heartwarming visit to the Old Plantation, where seventy-five genuine southern darkies (actually white actors in blackface) strummed banjos, danced breakdowns, ate watermelons, picked cotton, and sang spirituals in four-part harmony while a benign Master sat on a veranda between his blond-ringleted daughter and a faithful black mammy who from time to time said “Lawdee!”