The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  This continually changing landscape of rides, spectacles, exotic places, and reconstructed cultural wonders was connected by an intricate system of cable cars designed by Danziker, which crisscrossed the entire park and permitted visitors to gain an overview of the multitude of attractions and travel conveniently from one section to another. Danziker had also designed a scale-model subway, consisting of roofless cars the size of scenic-railway cars, driven by real engines and underlying the entire park, with twenty-four stations indicated by small kiosks in twenty-four different styles, including a circus tent, a Gothic cathedral, a tepee, a Persian summerhouse, a log cabin, and a Moorish palace.

  In addition to the striking transportation system, certain features of the new park drew attention in the popular press, in particular the group of sixteen new mechanical rides invented by Danziker, of which the most successful was the Chute Ball: an openwork iron sphere twenty feet in diameter that rolled along a steep, curving chute while riders inside were seated on twelve benches attached in such a way that they remained upright while revolving on a spindle. It was noted that most of the traditional rides had been carried to further degrees of evolution: in the Double Coaster, specially built roller-coaster cars rounding a turn suddenly rushed from the track and soared unsupported over dangerous gaps onto the track of a second roller coaster, and an immense and swiftly turning Airplane Swing released its planes one by one to fly through the air to a powerful plane-catching machine that resembled an iron octopus. The popular Wild Wheel was seen as a combination of roller coaster and Ferris wheel: along a sinuous coasterlike track rolled a great iron wheel, forty feet in diameter; the wheel’s two grooved rims turned along a pair of steel cables that had been suspended at intervals from wrought-iron posts and ran like telephone wires above the entire length of the dipping and rising track; up to one hundred riders sat strapped into wire cages on the inside of the wheel and turned as the wheel turned. But technological process was less evident in the mechanical rides, which at best were clever variations of familiar rides, than in the methods of transportation, in the advanced plumbing system in the public bathrooms, and in minor effects, such as the much-praised pack of mechanical rats in the House of Horrors.

  The new park was also praised for its many meticulous reconstructions of cultural landmarks and natural wonders, all of which made the similar attractions of Luna and the expositions seem crude and childish. Sarabee’s customers were invited to visit not only the Alhambra, but also the Porcelain Tower of Nanking, the catacombs of Alexandria, the Inca ruins of Cuzco, the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the palace of Kubla Khan, as well as an alp, a fjord, a stalactite cavern, a desert containing an oasis, a redwood forest, an iceberg, a sea grotto, and a bamboo grove inhabited by real pandas. One of the most admired replicas was that of the Edison Laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, with its three-story main building that contained machine shops, experimental rooms, and rooms for glassblowing and electrical testing, as well as the famous forty-foot-high library with its great fireplace and its displays of thousands of ores and minerals in glass-fronted cabinets, the whole building and its four outbuildings enclosed by a high fence with a guard at the entrance gate; the laboratory was supplied with a staff of sixty actor-assistants, and Edison himself was played by the Shakespearean actor Howard Ford, who was particularly good at imitating Edison’s famous naps—after which he would spring up refreshed and invent the phonograph or the electric light. But Sarabee’s mania for replication reached its culmination in an immense project that he designed with Otis Stilwell: a sixty-by-forty-foot model in wood and pasteboard of Paris, France, including over eighty thousand buildings and thirty thousand trees (representing thirty-six different species), the precise furnishings of every apartment, shop, church, café, and department store, all the fruits and vegetables in Les Halles and all the fishing nets in the Seine, all the horse-drawn carriages, motorcars, bicycles, fiacres, motor omnibuses, and electric streetcars, every tombstone in Père Lachaise cemetery and every plant in the Jardin des Plantes, over two hundred thousand miniature waxwork figures representing all social classes and occupations, and at the heart of the little city, an exact scale model of the Louvre, including not only every gallery, every staircase, every window mullion and ceiling decoration, but a precise miniature reproduction of every painting (oil on copper) and its frame (beechwood), every statue (ivory), and every artifact, from Egyptian sarcophagi to richly detailed eighteenth-century spoons so minuscule that they were invisible to the naked eye and had to be viewed through magnifying lenses.

  The 1917 park was widely regarded as the most complete, most successful form of the modern amusement park, its final and classic expression, which might be varied and expanded but never surpassed; and the sole question that remained was where Sarabee would go from here.

  Even as the classic park was being hailed in the press, Sarabee was said to be planning another park, about which he was more than usually secretive. At about the same time he began to lose interest in his older parks, which were placed under the management of a five-man board who were required to report to Sarabee only twice a year and who concentrated their attention on the first two underground parks and the pastoral park between them, while largely neglecting the aboveground park, which continued to decline. Patches of rust spread on the bridge-braces, paint peeled on the carousels, weeds grew under the roller coaster and between lanes of booths; and there were signs of deeper neglect. In certain stretches of the upper park, guards were removed and brought below; the remaining guards grew less vigilant, so that a dangerous element began to assert itself. A gang of actors, who seemed to have grown into their roles, prowled the darkened alleyways, where shanty brothels were said to spring up; and complaints were made against a gang of dwarf thugs who quit the Nightmare Railway and took up residence in a dark corner of the park called Dwarftown, where no one ventured after dusk.

  Sarabee’s new park, which opened in 1920 beneath the classic park of 1917, puzzled his admirers and caused lengthy reassessments of the showman’s career. Here at one blow he did away with the four central features of the modern amusement park—the mechanical ride (roller coaster, Swizzler), the exotic attraction (replicated village, market, garden, temple), the spectacle (Destruction of Carthage), and the carnival amusement (freak show, game booth)—and replaced them with an entirely new realm of pleasures. In a dramatic turn away from meticulous replication, Sarabee presented to customers in his new underground level a scrupulously fantastic world. And here it becomes difficult to be precise, for Sarabee banned photographs and the historian is forced to rely on often contradictory eyewitness accounts, tainted at times by rumor and exaggeration. We hear of dream-landscapes with gigantic nightmare flowers and imaginary flying animals, of impalpable pillars and edible disks of light. There are reports of sudden stairways leading to underwater kingdoms, of disappearing towns, of vast complex structures that resemble nothing ever seen before. Illusionary effects appear to have been widely used, for we hear of high walls that suddenly melt away, of metamorphoses and vanishings, and of a device that made a strong impression: a springing monster suddenly stops in midair, as if frozen, and then dissolves. This last suggests that Sarabee made use of hidden movie projectors to enhance his other effects. The entire park appears to have been a thorough rejection not only of the replica, the reconstruction, the exotic imitation, which had haunted amusement parks from the beginning, but also of the mechanical ride, which by its very nature proclaimed its kinship with the real world of steel, dynamos, and electrical power even while turning that world into play. Sarabee’s new park seized instead on the unreality and other-worldliness of amusement parks and carried fantastic effects to an unprecedented development. But Sarabee was careful to avoid certain traditional elements of fantasy that had become familiar and cozy. We therefore never hear of comfortable creatures like dragons, witches, ghosts, and Martians, or even of familiar elements of fantasy architecture such as pinnacles, towers, and battlements. Eve
rything is strange, unsettling, even shifting—for we hear of lighting effects that cause entire structures to be viewed differently, of uncanny replacements and transformations that resemble scene-shifting in a theater. Machinery appears to have been used solely in a disguised, invisible way; for only the presence of hidden machinery can explain certain repeatedly mentioned phenomena, such as solid islands floating in the air and a mysteriously sinking hill.

  The response by the public to Sarabee’s new park was curious: people descended, roamed about, uttered admiring sounds, felt a little puzzled, and finally returned to one of the higher parks. The opening-day attendance was the highest ever—over sixty-three thousand in the first two hours—but it quickly became apparent that crowds were not staying. By the second month receipts were far below those of even the uppermost park, in its state of increasing neglect. People seemed to admire the new park but not really to like it very much; they preferred the mechanical rides, the replicas, the booths, the barkers, the hot-dog stands, all of which had been rigorously banished from the new park. Sarabee, always alert to the mood of crowds, did what he had never done before: instead of making alterations, he launched a mid-season promotional campaign. Attendance rose for one week, then took a dramatic plunge, and long before the end of the season it was clear that the new park was a resounding failure.

  Sarabee met with his staff of advisers, who recommended three kinds of remedy: the addition of exciting new rides to enliven the somewhat inert park; the construction of a huge domed amphitheater in the center of the park, to contain twelve tiers of game booths, food stands, shops, restaurants, and penny arcades surrounding three revolving stages on which would be presented, respectively, a fun-house, an old-fashioned amusement park, and a three-ring circus; and the razing of the park and its replacement by an entirely new one on more conventional lines but with brand-new rides. Sarabee listened attentively, rejected all three recommendations, and shut himself up with Danziker and Stilwell to consider improvements that would enhance rather than alter the nature of the park. In an interview given in 1927, Danziker said that Sarabee had never seemed surer of himself than in this matter of the new park; and despite his own conviction that the park was a failure and that Sarabee should listen to the voice of the people, Danziker had laid his doubts aside and thrown himself willingly into Sarabee’s effort to save the park, which had already begun to be known as Sarabee’s Folly.

  The enhanced park opened the next season, to a massive publicity campaign that promised people thrills and pleasures of a kind they had never experienced before; a journalist writing in the New York Herald called the new park the most brilliant revolution in the history of the amusement park, with effects so extraordinary that they were worthy of the name of art. The next day a journalist on a rival paper asked scornfully: It may be art, but is it fun? He granted the superiority, even the brilliance, of Sarabee’s latest devices, but felt that Sarabee had lost touch with the amusement-park spirit, which after all was a popular spirit and thrived on noise, laughter, and rough-and-tumble effects. Within a month it was obvious that the refurbished park was not a success. Sarabee continued to run it at a loss, refused to alter it in any way, and began to spend several hours a day walking in the shifting dream-perspectives of his nearly empty park, which still drew a small number of visitors, some of whom came solely in the hope of catching a glimpse of the famous entrepreneur. And a rumor began to grow that Sarabee was already making plans for an entirely new park, which would surpass his own most stunning creations and restore him to his rightful place as the Edison of amusement-park impresarios.

  In the world of commercial amusement, success is measured in profit; but it is also measured in something less tangible, which may be called approval, or esteem, or fame, but which is really a measure of the world’s compliance in permitting a private dream to become a public fact. Sarabee, who had made his fortune in department stores and had since made it many times over in his series of unrivaled parks, had always enjoyed the pleasurable sense that his dreams and inspirations were encouraged by the outer world, were so to speak confirmed and made possible by something outside himself that was greater than himself—namely, the mass of other people who recognized in his embodied dream their own vague dreams, who showered him with money as a sign of their pleasure, and for whom he was, in a way, dreaming. His newest park was Sarabee’s first experience of commercial failure—his first experience, that is, of losing the world’s approval, of dreaming the wrong dream. His peculiar stubbornness may be explained in many ways, but one way is simply this, that he refused to believe what had happened. He kept expecting the crowds to come round. When it became clear they wouldn’t, he was already so soaked in his dream that he could not undream it. This is only another way of suggesting that Sarabee, whatever he was, was not cynical; his showmanship, his shrewd sense of what was pleasing to crowds, his painstaking efforts to adjust his inventions in the direction of wider and wider audiences, were only the practical and necessary expression of a cause he thoroughly believed in.

  Admirers of Sarabee praised the failed park as a sign of his originality and of his growing independence from the corruptions of mass taste; critics regretted it as a sign of decline, of increasing remoteness from common humanity; but both camps agreed that the failure was a crucial moment in Sarabee’s career, a moment that whetted their appetite for his next advance. For there was never any question of that. As Sarabee wandered the shifting illusions of his nearly deserted park, disguised as a weeping clown, or a journalist, or an old man with a cane, who dared to imagine that he hadn’t already begun to plan another park?

  It was about this time that the board of managers made an effort to save the declining upper park, if only because it served as entrance to the lower levels. Guards in maroon jackets were posted along the paths leading to the rotundas. The high grass was trimmed at the base of the openwork iron towers and under the roller coaster, bare patches were seeded and paths new-tarred, booths cleaned and painted, rust on bridge-braces removed, roller-coaster tracks repaired and old cars replaced with shiny new ones. Only at the far corners of the park, in the dark, twisting alleys of Dwarftown or the decaying lanes inhabited by unsavory actors, did the board abandon its efforts at restoring order and permit a shantytown to flourish among the weeds, the refuse, the broken lights.

  Eyewitness accounts of the new park, which opened on May 19, 1923, contradict themselves so sharply that it is difficult to know what was imagined and what was actually there, but the reports all suggest that Sarabee’s new level had a deliberately provocative air, as if he had set out to construct a sinister amusement park, an inverted park of dark pleasures. We know that visitors were given a choice: either to pass through the other parks or to descend directly in any of the thirty-six elevators that had been installed on the outside of the great upper wall. Those who chose the new elevators found themselves in large, lantern-lit elevator cars operated by masked attendants costumed like devils. We do not know exactly where the Costume Pavilions were located, although it appears that visitors were urged to assume a disguise before passing through red-curtained archways into an almost dark world. The park was lit only by red and ocher lights that dimly illuminated the midnight towers, the looming buildings and black alleys, where whispers of barkers in dark doorways and bursts of honky-tonk music were punctuated with darker noises—howls, harsh voices, clashes of glass. It was a world both alluring and disturbing, a dark underworld of uncertain pleasures that made people hesitate on the threshold before deciding to lose themselves in the dark.

  However exaggerated some of the accounts may be, or confused by the presence of actors and stunt men, it is clear that the park was intended to startle and shock. Many visitors simply left in anger and disgust. But large numbers remained to stroll about uneasily, peering into archways, lingering in the dark alleys, looking about as if fearful of being caught, while still others abandoned themselves utterly to the extreme and dubious pleasures of the park. Such abandon
ment, such release from the constraints of the upper parks, is precisely what the park seems actively to have encouraged—hence the importance of the Costume Pavilions, which, apart from adding color and humor, served the more serious purpose of encouraging people to assume new identities. The park appears to have deliberately offered itself as a series of temptations; the crowds were continually invited to step over the very line carefully drawn in Sarabee’s other parks. The complaints of scandalized visitors resulted in two separate police investigations, each of which turned up nothing, although critics of the investigation pointed out that Sarabee was more than capable of disguising the true nature of his amusements and that in any case the head of the investigations was a former roller-coaster operator in the upper park—a charge that was never substantiated.