The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  In the face of questionable and conflicting evidence it is difficult to know how to assess the many eyewitness reports, which include disturbing accounts of a House of Horrors so frightening that visitors are reduced to fits of hysterical weeping, of fun-house mirrors that show back naked bodies in obscene postures. We hear of smoky sideshows in which the knife thrower pierces the wrists of the spangled woman on the turning wheel and the sword-swallower draws from his throat a sword red with blood. We hear of rides so violent that people are rendered unconscious or insane, of a House of Eros filled with cries of terror and ecstasy. There are reports of troubling erotic displays in a Palace of Pleasure, where female visitors fitted with special harnesses are said to drop through trapdoors into transparent pillars of glass sixty feet high, which stand in a great hall filled with masked men and women who shout and cheer at the swift but harness-controlled falls that send skirts and dresses swirling high above the hips—an erotic display that is said to take on an eerie beauty as twenty or thirty women fall screaming in the great hall lit by red, blue, and green electric lights. We hear of a Lovers’ Leap in which unhappy lovers chain their wrists together and jump to their deaths before crowds standing behind velvet ropes, of a Suicide Coaster built to leave the track at its highest curve and plunge to destruction in a dark field. There is talk of a Palace of Statues divided into a labyrinth of small rooms, in which replicas of famous classical statues are said to satisfy unspeakable desires. We hear of disturbing prodigies of scale-model art, such as an Oriental palace the size of a child’s building block, filled with hundreds upon hundreds of chambers, corridors, stairways, dungeons, and curtained recesses, and containing over five thousand figures visible only with the aid of a magnifying lens, who exhibit over three thousand varieties of sexual appetite, and there are reports of a masterful miniature of Paradise Park itself, carved out of beechwood and revealing every level in rigorous detail, from the festive upper bridges with their rides, brass bands, and exotic villages to the most secret rooms of the darkest pleasure palaces in the blackest depths of the lowest level, containing over thirty thousand figures in sharply caught attitudes, the whole concealed under a silver thimble. Even taking exaggeration into account, what are we to make of a Children’s Castle in which girls ten and eleven years old are said to prowl the corridors costumed as Turkish concubines, Parisian streetwalkers, and famous courtesans and lure small boys and girls into hidden rooms? What are we to think of deep pleasure-pits into which visitors are encouraged to leap by howling, writhing devils, or of a Tunnel of Ecstasy, a House of Blood, a Voyage of Unearthly Delights? From these and similar reports, however unreliable, it seems clear that the new park invited violations of an extreme kind, and carried certain themes to a dark fulfillment. But the park seems never to have been intrinsically unsafe; rather, the dangers lay in the rides and pleasure palaces themselves, and not in the promenades and alleys, where the costumed crowds were never violent and where serious troublemakers were led away by masked guards and dropped into straw-filled dungeons.

  One of the more disturbing features of the new level, which quickly became known as Devil’s Park, was the public suicides, which many visitors claimed to have witnessed, although among the witnesses were those who said it was all a hoax performed by specially trained actors. Even the majority who believed the suicides to be real were divided among themselves, some expressing moral outrage and others asserting what they called a right to suicide. The issue was brought to a head by the spectacular death of sixteen-year-old Anna Stanski, a high-school student from Brooklyn who disguised herself as a man in a porkpie hat, pushed her way through the turnstile at the top of the new Lovers’ Leap, tore off her hat and set fire to her hair, and leaped flaming from the ledge before anyone could stop her—this at the very moment when a woman in her twenties and a man with wavy gray hair were having their wrists chained together by an attendant. Anna Stanski’s fiery death was witnessed by hundreds of visitors, many of whom saw her lying in a field with twisted arms and a broken neck, and it was reported the next day in major newspapers across the country. The park management, forced to defend itself, argued that Anna Stanski was a troubled young woman with a history of depressive insanity, that those who accused the park of promoting public suicides were now in the odd position of having to admit that Anna Stanski’s suicide actually saved two lives, since it discouraged the chained lovers from pursuing their leap, and that the park was no more responsible for her death than the City of New York was responsible for the deaths of those who leaped almost daily from its bridges and skyscrapers. Critics were quick to point out that there was a sharp distinction to be made between the City of New York and an immoral “amusement” that actively encouraged suicide, while others, scornful of the claim that lives had been saved, questioned whether the two so-called lovers were not rather actors hired to stir the passions of the crowd. Their scorn was turned against them by the park’s defenders, who argued that if in fact the lovers were actors, then the park could not be accused of encouraging suicide; and they argued further that, in comparison with the number of accidental deaths that occur in all amusement parks and are accepted in good faith as part of the risk, the number of suicides in Sarabee’s park, whether staged or real, was trivial and negligible, despite the grotesque attention paid to them by antagonists whose real enemy was not suicide at all but freedom pure and simple. The episode was soon overshadowed by a hotel fire in Brighton, in which fourteen people died, and the murder of minor racketeer Giambattista Salerno in a Surf Avenue seafood restaurant.

  Responses to the new park were sharply divided, but even outraged critics who considered the park a moral disgrace admitted that Sarabee, while forfeiting the respect he had earned with his earlier parks, was a shrewd showman who knew how to appeal to the debased tastes of the urban masses. Several commentators made an effort to connect the park with the new postwar freedom, the collapse of middle-class morality, the indiscriminate rush toward pleasure—in short, the collective frenzy of which Devil’s Park was but the latest symptom. In an attempt to assess the park and place it in Sarabee’s career, one critic argued that it was the embittered showman’s cynical response to his failed park: thoroughly disillusioned by failure, Sarabee had created an anti-park, a deliberately crude and savage park pandering to the most despicable instincts of the crowd. This interpretation, which attracted a good deal of attention, was answered incisively in a long article by Warren Burchard, who after an eleven-year silence on the subject of amusement parks returned to the charge and argued that Devil’s Park, far from being an exception in Sarabee’s career, was the latest expression of an unbroken line of development. Each park, the argument ran, carried the idea of the amusement park to a greater extreme. This remained true even of the failed park, which, despite its rejection of the mechanical ride, moved in the direction of newer and more intense pleasures. The history of Sarabee’s parks, Burchard argued, was nothing less than an uninterrupted movement in a single direction, of which Devil’s Park was not simply the latest but also the final development. For here Sarabee had dared to incorporate into his park an element that threatened the very existence of that curious institution of mass pleasure known as the amusement park: namely, an absence of limits. After this there could be no further parks, but only acts of refinement and elaboration, since any imaginable step forward could result only in the complete elimination of the idea of an amusement park. Burchard’s argument was taken up and modified by a number of other critics, but it remained the classic defense of Devil’s Park, against which opponents of Sarabee were forced to shape their counterarguments.

  The moral outrage directed against the new park, the conflicting reports, the rumors and exaggerations, the death of Anna Stanski, all served to pique the public’s curiosity and increase attendance, despite the many people who declared they would never return; and such evidence as we have suggests that many of Sarabee’s most outspoken opponents did in fact return, again and again, lured by forbidden plea
sures, by the protection of masks and disguises, by the sheer need to know.

  Even as controversy raged, and investigation threatened, and attendance rose, rumor had it that Sarabee was planning still another park. It was said that Sarabee was working on a ride so extraordinary that to go on it would be to change your life forever. It was said that Sarabee was developing a magical or mystical park from which the unwary visitor would never return. It was said that Sarabee was creating a park consisting of small, separate booths in which, by means of a special machine attached to the head, each immobile visitor would experience the entire range of human sensation. It was said that Sarabee was creating an invisible park, an infinite park, a park on the head of a pin. The intense and often irresponsible speculation of that winter was a clear sign that Sarabee had touched a nerve; and as the new season drew near and the last mounds of snow melted in the shadows of the bathhouses, small weekend crowds began to arrive in order to walk around the famous white wall, to stare at the great gates, the high towers, the covered elevator booths, to hover about the closed park in the hope of piercing its newest secret.

  The opening was set for Saturday, May 31, 1924, at 9 A.M.; as early as Friday evening a line began to form. By 6:30 the following morning the crowd was so dense that mounted police were called in to keep order. The eyewitness reports differ in important details, but most agree that shouts were heard from inside the park at about seven o’clock. A few minutes later the gates opened to let out a stream of workmen, concessionaires, actors, spielers, Mbuti tribesmen, ride operators, dwarfs, and maroon-jacketed guards, all of whom were gesticulating and shouting. The first alarm was sounded shortly thereafter, and witnesses recalled seeing a thin trail of smoke at the top of the wall. Within twenty minutes the entire park was in flames. The great white wall, a highly flammable structure of lath and staff that had cost a small fortune to insure, quickly became a vast ring of fire; policemen cleared the streets as chunks of flaming wall fell like meteors and threw up showers of sparks. By the third alarm, fire engines were arriving from every firehouse in Brooklyn. As part of the wall collapsed, spectators could see the flaming rides within: the merry-go-round with its fiery roof and its circle of burning horses, the hellish Ferris wheel turning in a sheet of fire, the collapsing bridges, the blackened roller coaster with its blazing wooden struts, the fiery booths and falling towers. Suddenly a cry went up: from one of the rotundas leading to the first underground park, there rose a flock of flaming seagulls, crying a high, pained cry. Some of them flew in crazed circles directly into the crowd, where people screamed and covered their faces and beat the air with their hands.

  By nine in the morning firemen were fighting only to contain the raging fire and save neighboring property; hoses poured water on the blistering facades of side-street boardinghouses, and a police launch was sent to rescue nine fishermen trapped at the end of a blazing pier. Suddenly a sideshow lion, its mane on fire, leaped over a flaming section of wall and ran screaming in pain into the street. Three policeman with drawn revolvers chased it into a parking lot, where it sprang onto the hood of a parked car. They shot it twenty times in the head and then smashed its skull with an ax. By ten o’clock a portion of ground caved in and fell to the park below, which was also in flames; spectators from the tops of nearby buildings could see down into a pit of fire, which was consuming the two hotels, the six bathhouses, the shops, the restaurants, the underground roller coaster and House of Mirth. The fiery lower pier fell hissing into the artificial ocean, throwing up dark clouds of acrid smoke; and from the flames there rose again a flock of crazed and shrieking gulls, their backs and wings on fire, turning and spinning through the smoke and flames, until at last, one by one, they plunged down like stones.

  By noon the fire was under control, although it continued to rage on every level all afternoon and far into the night. By the following morning Paradise Park was a smoking field of rubble and wet ashes. Here and there rose a few blackened and stunted structures: the melted metal housing of a Ferris-wheel motor, the broken concrete pediment of some vanished ride, clumps of curled iron. Somehow—the papers called it a miracle—only a single human life was lost, although innumerable lions, tigers, monkeys, pumas, elephants, and camels perished in the fire, as well as the seagulls of the first underground level. The single body, discovered in the debris of the deepest level and damaged beyond recognition, was assumed by many to be Sarabee himself, an assumption that seemed confirmed by the disappearance of the showman and the discovery, in his Surf Avenue office, of a signed letter transferring ownership of the park to Danziker in the event of Sarabee’s death. Some, it is true, insisted that the evidence was by no means conclusive and that Sarabee had simply slipped away in another disguise. Although the cause of the fire was never determined, a strong suspicion of arson was never put to rest; reports from inside the park suggested that the fire had not spread from one level to another but had broken out on all levels simultaneously. The papers vied with one another in proclaiming it Sarabee’s Greatest Show, or Another Sarabee Spectacular; the crude headlines may have contained a secret truth. For as Warren Burchard expressed it in a memorable obituary article, the fiery destruction of Paradise Park was the “logical last step” in a series of increasingly violent pleasures: after the extreme inventions of Devil’s Park, only the dubious thrill of total destruction remained. Sarabee, the article continued, recognizing the inevitability of the next step, had designed the fire and arranged his own death, since to survive the completed circle of his parks was unthinkable. The historian can only note that such arguments, however attractive, however irrefutable, are not subject to the laws of evidence; and that we know as fact only that Paradise Park was utterly destroyed in a conflagration that lasted some twenty-six hours and caused an estimated eight million dollars in property damage.

  It is nevertheless true that the brief history of Paradise Park, when separated from legend, may lead even the most cautious historian to wonder whether certain kinds of pleasure, by their very nature, do not seek more and more extreme forms until, utterly exhausted but unable to rest, they culminate in the black ecstasy of annihilation.

  The ruined park was repossessed by the City of New York, which filled in the underground levels and turned the upper level into an extension of the parking lot that covered the remainder of the old Dreamland property; the enlarged parking lot became a public park in 1934 under the administration of Fiorello La Guardia and has remained a park to this day. Here and there in shady corners of the park, on hot summer afternoons, it is said that you can feel the earth move slightly and hear, far below, the faint sound of subterranean merry-go-rounds and the cries of perishing animals.

  In 1926 a paper presented by Coney Island historian John Carter Dixon to the Brooklyn Historical Society revealed that no one called Warren Burchard had ever worked for the Brooklyn Eagle. Later evidence uncovered by Dixon showed that the name had been invented by Sarabee as part of a promotional campaign. Although the author of the Burchard articles is unknown, Dixon suggests that they were written by one of Sarabee’s press agents and touched up by Sarabee himself, who appears to have had a hand in his own obituary notice.

  Seventy years after the destruction of Paradise Park, Sarabee’s legacy remains an ambiguous one. His most daring innovations have been ignored by later amusement-park entrepreneurs, who have been content to move in the direction of the safe, wholesome, family park. Sarabee, himself the inventor of a classic park, was driven by some dark necessity to push beyond all reasonable limits to more dangerous and disturbing inventions. He comes at the end of the era of the first great American amusement parks, which he carried to technological and imaginative limits unsurpassed in his time, and he set an example of restless invention that has remained unmatched in the history of popular pleasure.

  A book of photographs called Old New York, published by Arc Books in 1957 and long out of print, contains fourteen views of Paradise Park: nine pictures of the upper level, including two of Paradise
Alley, and five of the first underground level. The one most evocative of a vanished era shows a group of male bathers in sleeveless dark bathing costumes standing with their hands on their hips in the artificial surf before the crisscross iron braces of the underground pier, with its gabled wooden roof, its arches and turrets, its flying flags. Some of the men stare boldly and even sternly at the camera, while others, with powerful shoulders and thick mustaches, are smiling in an easy, boyish-manly, innocent way that seems at one with the knee-high water, the pier, the ocean air, the unseen festive park.

  KASPAR HAUSER SPEAKS

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of Nuremberg. Distinguished guests. It is with no small measure of amazement that I stand before you today, on the occasion of the third anniversary of my arrival in your city. When I recall the brutish creature, half idiot and half animal, who appeared suddenly in your streets that day—a creature jabbering unintelligibly—stumbling—weeping—blinded by daylight—a hunched and stunted creature—lost—unutterably lost—a creature who from his earliest years had been shut up in a dark dungeon—and when I next consider the frock-coated and impeccably cravated young gentleman you see before your eyes—then, I confess, I am seized by a kind of spiritual dizziness. It’s as if I were nothing but a dream, a fantastic dream—your dream, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. For whatever I may be, I who was buried deeper than the dead, I am always mindful how very much I am your creation. Through the patient guidance of Professor Daumer, to whom my gratitude is boundless, I have been formed in your image. I am you—and you—and you—I who only a few short years ago was lower than any beast.