by Dawn Raffel
At the end of our conversation, he said, “I am not going to write this book. If you come out to California, I will share the tapes with you.”
A DREAM IN FLAMES
Coney Island, 1911
If you want to see something lost rise up again, you can go to the Coney Island Museum and view an exquisite reproduction of Thompson and Dundy’s Luna Park, made with 3-D printing. It’s the passion project of an artist named Fred Kahl—aka The Great Fredini—who spent more than ten thousand hours creating the 1:13 scale model. You might gaze on its lacy minarets, its balconies and towers, its perfect plastic people, and long to shrink yourself into a past where you’ve never been.
The love of imagined places fuels extraordinary creativity. We spend our days searching or feeling nostalgia for streets we’ve never walked, for sights seen only in photographs, for lives we’ve never lived. The Germans call it Sehnsucht. We’ll never find what we’re looking for, but the pursuit of it has us traversing the globe, or peering into a microscope, or scaling a height, or layering paint on canvas, or stumbling after a ghost.
* * *
—
The last time anyone saw Dreamland standing was Friday, May 26, 1911. William Reynolds, its owner, was determined to finally make his money pit of a theme park succeed. Dreamland ought to be bringing in a fortune, he thought—it was bigger and brighter than Steeplechase or Luna Park—but year after year it confounded him with lousy returns.
Reynolds didn’t apprehend that success wasn’t simply a matter of concessions. It was the way you played the public. As George C. Tilyou’s nephew Edo McCullough would write in Good Old Coney Island, “At Steeplechase, if the fact that the mayor was coming on a visit failed to catch attention, somehow the word would leak out that there was a plot to assassinate him in the park, and business would zoom.” Likewise, Frederic Thompson would turn the decision to dispose of an elephant into a culture-searing spectacle. “But should Dreamland boast that a local eccentric had invented a new kind of airplane and that a local character had been prevailed upon to fly it from the park to Far Rockaway, it would invariably turn out that the plane would ingloriously pump straight into the drink, and the crowd would shrug its shoulders and disperse, probably to Luna.”
Reynolds persisted. For the 1911 season, he’d ditched the all-white theme, repainting the buildings cream and fire-engine red. Eighty-odd lions, leopards, hyenas, and other wild beasts were on-site. Samuel Gumpertz, the manager of the Lilliputian Village, was promoted and put in charge of running the whole operation. Gumpertz was notorious for bringing Igorrote “savages”—indigenous Filipinos first displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair—to Coney Island for a season, an enterprise that got out of control when the tribespeople wanted to leave (and finally went on the lam). If nothing else, Gumpertz had a talent for stirring up drama.
Memorial Day weekend was make-or-break for every showman hoping to survive at Coney Island. Two months earlier, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire left 146 workers dead, most of them young women. New Yorkers needed a reprieve from grief. On Friday, May 26, with the forecast predicting ideal, breezy weather for Saturday morning’s season opening, George Tilyou, Frederic Thompson, and Samuel Gumpertz each hoped to get a decent night’s sleep. (Thompson’s partner, Elmer Dundy, had died in 1907.)
Late that night, a handful of people were awake at Dreamland. At the infant incubator concession, Solomon Fischel had just received a baby from a hospital. This brought the number of patients to five; it would grow as the season went on. Next door was a ride called Hell Gate, which took ticket holders in boats through a dimly lit cavern. It leaked, and workers were putting in overtime to fix it.
By 1:30 a.m., Dr. Fischel had gone to bed. Louise Recht must have been dreaming somewhere other than Dreamland that evening. Instead, a head nurse identified only as Miss Graf was on duty. All was quiet at Coney Island, with only the creatures of the sea scurrying on the beach and the bleary men at Hell Gate toiling thanklessly away. Then an exhausted worker knocked over a bucket of tar. Boiling hot. In a minute, the work lights sizzled and shorted, and Hell Gate burst into flames.
Dreamland was a disaster waiting to happen, with its million electric bulbs and its surface elegance masking shoddy construction (a situation permitted thanks to well-oiled political connections). The breeze that had promised to make for a beautiful opening day carried the flames with astonishing speed. And the water pressure was weak.* With the streams from the firemen’s hoses falling short, the inferno was heading straight for the infant incubators.
As the sky turned red and alarms rang out, The New York Times stopped the press. In the morning, it would report that all the babies had died.
* * *
—
They hadn’t. The best, most detailed description of what happened that night comes from Edo McCullough. As he recorded it, Miss Graf had been just about to wake the two wet nurses for the two a.m. feeding when Solomon Fischel ran into the nursery in his nightshirt. A police sergeant followed. Smoke poured in through the doorway as the doctor grabbed two babies, covering their heads with blankets to shield them. The nurses, still in nightgowns, each scooped up a child; a wet nurse named Anna Duboid grabbed her own newborn, and into the hellish night they fled.
In the utter chaos, the Times, along with everyone else, believed the babies had no chance. Ah, but this was always the story with these children. The initial grisly report stated that three had been carried out but suffocated, while “at least three other infants” were trapped inside. The next day’s paper ran a correction under the headline “All Well with the Babies.” Solomon Fischel explained that he and the nurses had rescued their patients and run to the home of a doctor named John Pierce. “He let us in and we put all five babies into one bed. Then the nursing took its regular course, and in five minutes the babies were as well off as if nothing had happened.” Later, he said, he took the babies by taxi to a hospital.
Martin Couney wasn’t quoted, which suggests he was out of town at one of his outposts; had he been home, he’d have picked up the phone and put a finger in the dial. He would have wanted to manage the damage, which was considerable, despite Solomon Fischel’s reassurance.
Property destruction was the least of it. The initial report of fatalities had ignited the wrath of John D. Lindsay, the president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Despite having been quickly apprised that the babies were safe, he’d dashed off an angry letter to the editor, which ran under Dr. Fischel’s account. “That the infants who were on exhibition in the Dreamland incubators were not sacrificed to the fire which destroyed that resort is a mere chance,” he raged, characterizing the show as “purely mercenary, violating every principle of medical or professional ethics.” He stated that the Society had previously investigated the incubators and had attempted, legislatively, to shut them down in 1906. He concluded with the declaration that such work should be conducted only in hospitals.
But the work wasn’t being done in hospitals. By the late 1800s, lying-in hospitals, such as the one Dr. DeLee started in Chicago, had popped up in cities around the country, largely to care for poor women who couldn’t pay for a private doctor or midwife to come to their home. New York had both the Asylum for Lying-In Women and Sloane Hospital, which had just moved to a new, seven-story building. Sloane would eventually morph into the obstetrics and gynecology ward at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. But expectant mothers with any sort of means chose not to go to a lying-in hospital. The protocol was harsh. A few years earlier, a nurse trainee had recorded it: On admission, kerosene and ether were applied to the woman’s head, and her hair was washed with ammonia, then braided. Her nipples were cleaned with ether and Albolene. Her pubic hair was shaved unless she was a private patient, in which case it was clipped. After giving birth, she had to lie flat for twenty-four hours and couldn’t sit up for the first five days. She could consume only milk—no food—until t
wo full days had passed. For a woman who lived in a squalid, overcrowded tenement and whose days were filled with backbreaking physical labor, this may have been helpful. But someone with a comfortable home would give birth in her own bed.
Sloane Hospital had one hundred cribs for newborns, but it wasn’t equipped to care for fragile children in need of long-term care. Few hospitals were, which is why institutions such as the Infant Asylum and Babies Hospital were established in New York. The latter opened its doors in 1887. Eventually, it evolved into Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at New York-Presbyterian, becoming the sister of Sloane; today it is one of the world’s leading neonatal care centers. Early on, however, many of these hospitals’ patients were foundlings and children whose parents were indigent, and whatever money there was came from philanthropists and charities. At the time of the Dreamland fire, Babies Hospital and similar institutions were rejecting incubators in favor of less effective padded baskets or warm rooms. Fear of “hospitalism,” combined with the labor-intensive cleaning of the machines, argued in favor of an open-air setup. Even taking a baby out of an incubator for a diaper change required more effort than simply picking it up from a basket. Hospitals couldn’t spare nurses to sit all day and all night with a single child too weak to suckle. What Mr. Lindsay failed to note in his letter was that there wasn’t a choice to be made between a sideshow and an ideal situation. The choice, in many cases, was between a sideshow and letting the children die.
* * *
—
After the babies escaped in the arms of Dr. Fischel and his nurses, Dreamland burned to rubble. And the night saw gruesome deaths. When the fire broke out, the animal keepers freed their charges from their cages, leading them into the main oval arena in order to wait out the crisis. An elephant named Little Hip refused to budge. He would move only under orders from his trainer, who’d been summoned. The animals in the oval stayed calm—until all the lights blew out and the flames shot higher into the night. As it became increasingly obvious that the firemen were fighting a losing battle, the trainers started frantically crating and moving panicked beasts. They managed to get five lionesses and four leopards to safety, and they led the Shetland ponies out of the park by blindfolding them.
Then Dreamland’s massive tower collapsed, shooting sparks in every direction. By now the animals were crazed, and any hope of saving them was gone. Some of the trainers stayed and shot as many as they could, sparing them from burning to death. Soon the trainers had to run for their own lives. Little Hip’s trainer, who’d raced to the park, had tears streaming down his face as he heard his beloved elephant trumpeting in terror, with no possibility of escape. A three-year-old Nubian lion ran burning through the streets, roaring in agony, with his mane on fire. Police shot twenty-four bullets into the lion’s flaming head, finally felling him with an axe.
* * *
—
Solomon Fischel’s Saint Bernard was locked for the night in his office on the midway. The doctor had tried to free the dog but was stopped by billowing smoke. Running past flames with his arms full of babies, he shouted to a fireman that his dog was trapped. In a moment of luck and valor, the fireman saved his pet.
But Solomon Fischel’s good fortune was coming to an end.
On October 18, 1913, two years after Dreamland burned, he would go to Manhattan’s City Hall with a woman named Anna Winter and sign a marriage license. At dinner that night, the forty-three-year-old doctor complained to his friends of feeling ill. Yet the couple went after sunset to a synagogue, where they said their vows in Russian. Next, they checked into a hotel with plans to stay for a couple of weeks. But at four a.m. on his wedding night, Solomon Fischel awoke with a terrible stomachache. Two hours later, he was dead.
The bride fled to her parents’ home in Brooklyn as the body lay in rigor mortis.
Louise Recht, learning of Solomon’s death, rushed to the hotel. The New York Times reported that “physical force had to be used to get her away from the body.” She was finally escorted home “in a hysterical condition.”
THE FORGOTTEN WOMAN
I had been wanting to pay my respects at Louise Recht’s grave, and finally, I got on the train and went. In her will she had stated, “It is my earnest wish and desire to be buried in the family plot of my good friends, Christopher and Belle Egan.”
Louise Recht had died with almost nothing and no one. Her only relations were nephews and nieces of predeceased siblings in France. A list of her debts consisted of the bill for her newspaper delivery and her Saturday Evening Post. She had set aside twenty-five dollars for Catholic masses.
As I came to the gate at Holy Cross Cemetery, I wished I had thought to bring flowers. Instead, I wandered empty-handed, and despite detailed directions from the woman in the cemetery’s office, I got lost. I found the correct row in the correct section, but then I’d count numbers of stones and come up short.
A man in an earthmover finally helped, directing me to a plot I had already passed at least twice. It took me a moment to register that this was the nurse’s grave. Whoever Christopher and Belle Egan were, she wasn’t buried with them. The marker was for the Hansin family, with five family members’ names engraved in the ornate stone. At the very bottom, nearest the ground, was “Amalie Louise Recht.”
I stood there a minute, thinking about all the children she’d held and fed and bathed and dressed and sat with through the night, all the wrists she’d slipped through a diamond ring that wasn’t hers. Someone had misspelled her name on her grave.
After a while I walked back to the cemetery office. “Just out of curiosity,” I asked the woman behind the desk, “is someone named Hildegarde Couney buried here?”
“What year?” she said. And then, “Yes, we have her.” She read off the plot number.
“Is that the same grave I just visited?” I asked. “Amelie Recht?”
She looked again. “Yes, it’s the same,” she said.
“But there isn’t any marker there for Hildegarde. There’s nothing at all that says she’s there.”
“Well, that’s where she is,” the woman said, before turning back to her paperwork.
BUILDING BETTER BABIES
Iowa and beyond, 1911
While Dreamland burned to ashes, a physician named Margaret Clark was cooking up something strange. She had been searching for an answer to a problem: How could Americans breed better children? A generation earlier, Étienne Tarnier claimed to have found inspiration at the zoo. Margaret Clark and her friend Mary Watts found theirs at the state fair. Just as farmers bred heifers and hogs hoping to win a blue ribbon, just as women baked blueberry pies for a prize, mothers might raise better babies for a competition.
Beauty pageants were nothing new, but the women envisioned a different, scientific measure of merit. Points would be awarded for measurable attributes: height, weight, head circumference, and other putative markers of desirable development. Clark and Watts debuted their competition at the 1911 Iowa State Fair—and then the contests spread.
Woman’s Home Companion took up the banner, launching a nationwide Better Baby Campaign in March of 1913. The magazine predicted that the initiative would “advance civilization by leaps and bounds” in as few as two generations. If women’s organizations and local authorities would kick in the money for sponsorship, the magazine would provide gold, silver, and bronze medals. At state fairs, the highest-scoring city baby and rural baby would each get one hundred dollars in gold. And every baby at every contest would receive a scorecard, pointing out its merits and shortfalls.
Panel on degenerates from the Century of Progress.
Hundreds of pediatricians participated as judges—measuring heads, peering in ears, tabulating scores. Within the first year, forty-five states (out of forty-eight then in the Union) had held a Better Baby competition. Mothers in rural areas and those too poor to pay for a pediatrician were lured by the promise o
f having their babies examined (at least superficially) by a physician, who might make an actual useful suggestion with regard to care or hygiene.
But the downside was appalling. As Alisa Klaus notes in her excellent history Every Child a Lion, “The baby health contest was essentially a eugenic concept, and in fact some women’s organizations sponsored what they called ‘eugenic contests’ or ‘eugenic exhibitions.’” In time, the scorecards included such criteria as “circumference of chest and abdomen; quality of skin, fat, and muscles; bones of skull, spine, chest, and limbs; shape of eyes and size of forehead; shape and patency of nose; shape and condition of jaw.” When it came down to judgment day at the state fair, a “perfect” infant could be only of Caucasian, Western European descent—essentially Aryan.*
True, some of the doctors who judged were focused solely on health and preventing birth defects. (Even Julius Hess himself served as a consulting physician in 1915.) Some had misgivings about their surroundings. But others were bent not only on breeding good seeds but also on ridding the nation of those they deemed bad. A Denver gynecologist named Mary Bates wrote of the contests in terms of her larger goal: to “speed the day when we can have scientific elimination before birth of the unfit, and someday the scientific culture of the fit.”
THE DAY OF COUNEY FINALLY ARRIVES
Lawrence and Carol Gartner had spent most of their waking hours in hospitals and classrooms in the Bronx and White Plains, New York, in Hyde Park in Chicago, and in Hammond, Indiana. Now they were settled south of San Diego, where snow never fell, and rain seldom did. Their bright, airy house at the end of a winding road was filled with light and colorful artwork. In their early eighties, the Gartners moved with the energy of people far younger. Larry, a slim man with a gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses, had dubbed our meeting “The Day of Couney.” Carol, who had retired as a professor of English and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Purdue University Calumet, turned out to be a Couney buff too. She had joined Larry in all his interviews; later, when I listened to the tapes, I would hear her posing some of the less medically oriented questions I’d have asked and think, Thank you.