By way of our months of COVID cabin fever, not less than we will take some pleasure in fantasizing about what we’re going to do as soon as we get off pandemic parole.
Lengthy earlier than Disneyland — even earlier than Walt Disney moved right here, in the summertime of 1923 — Angelenos had the selection of dozens of themed mini-amusement parks proper right here.
In carnival L.A., you may go to not only one however two ostrich farms, not only one however two non-public zoos, a monkey farm in Culver Metropolis and one other within the Cahuenga Cross, and not less than two lion farms: Jungleland, initially Goebel’s Lion Farm, in Thousand Oaks, and Homosexual’s Lion Farm, in El Monte, the place that MGM’s trademark snarling lions referred to as residence.
Curler coasters galore, Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, hot-air balloon rides, an alligator farm in Lincoln Park that was a goldmine for headlines like “Gators Now Hatching—Good For Pets or Baggage!” and “Saved From Demise In Alligator’s Jaws!”
Let’s simply say that zoning guidelines have been somewhat extra flaccid again then.
You, fixed readers, have requested about amusements of more energizing reminiscence — Beverly Park and Ponyland, the kiddie automobiles and pony rides at Beverly and La Cienega, a modest childhood adventure-land the place the Beverly Heart now welcomes giant automobiles and sells pony-hair sneakers.
Right here you’ve gotten a solution from Zev Yaroslavsky, the previous Los Angeles County supervisor and one in every of Beverly Park’s devotees, after I requested him to go full-on nostalgic:
“I used to go to Beverly Park for my birthday yearly as soon as we moved from Boyle Heights to the Fairfax space.” When builders purchased all of it as much as tear it down, “I used to be crushed. … I truly tried to steer the Beverly Heart builders to place the horse experience on the roof of their buying middle, however they couldn’t get the county well being division to approve it as a result of the eating places have been proper beneath the roof.
“I by no means purchased that clarification, however I had no leverage on the time to arm-wrestle them.”
What killed off all of our pleasure piers and wild animal grounds?
First, actual property costs — the easy-lucre attract of promoting five-to-an-acre homes as an alternative of five-for-a-buck admission tickets.
Second, fires. These legendary coastal enjoyable piers of Venice and Santa Monica have been wonders of creativeness and thrills, however they went up in cinders extra typically than previous Moscow. The final of them, the sea-meets-space-age Pacific Ocean Park, opened in Santa Monica in 1958, but it surely didn’t burn till after it closed 9 years later.
Third, legal responsibility. That Lincoln Park alligator haven wasn’t precisely watertight. A few of its thousand bellowing saurians obtained used to moseying across the Mission Highway neighborhood when floodwaters rose excessive sufficient to drift them free. However after World Warfare II packed L.A. with but extra individuals, the brand new households of their new houses obtained fairly agitated on the considered their baby-boom infants changing into gator bait. So the farm upped sticks for Buena Park in 1953, however that gig closed down in 1984.
Much less festively — as “Pets or Baggage!” promised — the animals have been handled like a crop of corn.
They have been rented out to film productions, which till 1939 didn’t have even the merest humane pointers. These cute silver foxes you may go to on the farms of Mt. Lowe have been skinned for flappers’ fur collars. The ostriches of South Pasadena gave rides to bolder vacationers, laid amusingly monumental eggs, offered plumes for followers and hats, and gave up their lives for wallets and belts.
Grider’s Birdland aviary on Central Avenue close to downtown offered guests each tickets and birds. Leroy Grider died in 1919, just a few years after offering one other public leisure: his divorce case. His spouse mentioned Grider habitually drank himself foolish, left the home to attend funerals of people that weren’t useless, and got here again sporting a unique swimsuit from the one he left residence in. The choose wasn’t shopping for it.
Don’t roll your eyes at these guileless pleasures. Do not forget that Los Angeles was a great distance from extra subtle cities, that the extensive world, so stuffed with the unique, was an costly place to go to, so these have been marvels certainly.
Probably the most magnificent and magical — the one which makes you yearn for a day of time journey — stood on 35 acres of farmland bounded by Grand and Primary, Washington and twenty first Road beneath downtown. It went first by the identify of Washington Gardens, then Chutes Park, and lastly Luna Park.
Over its 30-some years of life, it discovered time and area for political speechmaking and membership picnics, a lighted electrical fountain, an orchestra of fifty enjoying opera choices, German beer and Japanese tea gardens, a genius horse and a monkey circus. Lovely-baby contests usually left one triumphant winner and 19 seething moms.
Decorous women shrieked their means down the water toboggan “chutes.” Billiken’s Temple of Mirth and Joyland delivered G-rated guffaws. The Civil Warfare ironclads Monitor and Merrimack did miniature battle on a artifical lake. Tons of might bowl, a thousand might watch Vitascope “sparkles,” and 10,000 followers might cheer the Los Angeles Angels enjoying Pacific Coast League baseball.
In 1901, “Chinese language Day” on the Chutes welcomed a whole bunch of individuals archly referred to as “celestials.” This was no paragon of progressive thought. No quotation may be discovered for days dedicated to different nationalities or ethnic teams. And though the huge acreage was offered in 1912 to buyers who made noises about making a park for the town’s African Individuals, nothing got here of it, unsurprisingly, and by 1914, the park’s skeletons have been being dismantled for but extra growth.
What nearly all of those locations had in widespread is that they have been designed with decidedly good individuals in thoughts — good, hardworking Angeleno households. Not for L.A. the unsavory enticements of East Coast midways.
So what a gasoline that one straggling remnant of this age is within the footprint of the previous Lengthy Seaside Pike, which stood alongside a stretch of coast the place now you can discover the Aquarium of the Pacific, buying and a Ferris wheel.
The Pike opened in 1902. It survived makeovers and as many peaks and plunges in standing as a boardwalk curler coaster. The honky-tonk vibe of tattoo parlors and girlie joints catering to the shore-leave crowd helped the town determine in 1979 to not renew its lease.
The Pike had one final “boo!” left in it. In 1976, somebody shifting what he thought was a red-painted funhouse dummy discovered himself holding the indifferent arm of an actual, mummified man.
Elmer McCurdy had been the worst practice robber in Oklahoma. He blew up a protected full of $450 in silver cash, most of which melted and caught to the protected. In 1911, his final stick-up — mistaking a passenger practice for a freight practice carrying $400,000 — yielded a humiliating $46, some whiskey and the conductor’s watch.
The legislation rapidly caught up with him, and when he was shot useless, he was, once more humiliatingly, susceptible, and drunk. His unclaimed corpse started its 65 years of wandering by carnivals and sideshows. McCurdy now lies buried on Boot Hill. It’s the one in Guthrie, Okla., not the one at Disneyland.