New PDF release: The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

By Gary Cross, John K. Walton

Through the first a part of the 20 th century millions of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island looking for a unencumber from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. at the different aspect of the Atlantic, British staff headed off to the seashore hotel of Blackpool for leisure and leisure. although, via the center of the century, a brand new form of park started to emerge, supplying well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and punctiliously orchestrated company leisure. Contrasting the studies of Coney Island and Blackpool with these of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. pass and John ok. Walton discover playful crowds and the pursuit of delight within the 20th century to provide a transatlantic viewpoint on altering rules approximately relaxation, type, and mass culture.

Blackpool and Coney Island have been the definitive playgrounds of the commercial operating category. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that provided various pleasures and thrills from curler coaster rides and freak exhibits to bounce halls and dioramas of unique locales. Responding to the hot funds and mobility of the operating type, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool provided the playful crowd an "industrial saturnalia."Cross and Walton catch the attractions and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and look at how those "Sodoms via the sea" flouted the social and cultural established order. The authors additionally learn the resorts' very diversified fates as Coney Island has now develop into a trifling shadow of its former self whereas Blackpool maintains to entice viewers and provide new attractions.

The authors additionally discover the stories provided at Disneyland and Beamish, a background park that celebrates Britain's commercial and social heritage. whereas either parks borrowed components from their predecessors, in addition they tailored to the longings and issues of postwar customer tradition. beautiful to middle-class households, Disney supplied crowds an opportunity to bask in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a less complicated time. At Beamish, crowds accumulated to discover an break out from the fragmented and hedonistic lifetime of smooth society in a reconstructed realm of the previous the place neighborhood traditions and nature be successful.

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Extra resources for The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

Sample text

A partnership between Albert Ellis (a phrenologist on the Golden Mile) and J. W. 92 The key figure, however, was William George Bean; and here we see an even more direct transatlantic link. Bean was a Londoner, born in 1868, but moved to the United States at 19 years of age and found his way into the Philadelphia amusement machinery industry. When he returned to England in the mid-1890s, he operated a bicycle railway, eventually locating along side Outhwaite’s carousel in Blackpool. 93 Like its Coney Island counterparts, the syndicate under Bean’s leadership not only operated its own rides but also rented sites to others for stalls and mechanical rides.

A land company had combined several smaller holdings together in the early 1860s to control development along the shoreline and justify the building of the Imperial Hotel. 28 The local equivalents of Brighton and Manhattan Beaches actually lay outside the Blackpool boundary, going southeastward along the estuary of the River Ribble. Lytham was a classic case where a wealthy squire preferred to develop his property in an attractive, planned way, while St Anne’s, a 24 making the popular resort product of a speculative land company, offered a similar controlled environment to respectable families.

New American cities showed off their growth and wealth in a long series of exhibitions beginning in Philadelphia in 1876, followed by Chicago (1893), Nashville (1897), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. 70 Moreover, American exhibitions were especially willing to compromise with popular tastes and became more so over time. Freaks were an essential part of these otherwise uplifting exhibitions from 1876. 5 The freak show, preferably including an element of sexual titillation, survived as a sideshow attraction through the twentieth century on Blackpool’s Golden Mile.

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