Hoop-La: Ode to an archaic ride at Coney Island

August 30, 2023 11:28 AM

The Hoopla was a Razzle-Dazzle ride in the Pavilion of Fun at Coney Island's Steeplechase Park. Several dozen people sat on a ring suspended from a central pole, rather like a sit-down giant stride. It is documented in a newsreel, a painting and a postcard. The Pavilion of Fun was a vast, glass box, an ocean-front Crystal Palace erected by George Tilyou in 1909 and demolished by TFG's father in 1966 (although the Hoopla had been deleted twenty tears previously). See what it was like in this British Pathé Let's Go Coney! (Island) newsreel, which also has the Human Roulette Wheel and the Human Pool Table, but the Hoopla is shown at the very beginning.

Jeffrey Stanton, who compiled a lot of essential, early amusement park and World's Fair info into his westland.net site in the late 1990s, wrote a definitive History of Steeplechase Park. Scroll down to see the Hoopla painting, featuring the burly guys who kept it in motion, who apparently went airborne when they really got that thing going.

The newsreel footage was manipulated by Ken Jacobs in his "Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World" film, from 2006.
(trailer).

The Pavilion of Fun was closed in 1965, maybe to avoid competition with the pavilions of the Worlds Fair just to the north, in nearby Queens. In 1966, it was purchased and subsequently demolished by Fred Trump, to be replaced with a ritzy seaside apartment complex which never materialized.

Riding the last Razzle Dazzle, in England, a steam-powered contraption in Hollycombe, West Sussex.

posted by Rash (22 comments total)

A version of the Human Roulette Wheel still exists as the Teufelsrad, or "Devil's Wheel" at Oktoberfests and other festivals in Germany.

And it gets pretty insane when you add swinging obstacles, people throwing ropes at the participants and in some places...electrical shocks delivered through the metal bolts in the floor.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:47 AM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Faced with legal and community challenges from preservationists and organizations like the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, [Fred] Trump was unable to get a zoning variance to allow residential development on the property. Trump held a “Demolition Party,” hiring scantily clad models to parade in front of the park and encouraged guests to throw bricks at the stained glass windows of the historical Pavilion of Fun at Steeplechase. Then in the night, he bulldozed the amusement to the ground, thereby limiting any pending proceedings for landmarking... Every single Coney Island project that Fred Trump was involved in, from the 1940s throughout the 1960s, was touched by scandal, misappropriation of public funds, and political cronyism.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:04 PM on August 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

This Hoopla copy CIRCLING WAVE AMUSEMENT DEVICE appeared in Popular Mechanics and Billboard Magazine between (at least) 1909-1915. I am not sure why there's an additional top ring above everyone's heads. "Safety."
posted by user92371 at 12:10 PM on August 30, 2023

There's a local farm / micro-theme park which has some low tech attractions that always make me think of those old-timey rides, particularly the inflatable jumping pillow.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:13 PM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love the one in the Pathé reel with counter rotating discs in the floor.
posted by clew at 12:29 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Anyone interested in old Coney Island should seek out Little Fugitive, a 1953 film shot on location with a hidden camera, resulting in some fascinating footage.
posted by Gortuk at 12:31 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

I love the one in the Pathé reel with counter rotating discs in the floor.

That's the Human Pool Table. Both it and the Human Roulette Wheel were wooden, made of maple polished by years of humans sliding around on them, must've been gorgeous.
posted by Rash at 12:41 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

And an explanation for the middle section of that newsreel: "In the arena was where it happened"- in Trip(s) to Steeplechase Park, from a blog of Brooklyn Memories.
posted by Rash at 1:13 PM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

If I remember my history correctly, Fred Trump had to hurry to destroy the pavilion before the city passed historic landmarks preservation law, which would have saved it or at least delayed its destruction. This involved a demolition event, where Fred sold tickets for the pavilion’s final amusement activity—spectators could pay to throw a brick and smash one of its windows.
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:52 PM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

How long ago was it? I went to that counterrotating floor ride, and whatever about the finely polished maple, the thing was banging and thumping in a violent manner that almost left you bruised.
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:41 PM on August 30, 2023

I read all of Jeffrey Stanton's posts back in the early 2000s when I was living in Brooklyn, working on a novel about the days of Coney island with the big three amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. It must have been really something to see, and paved the way for the theme parks that came after.
posted by rikschell at 5:18 PM on August 30, 2023

Really, StickyCarpet, you were there? Inside the Pavilion of Fun, must've been pre-1964. Tell us more! I can imagine the underneath of that Human Pool Table, a Steam Punk bewilderment of intersecting belts and pulleys. Flailing around on top seems like a good way to lose a finger or two, the clearance between those disks getting worse every year due to age and lax maintenance.
posted by Rash at 5:21 PM on August 30, 2023

Seems I failed to read through the whole post before commenting some interesting facts that were also right below the fold. Sorry
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:16 PM on August 30, 2023

Was the blowing skirts up thing a spectator amusement or participatory?
posted by Mitheral at 7:34 PM on August 30, 2023

"Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun.

You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it; I'm not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone."

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
posted by BWA at 7:54 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I was a kid in Santa Cruz in the early 70's they still had a fun house with a huge wooden slide, the spinning disc and the air jets in the floor. The entrance was a giant clown head.
posted by boilermonster at 12:23 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

For more on the context of Coney Island in the early sixties, skip to the end of this article. Curious to know why the zoning board would not budge. Did NIMBYism play a part? Trump wanted to build low cost housing. (Which is a whole other subject, of course. For more on that, see also here.)
posted by BWA at 6:20 AM on August 31, 2023

The newsreel is all fun and games, and then suddenly there's a creepy clown blowing up women's skirts while a bunch of men watch. Lest anyone be tempted to believe it was a simpler, better time.

...it was purchased and subsequently demolished by Fred Trump, to be replaced with a ritzy seaside apartment complex which never materialized.

Perfect.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:15 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

The air jets were at the exit, one person at a time, with a clown goading you to go through if you hesitated and/or knew what was coming. Someone else hit the button to blow the air at the exact moment, while a crowd of men watched.

It was as awful as it looked.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:22 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ken Jacobs in his "Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World"

I've been looking into this and I made a mistake -- his video sample is apparently from a 1903 Edison newsreel, and you can tell it's a different Hoop-La because its passengers are all facing outward, rather than in.
posted by Rash at 8:26 AM on August 31, 2023

The air jets were at the exit, one person at a time, with a clown goading you to go through if you hesitated

My understanding of this sequence is the weird clowns and air-jets were at one of the entrances to the Pavilion of Fun, the one you went through after riding the mechanical Steeplechase ponies around the exterior of the building. And after being humiliated at this entry point, you could then join the audience in the Peanut Gallery to watch the next people coming in, and when that got boring you'd finally move into the Pavilion's interior, But I believe there were other entry points, like where you would for example be forced to walk through those huge, horizontal rotating tubes.
posted by Rash at 8:34 AM on August 31, 2023

Found another old Coney newsreel, cued here at the Steeplechase ride which then segues into what the narrator calls "The Blowhole Theater. It played for almost 70 years, New York's longest running show," which is followed by another glimpse of the Hoopla, with its operators hanging off of it; and the Human Roulette Wheel. Then, even more weird rides.
posted by Rash at 8:52 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]