The Playful Crowd : Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment and relaxation. However, by the middle of the century, a new type of park began to emerge, providing well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment. Contrasting the experiences of Coney Island and Blackpool with those of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton explore playful crowds and the pursuit of pleasure in the twentieth century to offer a transatlantic perspective on changing ideas about leisure, class, and mass culture.

Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an "industrial saturnalia."Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these "Sodoms by the sea" flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts' very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions.

The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britain's industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Making the Popular Resort: Coney Island and Blackpool About 1900
• 2 Industrial Saturnalia and the Playful Crowd
• 3 The Crowd and its Critics
• 4 Decline and Reinvention: Coney Island and Blackpool
• 5 The Disney Challenge
• 6 "Enrichment through Enjoyment": The Beamish Museum in a Theme Park Age
• 7 The Crowd Transformed?
• Notes
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Leisure-time activities are a window into people's lives. Cross (history, Penn State) and Walton (Univ. of Central Lancashire, UK) convey this well in this discussion of "pleasure places" in the US and the UK. They discuss how early in the century ethnically diverse immigrants in New York City swarmed to Coney Island in the summer, where they enjoyed the ocean and amusements, including exciting rides and freak shows. Coney Island was wildly entrepreneurial; most structures were shoddy, built for a short life. In England, more homogeneous crowds found their pleasure at Blackpool, which also had a beach and amusements but (in contrast to Coney Island) was solidly built with an eye toward order and longevity. Visitors to Coney Island went for the day, expecting change; visitors to Blackpool went for longer stays, expecting continuity. As the century progressed and the US and England gentrified, amusements became more genteel. The authors discuss Disney-style theme parks, with their sentimental images of the past, and England's Beamish Museum, which presented more realistic history. By the 1970s, the appeal of the cool tempered the appeal of the cute. Thrill rides reappeared--recalling those at Coney Island. Including photos and extensive notes, this is social history at its best. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All readers; all levels. R. Sugarman emeritus, Southern Vermont College