According to Westland, a new attraction called HellGate, a boat ride through Underworld-inspired caverns, caught fire on May 26, 1911. This grandiosity is what led to Dreamland’s demise. They actually set a six-story building on fire every half hour). It had artificial Venetian canals with gondola rides, trains through a Swiss alpine landscape (with artificial snow in freaking 1904), an “End of the World ” performance imitating the eruption of Vesuvius, and a fire drama in which two thousand people quenched a six-story building fire every half-hour (oh, the fire was real. That’s right: the above photo is from 1909.ĭreamland was Coney Island’s most ambitious theme park, existing a short seven years between 19. SHORPY on Pinterest did a magnificent job of coloring this old black and white photo from 1909. Closed: Dreamland was too ambitious for reality. And now, we have compiled a list of both the craziest theme parks in existence today, as well as some dreamy landscapes that were prematurely shut down.Ģ2 10. Theme parks are ridiculous, impossible, and endlessly alluring, simply because they connect to our childhood fantasies of alternative realities. In a theme park however, the child within each of us can move impossibly fast, fly, and experience adrenaline-surging loops and dips. When you’re a kid, you are tinier than the adults around you, incapable of true speed or dexterity. In a theme park however, the child within each of us can temporarily forget the limits of the real world. Reality is a stark contrast to the bright, endless fun that exists in fantasies. When you’re a kid, your favorite characters are restricted to the pages within a book, or images flickering upon a tv screen. Theme parks connect to childlike fantasies: desires for environmental escape, and for the human body to transcend its natural capacity for movement. Who would think that, for entertainment, human beings would want to be dropped from intense heights, or flung forward at biologically impossible speeds? Who would think that tourists would want to visit a purely artificial destination, where the structures, culture, and characters are all entirely fictional? Theme parks are a fundamentally ludicrous idea.but evidently are appealing to a large, diverse audience. When you think about it, every theme park is a crazy idea.
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