Intro

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston. The Hub of the Universe.
This is episode 210 Lost Wonderland with Stephen Wilk.
Hi, I’m Jake. This week I’m going to be joined by the author of a new book about Wonderland, the early 20th century amusement park at Revere Beach.
Dr. Stephen Wilk has deeply researched the investors and entrepreneurs who bought 27 acres of land along Revere Beach Boulevard and opened the park, the inventors behind rides like Shoot the Chutes, Hell’s Gate and Love’s Journey,
and the people who ran attractions like a firefighting demonstration, a Wild West Show and a model Japanese village.
His new book, Lost Wonderland. The Brief and Brilliant Life of Boston’s Million Dollar Amusement Park, reveals all of that as well as changes in the broader economy that doomed Wonderland nearly from the beginning.
After opening in 1906 the park went through periods of success and bankruptcy in a meteoric run that lasted just four short years while leaving a major cultural impression on the Boston area and Revere in particular.
But before Dr Wilk joins me to talk about the rise and fall of Wonderland. I want to pause and thank our latest patreon Sponsor Josh L.

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[2:11] I’m joined now by Dr Steven Wilk, an MIT trained optical engineer and the author of How the Reagan Got It, Zap Medusa, Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon and a young adult novel called The Traveler.
He’s also the author of an upcoming book on optics from Oxford University Press, tentatively titled Sand Bows and Black Lights, which will attempt to untangle the layers of mystery and misinformation behind the true inventor of the modern black light.
His latest book about reveres Wonderland amusement park, is called Lost Wonderland, and it’s available as of October 30th that your favorite local bookstore or online Stephen Welcome to the show.

Interview

Stephen:
[2:51] Thank you very much.

Jake:
[2:53] Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been perusing your new book, Lost Wonderland.
In the introduction. You you describe your first encounter with Wonderland as a as a t stop, you’re on your way to Revere Beach.
So can you tell our listeners a little bit about what your first impression was of Revere Beach? And then how you got from there from wondering about Wonderland in the seventies, toe writing a book about Wonderland?

Stephen:
[3:17] Well, I was an undergraduate here in the seventies, and I decided to ride the blue line out to its end and walk up and down Revere Beach.
I grew up in New Jersey. I’m familiar with the Jersey Shore and Jersey Shore’s boardwalks and you’ve got the rides.
You got the kiddie rides, you got the miniature golf, three games of chance and all the food stands and everything. So I came to Revere Beach expecting to find that, and what I found was practically nothing.
I am told that there actually were a couple of things, but I swear I did not see them. As I walked up and down the beach looking for them.
It got me wondering. Years later, I started going Thio.
The Revere Historical Museum, the Revere Historical and Cultural Preservation Society has museum down there on Beach Street in Revere, and I was just fascinated by the stuff that was there, and I wanted to find out where these things had all been located and when they were there.
So I started, started digging up all this information.
The story was just so utterly fascinating, especially the people that were involved in it, and I just kept going.
And finally, when I finished the book up, I started looking around, and fortunately I found the University of Massachusetts Press and they were.
They were taken by it and they decided to publish it, so it all worked out pretty well.

Jake:
[4:36] So the story opens on Memorial Day weekend in 1906 with the opening of the Wonderland amusement Park,
What would a visitor have seen as they walked through the gates and and came inside this brands new sparkling completely, never before seen amusement park.

Stephen:
[4:53] I figured this is a good place to start the book because it would immerse the people in the experience immediately, and you start wondering what is all this stuff?
And it was something new for the people back then. This was when amusement parks, we’re just getting started.
Ah, couple of amusement parks had opened in the General Boston area Ah, year earlier, but this one waas north of Boston. It was much easier access, and it was bigger than the other ones.
This was after the Coney Island Parks had made a big splash, and everybody wanted to have something like that in their own backyard.
So this was Boston’s Coney Island.

Jake:
[5:26] What were the other parks that were open in the Boston area? By that time was Paragon Park, one of the ones that was.

Stephen:
[5:30] Paragon Park down and haul. It opened the year earlier, and NorAm Biega Park out in the West had opened.
In fact, the day Wonderland Open was the day NorAm Bega opened for its 10th anniversary.
So I had a lot of competition, but Wonderland blew it away.
The crowds there were bigger than any of the parks are bigger than Revere Beach would see for another quarter of a century.
There were two entrances. There’s one near the beach, and there is one that was supposed to be the main entrance on Walnut Street, Walnut Avenue.
If you’re familiar with Revere Area, there’s something called the Wonderland Marketplace Mall.
That mall and it’s parking lot are where Wonderland amusement Park Waas and the main entrance and the administration building, or both were.
Marshals is right now, so you’d enter through what would now be the back of Marshall’s going on a bridge over the railroad tracks.
So is like entering a castle going over the drawbridge of the moat.
And when you got inside, you know that you had to crenelated towers and the castles and the, uh, the flags. Everything it really was very much like going into a castle. When you got on the other side, there was a lagoon in front of you that was the splashdown pond for the shoot. The chutes ride.
Every amusement park had to have a shoot. The chutes ride.
It was a very tall tower, about 70 ft tall and thes thes.
Flat bottom boats would slide down on the skim of water and would go skipping across the water like a thrown stone.

Jake:
[6:51] No. I was shocked to read that there had previously been a shoot the chutes type ride in Boston’s Back Bay.

Stephen:
[6:57] There had been right about where a symphony hall waas.

Jake:
[7:00] Was it a standalone attraction, or was it part of something else?

Stephen:
[7:03] It was a standalone attraction. That was when shoot the chutes first came out. They started becoming very popular.
Oh, are on the 18 eighties 18 nineties.
And, uh, fellow by the name of Paul Boynton had been, uh, pushing them and he patented his own. And he put one up in Chicago.
And then later on, he put went up in Coney Island. That was the basis of the Coney Island attractions.

Jake:
[7:27] You know, I was a back Bay tour guide for years. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Back Bay, but that was a new one on May.

Stephen:
[7:33] Yeah, but this one was bigger. This was the biggest shoot, the chutes in the world.
It had been built for the 1904 ST Louis Exposition, and they bought it and there was a little bit of anxiety when they’re shipping it here because they shipped it on six railroad cards on two of them have gotten lost, but they found him in time to put it all together.
So you had this thing, and this is the centerpiece of the park. Should the shoots right with centerpieces of several amusement parks put up this time.
But directly across was this building pink building with four minarets. It was the beautiful Orient, and right next to it was the ballroom and restaurant.
Next to that was something called descent into the Hellgate.
On the other side of it was the LaMarcus Thompson Scenic Railway. That was another very big deal back then.

Jake:
[8:26] Yeah. So tell us about the scenic railway. It’s not exactly the Mount Washington Cog Railway. It’s a whole different concept of a scenic railroad.

Stephen:
[8:33] This is a sort of proto roller coaster. When I first saw pictures draw pictures and drawings of it, I thought, Well, that can’t be what it looks like. That’s the drawing by somebody who doesn’t know what a roller coaster is. But no, I’ve seen photographs of him since, and they did look like that.
It has a very gentle up and down, uh, thing to it. It doesn’t go violently side to side. It doesn’t go way up high and then shoot down.
It just has this gentle undulations and it took you about maybe an eighth of a mile to around building.
You went into the building and inside there were scenes of Venice and other cities, and then it would come back out. It would take you back along this undulating trip back to where you came from.
There had been a scenic railway on Revere Beach before this, but it wasn’t a LaMarcus Thompson scenic railway. The guy who invented it.
So this is the first LaMarcus Thompson Railway there.
By the time Wonderland closed, there were three LaMarcus Thompson railways along Revere Boulevard.

Jake:
[9:30] You mentioned that there was, ah, scenic railway on Revere Beach before Wonderland. So that makes me wonder. What environment was Wonderland opening up into what was Revere Beach like before? Wonderland.

Stephen:
[9:42] Revere Beach was becoming the entertainment mecca it had been built into, Ah, park area.
What happened was that one of Lamar, one of Frederick Law Olmsted’s proteges, Frederick Loans, that is the great park designer of the 19th century, built Central Park in Golden Gate Park.

Jake:
[9:58] The emerald necklace here in Boston? Yeah.

Stephen:
[9:59] And, yeah, the emerald necklace here, one of his approaches with a fellow named Elliot.
And what he did was he arranged to buy up all these shacks that were along Revere Beach, had them Tauron down and,
moved the narrow gauge railway that had built down a little bit farther and put a boulevard a broad boulevard down there,
and forbade any building along the seaward side of it, facing Braud sound so that you would have an unbroken view of the beach.

[10:32] But he didn’t say anything about the other side, and that’s when people started putting in attractions and a lot of things went in there. In fact, there’s there’s there’s a host of material here for other books.
Louis Bob put up his carousel carousel. We can’t imagine today, but they were hugely popular back then. People would actually come to beach. Just go to the carousel.
You wouldn’t think a merry go round is so popular. But it Waas and another fellow by the name of Ridgeway, he had a submarine ride.
But it was a phantom submarine, right? It wasn’t really a submarine. He just gives the impression of being in a submarine.
And he put in something called the nautical. Yet he had a fun house in it and they had a ballroom in the whole sorts of other things.
So you had all these things that were starting to go up there and way up at the northern end.
Appointed Pines was the original amusement area for Revere Beach that had gone up in the 18 eighties,
and that all this other stuff closer down was now starting to siphon public attraction away from point of pines and towards the actual beach area.

[11:34] You had a fledgling entertainment area that was going up there. You had rides like the Johnstown flood and, um, the the old mill ride.
And like I said, these cara cells and the scenic railway and other things, so that whole area was an up and coming area.
And when J. J. Higgins, who had gone into real estate, found himself in possession of about 25 acres within ah, blocker Revere Beach,
All in once and once in one big chunk, he realized he had a place he could put his park. So that’s where it went in.

Jake:
[12:08] So what made this particular chunk of land other than the fact that it was 25 27 acres that were contiguous? What made it so desirable? Because it wasn’t immediately on the beach wasn’t.

Stephen:
[12:15] Mhm.

[12:19] It was. That was one of the problems that turned out ultimately. But it was close.
They built ah walkway very much like the pedestrian walkway. Now that goes between the beach and Wonderland Station.

Jake:
[12:30] Right, okay?

Stephen:
[12:30] They built one like that about 300 yards south of where that one is, and so it could entice people to go there. In fact, that was probably a more popular entrance than what was supposed to be the main entrance. Because it was on the beach.
You had the narrow gauge railway which ran up all the way Thio, point of pines.
And later on the extended it up Tinto Lynn that would bring people from Boston.
You actually take a ferry over to where the narrow gate started. Then you could take it from there right at the beach.
But it was easy transportation, so you had ease of access to a huge urban population. You had this brand new beach that everybody wanted to go to, so it was an enticing environment.
One of the problems, the biggest. The biggest problem, really was that where they wanted to put the park was mainly marshland.

Jake:
[13:18] Yeah. You wrote that in building the park that there were two big problems that had to be conquered. Right? There was fire and there was water. So it sounds like the water was because you’re building on marshland. So how how is that problem Conquered?

Stephen:
[13:31] They built the entire park on a boardwalk that was raised 2 to 3 ft above the mean ground level.
People were doing boardwalks elsewhere. I mean, the Chicago White City Park was built on a boardwalk, even though they didn’t have to contend with the marsh.
But it made it very easy to care for the ground. People be walking on. You could just hose it down.

Jake:
[13:51] I know. In the first season, especially in later seasons, there were some really big rides and and built attractions. Was that solid enough for all those?

Stephen:
[14:00] Well, they didn’t build the big attractions right on the board walk. The boardwalk could have built between the attractions in order to give them a solid footing for the buildings and for the attractions somebody came in.
They hired somebody to come in and drove, according to one account, 60,000 spruce pilings into the ground to give them a solid foundation, something for it all to be built on.
In fact, the buildings of the current marketplace mall Wonderland Marketplace mall are exactly where many of the buildings from Wonderland where and I suspect because they’re pilings are still there. And they’re using the given a solid foundation.
Exactly when I’m not sure it’s after Wonderland closed, I’m certain. But that area did see a lot of landfill because it’s not Marsh anymore. It doesn’t flood now.

Jake:
[14:45] So J. J. Higgins has this large parcel of land, and he has a vision Who are some of the other personalities that help him create what we know is Wonderland.

Stephen:
[14:57] The one I would love to know the most about. I would love to know how they met. Hey, meta fill in the name of Floyd C. Thompson.
Floyd Thompson was sort of cagey about his background.
If you read the souvenir book or the biographies of him that are given in variety or in the Boston area newspapers, he just says that, Uh oh, he was connected with some of the large parks in Coney Island, but he didn’t say exactly how.

[15:22] At first I wondered if he was somehow related to the Thompson of the Thompson Scenic Railway or this fellow Thompson, who constructed one of the Coney Island parks.
But he wasn’t related. Any of those he had started out, it turns out, as a pharmacist in upstate New York, But he became obsessed with Inc.
He started founding all these companies, and finally he partnered with some people doing entertainment business in New York, and I think that’s what really did it to him, he said. I’ve got to build one of these.
And what he tried to Dio was to build the largest amusement park in the world,
he bought up Steeplechase Park, which was, um, the oldest surviving amusement park in Coney Island and land around it.
And with a bunch of financial backers.
They’ve gotten together about a million dollars, which is a huge amount of money back then, and they were getting ready to build this, and they ran out of money they could not afford to pay.
George tell you, the the owner of Steeplechase Park, past the second installment, and so he basically foreclosed on the park and the park went back to being steeplechase, and it stayed in the till you family up until the 19 sixties,
until, in fact, it was bought by, uh, President Trump’s father.

Jake:
[16:46] Oh!

Stephen:
[16:48] So he had. He had failed dismally.
They basically went bankrupt. His marriage broke up, I think, at this time, and somehow or other he found J. J. Higgins or J. J. Higgins found him.
But it was a perfect pairing because he may have been broke, but he knew how to raise money.
He knew how to set up an organization, and he had the equivalent of a roller Dex with all of the game builders and attract attractions.

Jake:
[17:16] Getting the attractions into the park. It sounds like that meant, at times licensing attractions from their inventors, sometimes just outright buying them. How did you go about getting rides and shows all the different attractions at Wonderland?

Stephen:
[17:31] It varied from from place to place. They Thompson made a trip down to the New Jersey headquarters of LaMarcus Thompson and arranged with him to get full marks. A Thompson Scenic railway.
I don’t know who he talked to about getting the the shoot the chutes, but that was a real coup.
There was a fellow named Dr William A.
Cooney, who was putting up actual infant incubators and amusement parks all over the country because that was his mission. He wanted to try and save as many premature babies and incubators is possible.
And hospitals didn’t want incubators. That was against their philosophy.
So he put these up in amusement parks, charge admission and plowed the money back into keeping them going.

Jake:
[18:12] Yeah, I think for a lot of listeners it’ll be a real surprised to hear that incubators were a key attraction of an amusement park.

Stephen:
[18:20] Yeah, well, you have to understand the amusement parks of the time. People didn’t quite know exactly what they’re going to be.
They didn’t know that they were going to be things like Disneyland at the time. There model was the world’s fairs that people were having, so they wanted to have, like world’s fair type exhibits and infinite give. You fit in perfectly with that.

Jake:
[18:37] Because of the incubator, there is also a full scale ah hospital attached to the park, right?

Stephen:
[18:42] Right? Somebody tried to put it up on incubator on Revere Beach.
A few years earlier, they were imitating Cooney, who had come and given a demonstration of one of the Boston trade shows, and they were closed down.
And I suspect it was. Although it was nominally because they didn’t follow rules, they didn’t have capability for taking care of babies.
I think it was because people were outraged and thought the Children were being exploited.
So when Thompson arranged for Cooney to come in there, he made sure that they actually had a hospital. They had the facilities so they wouldn’t be shut down on that basis.

Jake:
[19:14] Now it’s funny because that’s not the only emergency services that were available on site. There was also a fire department attached to the park, right?

Stephen:
[19:21] They had a fire department they wanted. As as you said earlier, one of the great problems was fires.
A lot of amusement parks had fires to the Coney Island.
Parks were burned to the ground and many other ones around the country, where, as well, Wonderland was incredibly well built.
From the point of view of fires. They went out of their way to make sure they had plenty of water mains. They had buildings that were fireproof construction. They used shellac at a minimum.
They put asbestos between the the sheets of plywood on the buildings, and they had their own full time fire department, and they made sure they flushed the boardwalk every morning.
Wonderland never had a fire, never had anything close to a fire.

Jake:
[20:07] That’s very impressive, given the fate of a lot of public buildings around the Boston area.

Stephen:
[20:12] Yeah, a lot of one’s on Revere Beach, that Johnstown flood that I’ve mentioned.
That one was claimed to be a fireproof building. But when the old mill next door to it caught fire, it burned down everything on one side. But the Johnstown flood saved everything else.
And then the next year, despite this name, the Johnstown flood burned down, so it happened to a lot of places. The one of the last reigning amusements on Revere Beach was the Cyclone rollercoaster and that burned.

[20:41] One of the things they tried to get was a ride called Creation. This had been a big deal at the ST Louis Fair, and they brought a version of it for one of the Coney Island fares, and it was really, really popular.
It was a ride that was invented by a guy who was also a magician.
I use all these little tricks toe make things really spectacular.
And they announced back in November of 1905 that creation is going to be one of their big events.
And then two months later, suddenly they completely changed the design of the park and creation wasn’t there anymore.

[21:18] Somehow or other, they must have lost it. I don’t know how or what why people don’t like to talk about failures, but they did get the services of a guy named Attilio Pistola.
Go ahead, worked on creation and who was also arrived designer and he was going to put put two of his rides in there.
One of them was called the descent into the Hellgate, which had already gone up in Coney island, and the other one was one that he was calling the razzle dazzle.
But that never went in. Unfortunately, other things went in for for entirely other reasons.
You had to have, Ah, sort of native peoples shows they had, ah, Wild West Show. In Indian Congress, for instance, there were a lot of those that were around.
They wanted to put in an exhibit of Philippine natives because those were popular in a lot of amusement parks at the time.
But that never went in. But they did have a Japanese village, and they did have the beautiful Orient.
So it’s kind of like a world’s fair. Like I say.

Jake:
[22:15] Yeah, it’s almost Ah, culturally insensitive version of like an Epcot today.

Stephen:
[22:20] Yeah, sort of, Um, I mean, they were pretty respectful. In some cases, they were pretty respectful of the Japanese. They had a Japanese firm come in and build houses and put up a model of Mount Fuji and everything else but the Egorov Village that that would have been pretty insensitive.

Jake:
[22:31] Okay?

[22:36] You described an attraction called the African Dodger. That was not exactly Can you describe what the African dodger was?

Stephen:
[22:43] Yeah, this you can look this up on the Internet and you’ll find a lot of pictures of it there.
It is incredibly culturally insensitive. Basically, somebody would stick their head through a hole in a canvas.
Tents, sometimes through the bull’s eye, painted around it, and people would throw balls at the head variable. This person was black, which is why it was called the African Dodger. And he was supposed Thio taunt the people to throw the balls and hit him in the head. He supposed to dodge out of the way.
The balls they used were like they look like baseball’s. They were, fortunately, a little smaller and a little lighter.
But you still don’t want somebody throwing hardballs at your head, and some people would sneak in riel, baseballs and things people did get seriously hurt it.
Some of these attractions I don’t know about the one in Boston, but, uh, even in Boston, they shortly after this kind of thing was going on.
People said, We can’t do this any morning, started passing laws against it, but that wasn’t until after Wonderland closed. Unfortunately, the descendants of this was the dunk tank.

Jake:
[23:41] Yeah, we have one of my company picnic. The CEO or one of the high officers usually sits in the tank. We all get to throw the ball. I’m not that accurate, unfortunately.

Stephen:
[23:47] Yeah, and yeah, and in that form it’s great. I mean as a charity thing and you have fun, and it’s sort of like that.
But when they first there came out, the person who was sitting up there was invariably black.
They call these things the chocolate drop.
So it was, you know, it was It was racist. It was a racist descendant off the violent and racist African Dodger.

Jake:
[24:12] So as long as we’re talking about the different sort of cultural attractions at the park, there was, as you mentioned, there was a Wild West show that performed every half hour. It’s not Buffalo bills show it was lucky Bill or Wild Bill, so.

Stephen:
[24:26] William Kennedy. His family was from, uh, there from the wilds of I think it was like Ohio. I remember exactly where it was.
He became familiar with the Indians a little bit farther west and started up a Wild West show with his brothers.
Uh, they ultimately ended up in the Oklahoma territory, and they brought in Indians from various places, including several Sue.
One of them was supposed to have been at Custer’s last stand, and he may have been.
I’ve identified who he could have been from the list of people I found on the Internet that the interviews a racially insensitive again there, people treating them as ignorant savages.
But the chief who came in with no ignorant savage, they asked him, Why are you coming and said, Well, because we’re being paid?

Jake:
[25:13] Yeah, Pretty good reason.

Stephen:
[25:14] Uh huh, Yeah. Plenty. Bill was from a slightly later vintage.
He was one of those people who, as I say, he had the misfortune to meet his hero.
His hero was Buffalo Bill, one of his competitors, Buffalo Bill, on when he met him the second time, he couldn’t believe how he’d fallen down in the world. The man was just in a disgraceful situation.
Ultimately, he rescued Buffalo Bill Buffalo. Bill shows going bankrupt and the year after Wonderland.
Uh, Pawnee Bill partnered with him. They put on a show called the Two Bills.

Jake:
[25:48] How did Pawnee Bill get that name? I know he had some frontier bona fides.

Stephen:
[25:53] Right? He definitely did. He was like I said, he was an Indian agent, too.
They had a hard time pronouncing his name, but Bill was easy, so they just called him Pawnee Bill. After a while, he met his wife, who is very upper class sort of Philadelphia woman.
But she fell in with the show and she became a sharpshooter. She was part of the show as well.
Both both these guys both didn’t just have Indian and cowboys.
They also had chariot races. They had Cossack writers.
They had Australians with boomerangs and plenty of bills show anything from out of the ordinary.
One of things I love about plenty. Bill was there was a guy named E e Smith who was from the West. He wanted to photograph reserve the cowboy way of life because you could see it was vanishing.
He came to the Museum of Fine Arts and studied photography as their school of fine arts and learned that Pawnee Bill was right here in Revere.
So you take pictures of cowboys without having to go west. So he took a lot of pictures, and they still survive.
And they’re gorgeous there in gorgeous shape. Um, I put one of them in the book and I put a few of them. My website.

Jake:
[27:06] And what’s that website for folks who want to find it?

Stephen:
[27:08] Okay, uh, the pictures. Because I could only have a dozen black and white pictures in the book.
I put more pictures and the color pictures at a website called www dot lost hyphen Wonderland dot com. Very simple.
Lost Wonderland dot com with a hyphen between the lost in Wonderland.

Jake:
[27:27] Pawnee Bill joined the show in 1908 And I guess that would have been the second season of the 3rd 3rd season.
But before we jump that far, I just wanna go back to a couple of the other things that were open on day one from opening day.
And among them, You know, we’ve talked about all the precautions against fire that were taken at the park, But yet every day the park would essentially said an entire city block on fire on purpose.

Stephen:
[27:53] Yes, that Yeah, this is this again was a big attraction at the time.

Jake:
[27:53] I gotta hear more about this.

Stephen:
[27:59] They got started because they were basically fire department trade shows that they had in Germany and in England.
And one they had in Earl’s Court in London was really popular because it not only showed what they had, they actually put on a dramatization. They built a set of buildings and set them on fire.
And they demonstrated the use of the hook, the hook and ladder truck and the nets people would dive into and the chemical fire extinguishers and the pressurized fire things just to show you how they all worked and how effective they all were.
And one of the guys who had participated in this was a guy by the name of Hail.
He was a police. He was a fire chief out in the Midwest and also an inventor and, uh, he responsible for another thing at Wonderland to the Hales Tours attraction.
But he built his own version of this fire show for the ST Louis 1904 World’s Fair. The ST Louis Fair was a big influence on everything that happened at Wonderland.
He put it together zone show and it had the same thing. You had a city block. You demonstrated all these different things. People loved it.
They loved it so much that every other amusement park had toe have one. Within a couple of months, two of the put Coney Island parks had their own fire and flames or fighting the flames show. So you had to have one of these.

[29:20] Floyd Thompson went to the biggest agent in New York, Armstrong at one of Armstrong’s lieutenants, basically his partner.
He had been a performer, so people in the business knew and trusted him, and they arrange for him to go out and build this show.
He had been a one legged acrobat when he was a boy in Kentucky, working with horses.
One of them fell and crushed his leg, but he reinvented himself as a wrestler.
He would take on all comers of county fairs, and he beat them all.
And then he became an acrobat, and later on he teamed up with another one legged acrobat, and they did things that nobody else could do because you had to have only one leg, otherwise two legs, to get in the way.
And this went on, you know, he performed for, like, 20 years or so.
Finally felt he was getting a little bit old for this. So he started becoming an agent and working with Armstrong Thompson set them up in a company in town, and they started putting together the fire and flames show,
and they built a city square with buildings on three sides.

[30:30] It was built with steel backing on it and probably with asbestos.
And they would put fire fire burning material inside the windows.
They got themselves a bunch of actors, and people would come and sit in this enormous grandstand with a huge curtain in front of it, and they pulled the curtain back and you’d have this street scene going on. It was like a play.
You had the tailor. You had the fish seller. You had a Salvation Army.
Women going by. You had a drunks. You had a street gang of kids that were bothering the drunks, you know, and people would yell at them, and then the fire would break out in one of the houses and everybody would go panicking all around.
And they had their own fire team. That was distinct from the Wonderland Fire department. The entirely separate one.

Jake:
[31:16] Just a show team.

Stephen:
[31:18] Just a show team with latest equipment and with, you know, retired fire fireman working at it and they would come out and they had a chemical engine. They had the pressure engine. They had the nets.
Whenever in the old movies, you see people jumping in the nets, the fireman air holding.
This is where the like This is the legacy. This is where it comes from. People had been used to these shows.
They start showing up in the cartoons in the thirties and forties because they knew about these shows and they would put out the fire and they would have a show during the day.
And they had to be more spectacular one at night because it’s in the dark. Of course, on this show ran for two years.
They knew it was only gonna be temporary. After all, the one in ST Louis World Tour is only one year.
Both of the Coney Island shows only lasted two years. So even as these guys were building the fair, they were figuring out how Maney railroad cards they need to ship it somewhere else.
But the next year, after the two years Pawnee Bill’s show went up in that same stadium and the guy who built that went on and put in another attraction, Wonderland. And then after that, he went to Manchester, England, and he put up a fire and flame show there.

Jake:
[32:27] On day one, you had fire and flames. You had shoot to shoot the Hellgate uh Thompson Scenic Railway. Ah, lot of attractions ready to go. How did the public find out about Wonderland? How did people know to come and see fire and flames or whatever attraction?

Stephen:
[32:42] Well. Among his other talents, Thompson was an incredible publicist.
He was constantly making sure that there were stories in the newspapers about this.
Whenever anything went up, there were there would be a story about it being built whenever anything was imported.
Uh, they would, you know, when when the wild animals came from pariahs, wild animals show, he made sure reporters are on hand to report about it.
When the Japanese builders were putting up the Japanese village, he made sure that people were there to talk about that.
So people were prime. They ran advertisements for months in the newspapers before this opened up, so that by Memorial Day people were primed. They knew there’s going to be something there.
They’d heard about it. They’d read all the stories and they really wanted to see it at 11 oclock on the Memorial Day before people were supposed to get in.
There are crushing the gates, especially at the beach side. So they opened the gates early and let him in.

Jake:
[33:35] So it sounds like probably the opening day box office Waas good and was the first season overall a success?

Stephen:
[33:39] It was excellent. Yeah.

[33:44] The first season overall is a success. They had something like a million people came the first summer.
There are a million admissions in any case, because people probably came multiple times they sponsored special events.
You know, groups would get special discount rates to come in, just like the amusement parks now will have days for different companies.
Uh, they had special things going on. They had races that went on at the park and things like that.
So there was plenty of publicity is plenty of pushing for this to come out.
And it was It was, you know, greeted by by plenty of plenty of people coming in.
On top of all that, the park was a knit illuminated at night. I mean, electricity was was the up and coming thing.
It wasn’t that many years before that the Thompson House and Company and Lin had joined forces with Edison’s company to form General Electric.

Jake:
[34:40] I believe you wrote that the park used as much electricity as Cambridge and Somerville combined. Were they generating their own power or they tapping into the grid, Okay.

Stephen:
[34:45] Yeah, yep,
no, they were buying it. They’re buying it on the grid. They and they had They had their own electrician’s. They designed it themselves.
One of the sore points with General Electric was that nobody was was buying their services toe like these parks or the international exhibitions, and that’s what led to the simulator for the first year. They wanted to publicize themselves.
They bought equipment from there. They bought a lot of transformers from General Electric. But they put the whole thing together themselves.
And most of these parts had a tower of light. Wonderland did not, but it had lights on everything.
The shoot the chutes tower was itself practically a tower of light.
If you go to my website, there are several pictures of Wonderland at night, some of them hand color to show you what it would have looked like. Well, these colored lights up.

Jake:
[35:37] And the Tower of Lighter that the lit up shoot the chutes wasn’t the only thing drawing the eye. You also had a tethered balloon for much of the season.
Fred Thompson and himself. Floyd. Sorry, Thompson himself went up in the balloon and pulled off quite a stunt. It sounds like it sounds like he was lucky toe live through it.

Stephen:
[35:55] Oh, yeah. He, um Yeah. He was very lucky.
He saw the people going up in the balloon and the entire fellow who called himself Professor LaRue.
His name is really Joseph Cray from upstate New York, but they all call themselves Professor. And LaRue sounded exotic.
His wife, his third wife. Actually, he married all his wives on the balloon.
Uh, Christina, invariably called tiny lira, went up and there was another local woman. They hired a local acrobat who went up a swell.
And I have a feeling I don’t know exactly why I have a feeling that Thompson saw these two women going up and figured I could do that.

Jake:
[36:35] Yeah.

Stephen:
[36:36] So against the advice of the rest of the people on the board of directors who were shocked, he said, Let me go up there and somehow or other, they agreed.
So he took off his straw hat. He put on a cap, take fitting cap, and they tied him onto the trapeze.
This is a balloon that didn’t have a basket underneath. It had to trapezes hanging,
because, uh, Professor LaRue’s act back when he was going on the balloon used to be to go up on a trapeze, and then he would perform acts on the trapeze with no net way up in the air.

Jake:
[37:10] That makes my heart go pitter pat.

Stephen:
[37:12] Yeah, me too. So But right now they had the trapezes. Nobody was performing trapeze act on it, but they had a couple of parachutes. They weren’t folded up.
Their tops of them were simply attached up near the balloon.
You can see that in illustration. I put one on the website, and, uh so he they tied him on.
I mean, it’s a very good thing they did, because when Presser LaRue fired the pistol to indicate the balloon should go up, it did with a jerk, and Thompson was jerked off his seat.
Tiny, of course, wasn’t she was used to this and she told him, Don’t let go because they were already so high up, he would have been killed and he couldn’t jump with a parachute because it required about 2000 ft toe open.
So you had to wait until they’re at least that high up. So the balloons balloon goes up and up and up, and he’s holding on there for for dear life.
And they got up to the top high enough. Finally, they know they’re high enough because the rope has paid out that far.
LaRue fires the pistol again, and Thompson doesn’t or cannot let go.
He fires it again. Thompson still doesn’t like fires a third time.
Thompson’s finally able to release himself, and he floats down and his parachute opens.
And as he’s drifting down, he starts drifting over the railroad tracks of the Boston and Maine Railroad. That’s right next to the park, just as a train is coming by.

Jake:
[38:42] It’s like something out of a movie.

Stephen:
[38:43] Yeah, and he remembered what he had been told and what he had seen. Presumably with that, you can rock the balloon side to side and move a little bit.
So he starts doing this. And by that, and possibly also with the aid of a convenient gust of wind, he comes down to one side of the track and the train goes by. It doesn’t hit him.
People rush out from the park, pick him up and haul them off in triumph and his arms air in the air, mainly because they’re paralyzed, that he can’t get them back down.
So they took him back to the hospital.
That’s near the the incubator, and they misogyny and according to one account, They gave him sort of electric shock therapy and eventually got his arms down.
And he goes and talks to the newspaperman because of course he’s going to talk to the newspaperman and he says, Oh, it was great, I love it. I’ll do it again sometime but he never did.

Jake:
[39:32] Well, because in a way, that’s Thompson Swan song with the park because he doesn’t come back after the first year, right.

Stephen:
[39:39] Out after the first year he stayed on for a while. After that, he he protested the the the affair of the simulator and he oversaw the other things going on, and they gave him a gold watch at the end.
And that was arguably the high point of his career because one of the things he was doing while not telling anybody about it, he was building another amusement park up a point of pines.

Jake:
[40:03] Just up the beach.

Stephen:
[40:04] Just up the beach five miles off the beach.
That was going to be twice the size of Wonderland, and it was going to be right on the ocean which Wonderland wasn’t.

Jake:
[40:12] I think that’s where I got confused in thinking that he didn’t come back because you wouldn’t think that would be okay with the other directors. Yeah.

Stephen:
[40:18] Oh, it wouldn’t. It wasn’t once they found out about it, what he did was he put a full.
He put a quarter page ad in Billboard magazine as if they wouldn’t notice it. And his name was in bigger letters than anything else.
Well, they found out about it, and I don’t have any records of it, but he’s gone after that point. So obviously they gave him a chewing out, gave miss papers and the people that point of Pines Corporation decided, Well, if he’s going to do this, we don’t want him, either.
So he was. He was gone from both parks, and he ended up doing a little bit of agenting in New York, I think.
But the next we hear from him, he’s always on the other side of the country in Seattle, running a place called the Aidan Musee.
And he ran a number of ventures after that, including another one called Wonderland out in Los Angeles.

Jake:
[41:07] Yeah, I didn’t realize until reading your book that Wonderland was not a unique brand to our Boston area that they were, in fact, at least a half dozen or maybe Mawr Wonderland around the country in different places.

Stephen:
[41:18] That’s right, most of them built about the same time, and the reason they all of the same name.
Everybody wanted a little bit of stolen glory from Coney Island so or from Chicago’s White City. So all over the country you had Park’s opening up with names like White City, Coney Island, Luna Park Steeplechase, even though they had nothing to do with the original parks.
One of the Big One in Coney Island was called Dreamland, but it was supposed to originally have been called Wonderland. That’s the name on all the original paperwork.
So all these other parks that are imitating it were called Wonderland, including Boston’s own Wonderland.

Jake:
[41:54] So going into the second season and I won’t make you go through every season in a detailed rundown, but it sounds like the park was on a pretty good footing to start a new season.

Stephen:
[42:04] It was despite having lost their general manager and this guy who was a really ace, it promoting things, including himself.
J. J. Higgins, the guy who had founded the whole thing and was the park treasurer, got promoted to general manager, which had to be a very weird thing because he’d never run an amusement park before.
But fortunately I think for him the guy who had been an excursion agent guy, the named Eugene L. Perry and who was the same sort of extroverts soul that Thompson was took over as assistant general manager.
And I think he’s the guy who really kept things going there.
But they put in a lot of brand new exhibits. The park reinvented itself almost every year.
Some of the big attractions remained constant throughout the entire life of the park, like the Shoot, the Chutes and the Hellgate.
But some of the things from the first year the Children’s Theater, the fatal wedding, Princess Trixie, Ferraris, Wild Animals show they’re all gone, replaced by new things, and the new things were just a fascinating Willard’s Temple of Music battle.
Abbey Blakes Wild animals show under the sea.
They put in a giant aquarium basically, and they had a guy in a diving suit down there showing off, and they had an escape artist escaping underwater, and you could watch it right through the side of the tank.

Jake:
[43:23] Yeah, it’s interesting that the degree to which the park had to be reinvented every year, I guess some of that would have been because they didn’t have exclusive contracts with some of the exhibit, so they didn’t have a long term contracts with some of the others, so I always had to get something new in the door, right?

Stephen:
[43:35] That’s right. Yeah, it actually looks to me as if the William Kennedy, uh, cowboy Wild West show wasn’t even engaged for the entire summer.
They kept renewing their contract week by week. So they ended up being there the whole summer.
It just listen to, given that it was going to bay.
Um, some of the other ones, they had only engaged them for one year, and, you know, they went out somewhere else afterwards.
In a way, this is good because you wanted have fresh stuff to draw people in.
And the third year in 1908 was arguably the biggest year because they had so many things going on. They had plenty bill.
They had Chiquita the doll lady. They had Annette Kellerman, the Australian Mermaid and a host of other things.

Jake:
[44:18] I love in that Kellerman We did a years ago now. Episode 82 We did a show about that. Kellerman’s time here, here in Boston. But for for folks who might not have listened that far in our back catalog, will you Will you introduce us to her?

Stephen:
[44:32] All right, well, Annette Kellerman was she.
She originally had rickets as a kid.
Some people think she had polio, but it was Rick. It’s It was insufficient absorption of vitamin D, which lets you metabolized calcium so the bones don’t get stronger, your legs bend.
They’re just starting to learn about how to take care of this. And they probably would have given her like cod liver oil, which has a lot of vitamin D in it.
But they put her feet into very heavy iron braces to straighten them out. And she loathed this and hated this.
It trapped her in the house. And then after that, after she got the braces off, they wanted to build up her strength.
So they enrolled her in swimming lessons, and she resisted this. She really didn’t want to do this.
But she found out she was really good at it and became a spectacular swimmer in Australia.
And she went thio Europe.
And she did a demonstration swim down the Thames and she tried to swim. The English Channel didn’t quite make it, but she became very popular. She started putting on shows she bought were treated diving shows.
And she had this, uh, costume that looks like modern long johns. It was a form fitting wool in the suit, which I kind of hard to amazing to swim in.
But it was much better than the frilly, fruity swimming outfits. The women typically war, and it was at first scandalous.

Jake:
[45:56] Has considered too revealing, even though she was covered basically from risk toe ankle.

Stephen:
[46:01] Right, But it showed her it showed her shape, and actually, this may have been one of the draws on her show because they made sure they put mirrors all the way around the tank. When she did state shows, you could see her from all sides.
Anyway, she she was well known. There was a story about her in the Revere Journal in the summer of 1907 before she even came Thio Revere.
She had spent the previous summer in Chicago putting on shows there and they got it for the entire summer of 1908 And so she came and she did these diving shows.
They built a special concrete tank for someplace. I wish I knew where I don’t.
Somewhere within the park, though, she judged swimming contests.
She tried to do a swim tout to Boston Light, which was, you know, the Holy Grail of swimmers at that time.

Jake:
[46:50] It’s still in a lot of ways. Is there still a Boston light swim every summer?
And it’s It’s one of the most extreme endurance. So I’m in non pandemic times. I go to the y and I swim a mile a couple times a week, and I think I’m a hard core swimmer. And then I look at it that Kellerman’s exploits and I’m blown away.

Stephen:
[47:06] Yeah. Oh, yeah, but she was an amazing person.
There is a persistent story that she was arrested on Revere Beach because she wore that abbreviated swimming outfit and,
they took her into court and she argued her case saying, Look, I can’t swim in anything else in this,
But the amazing thing is, there is no contemporary record of this whatsoever.

Jake:
[47:31] Yeah, you know, I I was taken in by this, that that past episode we told from that perspective because in her own writing, she talked about this having happened.
But then you go back and look at the press. Now I have better access to a lot of the local newspaper databases than I did back in the day, and it’s not there.

Stephen:
[47:49] Yep, it would have been in the newspapers because they report on other women who were arrested for indecent count dressing.
They reported on when Kellerman was arrested for other reasons.
If she had been arrested for indecent exposure on the beach Revere A, it could not have failed to make the papers. There’s no police record of it. There’s no record of it anywhere until the 19 twenties. And when it comes out in the 19 twenties, she’s the one who tells the story.
She also included it in her unpublished autobiography called My Story, which was used as the basis for the film Million Dollar Mermaid.
In fact, the original title of the film Million Dollar Mermaid was going to be one piece bathing suit is if that was the only thing she ever did.
But that was the biography of her and start Esther Williams, and she was the adviser on it on. She told the story when she went out on tour promoting this in the 19 fifties.
So she is the one who did it, and I give a reason for why I think she did in the book.
I would get into it now It would take way too long, I think.

Jake:
[48:53] Yeah, well, she not unlike Floyd Thompson and some of the other personalities attached to the park. She she was a master self promoter. If nothing else, she was that Ah, master swimmer, but also a master self promoter.

Stephen:
[48:59] Oh, yeah.

[49:03] And she reinvented herself constantly. She, uh she had the swimming, actually, the diving act. She was the marathon swimmer.
She got into movies early.
There are some surviving movies of her. She made one of the first nude scenes and she did an act where she on stage, where she dressed as a man and dance is a man and everything she was just doing constantly changing her act.

Jake:
[49:25] For the 1908 season you had. Annette Kellerman is one of the major draws. You had Pawnee, Bill.
But you also had events that were outside the control of the park. That would have a major effect going forward. What was happening? Sort of off stage from the 1907 into the 1908 season.

Stephen:
[49:42] Oh, well, there are a couple of things. One is there is a big fire in Chelsea in 1908 But the thing that affected, uh, Wonderland and also great many other parks was something called The Panic of 1907,
That was very much like the recession of 2000 and eight, both the size and its effects,
and it was causing runs on the banks.
Uh, it was the biggest recession until the Great Depression, and it took away an awful lot of people’s disposable income.
It was finally stopped with J. P. Morgan and several other bankers volunteered money to try and prop up a lot of the banks.
But by that time, the damage is already done, and the park suffered.
Several of them went out of business completely.
Wonderland itself found itself at the end of 1908 season bankrupt.

Jake:
[50:36] That had to be a shock after such a successful season to come out on the other end and financial disrepair.

Stephen:
[50:39] Right? Yeah. Yeah. Part of the problem is all those big, spectacular acts.
I think, uh, the successful amusement parks like to use steeplechase that kept on going to 19 sixties is that they would have a couple of very big, very expensive attractions that they kept going for a long time.
So it advertised over a long period of time and they wouldn’t have big name performers coming in.
Whereas Wonderland not only had, uh, at least three big name performers that year Pawnee Bill, uh, Annette Kellerman and Chiquita.
They also had a lot of weekly circus performers and the artist ring. So they constantly have people coming in and going on. They all had to be paid.

Jake:
[51:19] And with those. I don’t remember this from from the book. Would those have been separately ticketed? Would each of those have been raising their own revenue or they’ve been covered by the admission into the park?

Stephen:
[51:30] Ah, that changed through the life of the park. If you look at some of the pictures, for instance, you could see that there is an admission price for the beautiful, beautiful Orient.
There is an admission price for the velvet coaster. Got to pay five cents to go on to that.
There’s a separate admission price to get into the fire and flames show in the later years of the park.
They made it kind of like Disneyland is now where you paid a single price and you got to go on everything.

Jake:
[51:56] It may have cost money in terms of individual admissions, but had to have saved money in just salaries. Right?

Stephen:
[52:02] Yeah, they had separate ticket girls, and they all had official ticket ticket ticket girl uniforms.

Jake:
[52:08] So after the 1908 season, the park is left bankrupt and then it’s advertised for sale in early 1909 than it sells at auction.
They’re sort of Cem Cem. Financial sleight of hand. How how does the park get reinvented for the following season?

Stephen:
[52:27] All right. What they did was basically they told other creditors. Look, we’re going to auction off the park, and you will be paid basically proportionally out of what we get for that.
They sold it for exactly half that cost.
But they sold it to themselves. The same people, but a different organization they now had instead of the Wonderland, uh, company they now had, uh, the Walnut Street Corporation,
and J.
J. Higgins was still the general manager of it. And all the people on the board. We’re now on the board of this and Colonel Bartlett waas, now the treasurer.
So you have the same people, but it’s a different park, but they sold it for half the amount, so they only have to pay people back 50 cents on the dollar.
So they’re able to get out of the financial debt immediately. And they immediately issued a sort of austerity decree.
They had to shut down things and keep the cheapest possible. So the artist ring, the circus ring is gone. No circuit farmers, they get much cheaper blood ville performers.
Where Pawnee Bill had been that whole grand, uh, area. That whole grandstand with the whole stage behind it.
As far as I could tell. Didn’t have anything going on in it.

[53:49] They didn’t have a wild animal show. They seem to have shut down the beautiful Japan area.
Are they even shut down the incubators? Which amazes me.

Jake:
[53:59] Sounds like that there’s a core. Some of the major rides air still open.

Stephen:
[54:02] Right? The major rides are still there to shoot the chutes. Does scenic railway the Hellgate?
The what had been hails tours is basically a motion picture. Theaters still going? The arcade is still there?

Jake:
[54:15] Sounds like the surprise success of the 1909 season with some of the musical offerings.

Stephen:
[54:21] Yeah, they had a lot of musical act. They still had one big musical act they always had.
Throughout the first three years of the park, they had marching band that was constantly playing. And they also had the Allison Wonderland parade within Alison Wonderland show they had for this one, Cinderella and her golden slipper.
And that was that was the big attraction. They opened earlier than they normally had to show, basically, because they didn’t have much else and they changed the show constantly.
The guy who was running it was the same guy who put on a lot of amateur theatricals, including the Hasty Pudding Club, and he would change musical numbers every every week. He’d change people around in their roles.
He’d introduced things like, uh, electrical jump ropes with with with lights on them.
For these things, he got the most recent and popular music, including stuff from this young guy named, uh, Irving Berlin.

Jake:
[55:17] Not yet. Irving Berlin. It sounds like the time.

Stephen:
[55:19] Yeah, Isaiah Bilin. They had some of his earliest and best Azi earliest songs, and it very popular, especially because a lot of them had an opportunity for the audience to sing along, which they gladly did.

Jake:
[55:31] Sounds like the two biggest hits were My Ponyboy and My Wife’s Gone to the Country. Hooray! Yeah, again, that audience participation, right?

Stephen:
[55:38] Yes, that’s which everybody shouted out. Hurry. Yep, that’s right.
And there’s another one called Sadie Salome Come home, which is kind of weird because they had solemnly is one of the show’s going on one of the theaters.

Jake:
[55:54] So, against all odds, with this sort of austerity plan in place, Wonderland managed to turn a profit. 1909 After being bankrupt at the beginning of the season.

Stephen:
[56:03] That’s right. They got a profit, and they opened for the next year. But the writing was pretty much on the wall by this point.

Jake:
[56:11] There was an article in the journal The Revere Revere Journal at the end of the season that it seemed to be a bad omen. What stands out about that story in the past tense? That’s never good.

Stephen:
[56:20] It talked about the park in the past tense. And it also meant Yeah, yeah, this was a great park. Wait a minute. We’re still here.

Jake:
[56:28] What do you mean, waas?

Stephen:
[56:30] People are fickle. And even though they had a bridge that was no longer than the existing pedestrian bridge, people didn’t want to walk it as long as there are already attractions right there on Revere Boulevard.
In fact, some of the people who had put up things in Revere in Wonderland we’re now putting up things on Revere Boulevard.

Jake:
[56:53] So they’ll be competing with their own rides or their own attractions within Wonderland a few steps away down the beach.

Stephen:
[56:57] Right? Yep. Uh, and Wonderland basically booted out Louis Bob, who mentioned he already had carrot cells on the beach while he also had to attractions in Wonderland.
And those seem to be gone after 1908 But he didn’t carry. Just put more attractions up along the boulevard.
Like I said, there were three LaMarcus Thompson scenic railways on the boulevard. By this time, people went to them. They didn’t go to Wonderland.
The one way Wonderland could have made itself stand out was by having spectacular acts, but spectacular acts cost money and they couldn’t afford the money, so they’re caught in a Catch 22 situation there.

Jake:
[57:34] And so for 1910, the writings clearly on the wall, the park’s opening weeks later than than it ever has before it opens for Bunker Hill Day.

Stephen:
[57:43] Right instead of Memorial Day weekend and again, you don’t have any other really big attractions.
You do have the permanent rides that have been there and you did have the stage shows. Still one of the things they had it almost makes up for all the awful racist things they had had before this one of the attractions they had there.
Waas Matthew Henson Matthew Hansen was the first man to the North Pole.
He was purees assistant. But by the time here, he got up towards the pole. His feet were frostbitten. He couldn’t get there anymore.
Henson went with the Inuit guides they had, and as far as we know, he was the first person to get to the North Pole.

Jake:
[58:26] And the reason that you say that that goes some way toward erasing some of the earlier acts Waas.

Stephen:
[58:31] Because Matthew Henson was black and he was He had been a Navy man.
Perry found him when he was working in a store in Washington, D. C.
He joined him and went along on his voyages, and he became a very skilled Arctic explorer. He learned how to build igloos. He learned how to run a sled, learned how toe you know, make fires and stuff up there. He learned how to speak into it.

[58:54] Well, then they get back and you have to understand. It’s not like somebody was paying for the expedition. For the most part, they did all this on a shoestring.
They had no salary. So they come back and both he and cheerier broke Basically.
And one way you recruit that is to try and dio Ah, speaking tour and puree.
Perry turned really selfish. Ah Henson had a lot of people who vouched for him.
But Perry was kind of nasty and said, No, don’t don’t go out and give it speech. I’m gonna go out and give speeches.
But Henson had to survive. He I was very lucky to find an agent who said he would take care of everything, and he did.
He really did a good job for this guy and he went around and he gave lectures all over the place, and they booked him for the entire year in Wonderland.
And if his lecture is like anything else he had, he actually had slides and motion pictures from this.
He had the sled that he had in the clothes that he wore.
So he probably went out and demonstrated all this. Did the slideshow gave a lecture and everything else.
There were some places in the country where he was somewhat reviled or look down on because he was black.
But there’s no evidence of that being the case in Boston. He was there at Wonderland for the entire season, and it was one of the things that helped make that season a lot less awful than it would have been otherwise.

Jake:
[1:00:13] Well, you know, I have tow ask. And I’m not sure that if this was even part of your research,
I know in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a huge controversy about segregation in public amusements in Boston, from roller rinks to movie theaters toe any public space of her congregation.
Do you have a sense of whether Wonderland was open toe all or if it was de facto segregated?

Stephen:
[1:00:38] Well, I have found absolutely nothing relating to that. There’s there’s nothing in there that suggests that it waas,
although I admit that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t still considering that you had attractions like Dark Town and the South before the War and Matthew Henson.
It boggles the mind to think that you wouldn’t let black people in to see this, too.

Jake:
[1:00:59] The existence of minstrel shows wouldn’t have been a mystery to anyone, white or black at the time. It would have just been part of the background of entertainment in Boston, I guess.

Stephen:
[1:01:05] No, no,
right. Minstrel shows were big attraction of the last two years,
as was There was a Minstrel Show is adapted from 1/19 century minstrel show,
and you couldn’t imagine somebody putting this on today, although I found the script, and it’s interesting to read through it because the script is not written in dialect as I would expect it to be.
But it’s so obviously meant to be part of a minstrel show with people in black face that they must have been expected to improvise their own accents.
Well, like I said, all this degrading and racist things happened two years before, But at least the last year you had a very positive image of of Matthew Henson has not only the Explorer but the first man to the North Pole. That’s pretty impressive.

Jake:
[1:01:53] I don’t think anybody realized when the park opened on Bunker Hill Day, June 17th.
But when it closed on Labor Day in 1910, it was closing for the last time.

Stephen:
[1:02:04] Plenty of people realize that because there are ads in the newspaper leading up to this selling off stuff from Wonderland.
They as even before it closed.

Jake:
[1:02:12] So even before the park closed, the assets are up for sale. That’s great.

Stephen:
[1:02:15] Yeah, you mentioned earlier that there was a tethered balloon. Yes, the last year one of the attractions was a tethered balloon. You could go for a balloon ride, and we actually have a description of somebody who did it, which is pretty neat.
But weeks before the park closed, there’s an ad selling the balloon. Yeah, just.

Jake:
[1:02:31] Uh huh. What happened to the rest of the assets? Is the park closed?
Leaving aside the land, everything that could be sold off of the land? What became of that?

Stephen:
[1:02:42] People wanted to buy the land. Um, there was a fellow who had arranged before the park was closed. Even Solomon Cirque.
He wanted to put in an ice plant there, and he was assured because of its own pure water supply, fresh water supply that he’d be able to pump out enough water to make ice in his electrically refrigerated plant. And it turns out.

Jake:
[1:03:05] Which was a new thing at the time, going from ice houses to electrical refrigeration.

Stephen:
[1:03:10] It’s amazing to me that there was fresh water. I mean, this is this is in the middle of Paktika salt march, somehow or other, though they were able to get water because they used the fresh water filling lagoon and Annette Kellerman’s diving pool.

Jake:
[1:03:23] As a self promotional plug? I will refer our readers back to Episode 1 77 if they want to know why.
There might have been fresh water available at Wonderland that that episode talks about an artesian sediment under Boston Harbor.
So that was done at the very beginning of the 19th century. There was, ah, well dug on Long War from Boston Harbor, but that talks about the various layers of sediment, including one with a trapped aquifer.

Stephen:
[1:03:48] Whoa, That’s neat. That would explain, but it didn’t produce enough for his ice plant, and he sued them.
And so that didn’t get built. And then, over the next 10 years to other groups came in and said they were going to develop it for homes. And that never happened either.
I’m sure what happened is they sold off a lot of the things The Marandi proctor oven that was inside the restaurant must have gotten sold to somebody else.
All of that copper wiring that was used to elect like the park must’ve been fabulously valuable. And that got used the wood that was used for the LaMarcus Thompson Scenic Railway.
Uh, there was a company that got rights to that, and they continued selling it off for the next 20 years.
And a lot of houses and things were built in their use. That stuff it’s possible that the velvet coaster ended up on the boulevard.
I’m not quite sure there’s Ah, there’s a newspaper account that talks about both of the roller coasters being sold, so I assume the other one went some place. I haven’t been able to find out what happened to shoot the chutes.
They took down as much of something like the Hellgate as they could. The hole in the ground was still there, And one of the sad things that happened in the years following is that Ah, boy, who is playing fell in, hit his head on one of the boards there, the whole full of water and he drowned.
They got him out and tried to revive him, but they weren’t successful.

Jake:
[1:05:08] Yeah, terrible.

Stephen:
[1:05:09] A miniature golf course went up on the site.
They put up a bicycle racing course track there, and I think that bicycle racing track ultimately became the track at Wonderland Race. Race course.

Jake:
[1:05:22] The dog track. So did the people behind the original Wonderland Park have anything to do with the dog track or the Wonderland Ballroom or the Wonderland T station? Any of the other ways that name was used?

Stephen:
[1:05:23] Yes, the dog track.

[1:05:35] No, no, no. The Wonderland Ballroom that was Wonderland Park was not where the later Wonderland Ballroom went up the Greyhound track, one of 25 years after Wonderland closed.
All the people who have been involved in Wonderland went on to other exploits elsewhere.
Some of them continue to work up and down the boulevard. As I said, the fellow who did the fire and flame show ended up going elsewhere, but he also came back and they put up something in Virginia Beach, and,
I just learned shortly before the book went out that,
he ended up working in an auto shop within within.
Stone’s throw over Wonderland had been in his old age.

Jake:
[1:06:14] I was shocked, even just looking at the cover of the book to realize how short lived the park. It Wonderland was given How sort of long the cultural shadow of the park has been.
The park closed in 1910, but there were amusements on the beach for decades. What was the boardwalk like after Wonderland?

Stephen:
[1:06:34] Well, we didn’t really have a boardwalk and Revere beach. You had the boulevard, but it had all sorts of things that went in after that.
Like I said, there were more LaMarcus Thompson Scenic Railways. There are a lot of fun houses that went up.
There were several roller coasters. In fact, Guy Traver, who built the,
the circle swing at Wonderland that was his first big success of the circle swing, went on to become one of the premier but roller coaster designers he built to roller coasters and Revere Beach the Cyclone, which is the one that was one of the last things to go. But he also built one called the Lightning.
That was one of the scariest roller coasters ever built, one of the fastest. It was built out of steel. When most people are making wooden roller coasters and the steal of the time wasn’t really up to it.
It would when the when the trains went over, Sometimes they would share the heads off the bolts.

Jake:
[1:07:22] That’s not a good thing. I’ve heard the Lightning referred to as a place that Ah young man would take his girlfriend if he got his girlfriend in a family way and wanted her not to be.

Stephen:
[1:07:32] Yeah, that’s the take her for a ride. Actually, they all said that about the cyclone, So yep.

Jake:
[1:07:35] The right ride. The Lightning right?

Stephen:
[1:07:37] But the lightning the only place where the track was horizontal was where you got on and off.
Everybody else, it was tilted. You look at pictures of it. It’s amazing it that that they had something built like that back then.

Jake:
[1:07:48] It’s terrifying.

Stephen:
[1:07:49] Yep. They also put in, like the Derby Racer and the The Dodge Ums that I would have called bumper cars down New Jersey.
Um, and off a lot of other attractions up and down the beach went on throughout the forties, and then it was kind of dying at the end of the forties.
But then the blue line went through and give it a new lease on life and Wonderland continues amusement area up through the sixties, it was until about 1970 that it really died.

Jake:
[1:08:15] I know that counterfactual zehr hard. There’s no crystal ball. But do you think that Wonderland would have survived longer if it hadn’t been for the panic of 1907?

Stephen:
[1:08:25] I think it probably would have, especially if they learn a little bit more financial discipline.
It’s not guaranteed. The guy. Floyd Thompson has a parallel guy by the name of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Would Cornelius Vanderbilt would is mostly forgotten today, but he is the guy who built Disneyland.
He’s been expunged from the Disney Records because he got in a tiff with Walt.

[1:08:51] But he built Disneyland, and after that he went on to build other parks elsewhere in the country.
He built one in, uh, the Denver area.
He built one in New York City that was bigger than Disneyland called Freedom Land.
I went to a three times as a kid and up here in New England.
He built something called Pleasure Island in Wakefield.
All of his parks. Except he was involved in the building of Six Flags to that one survived. That was not only him. All of the parks he built himself closed. Within a few years. Freedomland lasted 31 in Denver only lasted a couple of years.
Pleasure Island lasted the longest of any of them, and they know only lasted 10 years.
But he did the same thing that Thompson and Wonderland people had done.
He had a big act coming in big name acts, and they had to be paid, and I think that contributed to their downfall. So even without a panic, if you’re if you’re if you’re not careful with your money, your park could still closed down.
I’d like to think Wonderland would have survived longer, but it’s not guaranteed, like you say.

Jake:
[1:09:55] And just to do one more. What if, if you don’t mind What? What if there had been, Ah, Boston main station, right outside the gate.

Stephen:
[1:10:03] Oh, that would have made a big difference. I think that’s what they’re hoping for.
If you look at both the conceptual paintings, they did, they imagine there’s going to be a railroad stop right there.
And if that was the case, it would have been easier to get to than taking the ferry and then taking the narrow gauge.
But even if took narrow gauge, you still had to walk because it wasn’t exactly add a narrow gauge station.

Jake:
[1:10:25] So where was the closest station?

Stephen:
[1:10:27] Uh, well, there, too, about ECU, a distant stations. There’s one down in Crescent Beach. Is one up about where the bathhouse was? I think it was a walk.
People are lazy. Like I said, if there had been a railroad station right there, that would have made a difference.

Jake:
[1:10:42] Especially, I guess if you didn’t have to walk past all the competing attractions on the beach to get there.

Stephen:
[1:10:46] Absolutely. And you could have gone straight up from Boston without having to take the Perry. I think.

Jake:
[1:10:51] Your final chapter is basically made up of sort of brief summaries. So the lives of the main characters that were introduced in the book after Wonderland of all those personalities, is there a post script that’s your favorite?

Stephen:
[1:11:05] Oh, boy, there’s so many of them. They’re probably my favorite. One is about the very end of Chiquita and and her husband because they were convinced he only wanted her for her money.
And, uh, she was the center of a cause celebrate in Boston when he finally caught up with Frank Bostock, the guy who was managing her and who he was convinced was, was taking advantage of her.
Uh, they lope, they got married. They would. Bostock wanted him to get divorced, but they stuck together.
They escaped from him twice, and finally she went off on her own. And she said, I don’t like your show. I don’t like this and I don’t like you.
And that was before she came toe Wonderland. She was managing her own act by that point, but they stayed together for the rest of her life,
and he wrote a piece of music that I swear sounds like it, uh, it was dedicated to her,
and after that, he went off and joined the band again, as he had before.
He had been with her as a very poignant story.

Jake:
[1:12:10] Is there anything you wish I had asked about today?

Stephen:
[1:12:13] You really do have to read the story of Henry Patty, the guy who invented loves journey, uh, the sort of tunnel of love. But it was a high tech, eternal love.

Jake:
[1:12:25] And he also he finds love on his own ride right?

Stephen:
[1:12:28] Right? Who found his bride on the loves journey. And what happened afterwards?

Jake:
[1:12:36] If people want to learn more about Wonderland and your research or if they want to follow you and your work online, where should they be looking for that?

Stephen:
[1:12:45] Alright, there to places. One of them is my Wonderland site.
It’s lost Wonderland dot com with a hyphen between Lost in Wonderland.
The other one is my general site, my older site that has all my writings. If you Google the writings of Stephen are Wilk, it will take you there.
That includes my other writings. And I have three other books out in the fourth one coming out, uh, February.
I also have an awful lot of genre publications in history and mythology.
Uh, mystery science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Jake:
[1:13:22] We’ll make sure the link to both those sites in the show notes this week so people can find those Stephen Wilk. I just want to say Thank you so much for spending more time than we had bargained for talking about Wonderland with me today.

Stephen:
[1:13:26] Okay, Great.

[1:13:34] And thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. I appreciate it.

Wrap Up

Jake:
[1:13:37] Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Toe. Learn more about Wonderland.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 210 We’ll have links to Dr Wilkes websites, where you can find all the photos that didn’t make it into the book, as well as more information about Stephen and his other work.
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Music

Jake:
[1:14:35] Stay safe out there, listeners.