Coney Island
The amusement park and theme park both originate from Coney Island. While New York never hosted any of the great exhibitions during the 19th century, the artifacts from these travelling Exhibitions and World Fairs began finding a permanent place on Coney Island from 1878.

Two years after the dismantling of a 300-foot tower from the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, it is re-erected in the middle of Coney Island. Its majestic view reaches all the way to Manhattan, more easily seen through the telescopes on top. Thus, a New Yorker could say he had seen his residence from atop a Philadelphian tower. As it turned out, such time-and-place traversements would soon become commonplace on Coney Island.

In the years that followed, many remnants from the exhibitions arrived on the island, but not only its structures or "mechanical wonders". Along came a multicultural group of Africans, Asians, Native Americans, who had been on display for educational entertainment. Together with the more obvious living exhibitions - midgets and freaks - they found permanent residence on the island.

In 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, creating a great passageway for thousands of Manhattanites towards Coney Island. During the weekends, the island was packed. New attractions such as the Loop-the-Loop and the Rollercoaster hurled the crowds through the air. Many more bizarre and fantastic inventions followed. 1

One such invention was the Steeplechase. The Steeplechase was a mechanized horsetrack on which contestants raced against each other towards the finishline. By adjusting and positioning their weight on the mechanical horse, participants could adjust the speed, thus making it a real competition. The Steeplechase quickly became a tremendous success and ran 24 hours a day. Following the success of the Steeplechase, its owner plants a few more unrelated amusements in the direct vicinity, and builds a wall around them. Steeplechase Park isolates itself from the rest of the island, and becomes the first real amusement park.

At this point however, the word 'theme' park does not apply. Steeplechase Park was nothing more than a diverse collection of midway amusements. There is no theme or setting that binds these amusement-rides in any way; the enclave is as diverse as the world outside.2

Luna Park
Several years later, architectural school dropout Frederic Thompson and entertainment entrepreneur Elmer Dundy open the first true theme park on Coney Island. The park is called Luna Park, bringing its visitors to a place even more isolated than Steeplechase Park: the Moon.

Frederic Thompson was born in 1873 in Ironton, Ohio. His father was a steel and iron manufacturer, who moved his family to several different towns and cities until settling permanently in Nashville, Tennessee, in the late 1880s. Frederic developed a strong interest in machinery during his youth, and always preferred turning opportunities into income instead of going to school. For a few years he studied architecture under his uncle, a prominent architect in Nashville, for whom he worked occasionally between 1890 and 1897. In 1893 he left for Chicago, to work at the Columbian exposition as a demonstrator in an industrial machinery exhibit, and was afterwards involved with every American world's fair through the Pan-American exposition held in Buffalo in 1901. His investments in midway amusements grew with each fair, which he and a partner designed and built for numerous showmen. In 1897, Thompson received an architectural medal for his design of the Negro Building at the Tennessee Centennial. Later, he was forced to take over some of the amusements he had designed from showmen who went bankrupt while still owing him money. Thompson turned out to have a much greater feel for show business. By 1898, he had turned these often passively educational and self-conscious artistic spectacles into a commercial success by injecting the shows with narrative action, movement, and mild sexual titillation.

For the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American exposition, Thompson first teamed up with rival showman Elmer "Skip" Dundy. It was here that they first took their visitors on "A Trip to the Moon". Thompson & Dundy’s amusement was strongly inspired by H.G. Wells' science fiction story "The First Men in the Moon", which had been published in serial form in Cosmopolitan some months before the Pan-American fair. The amusement would later become the cornerstone of Luna Park. "A Trip to the Moon" used modern technologies such as electricity, illumination and hydraulics to give its customers the sensation of flying in a winged ship. Upon arrival, visitors could actually participate in the theatrical setting depicting the Kingdom of the Man in the Moon. There, they viewed a musical show and the monstrous "Moon Calf", sampled green cheese offered by the midget population, and shopped in a lunar marketplace.3

Luna Park was in fact an enclosed miniature city, made up of hundreds of towers, spires and minarets. Their style, a converted Beaux-Arts classicism, was an eclectic mix of renaissance and Oriental, all from Thompson's imagination. This "amusement architecture", according to Thompson, had to affirm human desires and encourage "release, freedom, and spending" instead of making people deny themselves pleasure or restrict their desires. On opening day, 60,000 visited Luna, and an attendance record was set on the Fourth of July weekend of 245,000. Each season, Thompson adds even more towers to his lunar forest, reaching over 1300 in number by 1907. Luna Park's wild skyline was topped with over a million lightbulbs, creating a beaming spectacle which was visible for miles. By then the park contained a more complex and sophisticated infrastructure and communications network than many American cities did at the time, making the Luna Park the most technologically advanced fragment of the world. 4