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.
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