Book Reviews The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills. By Judith A. Adams. Boston: Twayne (G. K. Hall), 1991. Pp. xvi + 225; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). Judith Adams has written the most definitive condensed history of the amusement park industry in the United States to date. Drawing on a wide interdisciplinary and business literature, The American Amusement Park Industry surveys the history of this mass-cultural form from its 19th-century origins through its late-20th-century inter nationalized and corporate structures. In the process, this volume brings together bibliographical, economic, and case-study materials hard to find elsewhere. It constitutes an important handbook and source for anyone interested in the history of entertainment and mass culture. Adams finds the industry’s beginnings entwined in trolley parks, pleasure gardens, exhibitions, and fairs and locates its major defining innovations in the early Coney Island and the World’s Columbian Exposition. This part of the history has been told before, and more provocatively, by, for example, Robert Rydell in his work on world’s fairs and John Kasson in Amusing the Million, a meditation on the relationship between Coney Island and the 20th-century middle class. Similarly, Adams’s chapters on the Disney empire rehearse arguments made more cogently by Richard Schickel and Michael Wallace. Nevertheless, she breaks new ground by tracing the turn-of-thecentury rise and the Great Depression decline of the hundreds of smaller urban amusement parks developed by big industrialists and petty entrepreneurs to divert the working class. Both the Depression and the rise of automobile ownership, Adams argues, were responsi ble for the shakeout of the old parks and paved the way for the exurban conglomerate chains of parks that sprang up, following Disney’s lead, in the boom economy of the 1960s. Adams illustrates the process of dissolution, reorganization, and conglomeration with case studies, drawing a picture of the mixed industry of the 1990s— dominated at the top by nearly twenty corporately owned chain theme parks, planned on the basis of market research and located close to main currents of mass tourism. In the same industry (if not the same market), dozens of amusement parks from the 19th-century urban tradition still persist, with much smaller audiences, ad budgets, and admission prices. Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 797 798 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Adams argues that amusement and theme parks have been sites where Americans have celebrated and learned to understand tech nology and machinery, through encounters with the Ferris wheel, the incline railroad, electricity, and other wonders. It was often in the parks, she argues, that new technologies were visible and available to masses of ordinary people. According to this line of thought, parks were both ritual forms that promoted new ideas and discoveries and the means by which Americans came to terms with those discoveries. She also shows that the parks were not fully possible without techno logical expansion and change. For example, street railway companies built parks and initiated the pattern of resort trips by large numbers of city and suburb dwellers. When autos replaced streetcars, the lure of the amusement park was replaced by the call of auto touring, but eventually the hypercity and the superhighway made the theme park and its mass audience possible. This chain of events is plausible, but one is left wondering if the question “why theme parks?” is not being asked in the wrong way. Clearly, technology helps make theme parks possible, but what makes them necessary and desirable? One way to answer this question is to posit that amusement and theme parks answer some deep psychic and cultural needs on the part of the American people, and Adams resorts to this argument, as have many other commentators on the industry. A trip to Disneyland may function as a sacred pilgrimage, but theme parks also fill needs for their producers, developers, and promoters. The 1980s explosion of investment in these carefully researched and highly controlled “leisure destinations” is part of an intensification of the exploitation of leisure by conglomerate corporations. The biggest theme parks...
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Aug 30, 2019
Tauhid Ahmed Bappy 
