This Week: laffinthedark.com

For many people today, an amusement park means places like Disney World or Six Flags, huge corporate wonderlands with multi-million-dollar roller coasters that can interrupt your blood flow. But amusement parks began on a much smaller scale around the turn of the century, with numerous regional parks that appealed to thrill-seekers with quirky, low-tech attractions that often relied on their imaginations. One of the most popular was the "dark ride," which involved taking a mechanical car ride through a darkened building equipped with spooky creatures or scenes. While some of the classic dark rides and funhouses still exist, they are becoming harder to find. Bill Luca, a graphic designer in Boston, and George LaCross, a promotional copy writer for the Providence Journal, have harbored a lifelong fascination with dark rides that has gone beyond being a simple hobby. They have conducted what is possibly the only primary research into the history of these rides, interviewing the original designers and park owners. They've posted much of this information at laffinthedark.com, their colorful tribute to the thrill rides of our past. Here, Bill Luca answers our questions.

Define what makes for a true "dark ride" and funhouse.

A dark ride to us is the classic old amusement park ride where you're in a car that takes you past eerie figures and scenes. Funhouses were collections of scenes, obstacles, and weird situations that you physically walked through, such as shaking staircases, shifting floorboards, and rotating barrels.

What are the roots of dark rides and funhouses?

Nobody knows who invented funhouses in general. They were appearing in parks back to the early 1900s and there were many amusement-ride companies building them. One popular type, Noah's Ark, was cooked up by LeRoy Raymond in 1919 at Venice, CA. Many of these were built around the country, with the last surviving one in America now at Kennywood Park near Pittsburgh. The dark ride was invented and patented by Leon Cassidy's Pretzel Amusement Ride Co. in 1928 in New Jersey. That's the classic spook-house ride, which became immensely popular. Many other ride manufacturers, such as Traver, Messmore & Damon, Allen Herschell, and Philadelphia Toboggan Company jumped in to building them in the 1940s. Today, modern rides are built by Sally Corporation in Florida and a few smaller companies. A lot of portables are made in France and Italy.

Which dark rides are the best known?

Not too many of the past dark rides are remembered today. There are a few like the Laff in the Dark at the former Euclid Beach, OH and another that was at Crystal Beach, Ontario that people still talk about. Today, Spook-A-Rama at Coney, Zombie Castle at Rye Playland, NY, Haunted House at Knoebel's in PA and Phantasmagoria at Bell's Park, OK are some classics that are still operating, among quite a few others we highlight on our site.

Was there a "golden age" for dark rides/funhouses?

To me, it was the '40s and '50s. A few of those dark rides are still around in their great "low-tech" forms. Funhouses from back then and earlier are pretty much gone. In the old days, if you bumped into a wall in a dark corridor or fell on your ass after coming down a slide, or got dizzy from walking through tilted rooms or on spinning floors, you laughed. That was the idea. Today, it's a lawsuit, and that's what did these things in. Parks just won't set themselves up for the liability, where if someone sees a creepy fake creature in the dark, they get a lawyer and say it reminded them of their ex-mother in law and now they can't work, sleep or function sexually and want $10 million. This stuff happens.

Are dark rides still as popular today?
What's the "state of the industry"?

The basic dark-ride concept is an ever-popular part of amusement parks, but today it's a lot different. Technology has allowed the development of sophisticated, high-tech attractions like Disney's Haunted Mansion, Indiana Jones Adventure, and similar rides using digital and video imagery and sound and computer-driven animatronics costing tens of millions of dollars. These are today's versions of the old, wooden, low-tech spook house. They're incredible, impressive experiences, but we don't get into those on the site. Plenty of other sites are devoted to the Haunted Mansion. We focus on the old stuff, the tawdry, noisy, run-down, low-tech seaside amusement park rides. The stuff we grew up with.

What's your earliest memory of enjoying a dark ride or funhouse?

Living in New England, at around 7 years old I was initiated by going through the old Treasure Island Pretzel ride at Revere Beach, just north of Boston, and at Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Old Orchard had three walk-through funhouses including a Noah's Ark and two great dark rides including the great Devil's Den. I lived in those rides as a kid. The amusement area is still there, but the great rides I remember are all gone. And I have great memories of Coney Island when there were about seven or eight dark rides going. When I was first there, a lot of these parks still had rides that had been there for 30 or so years, so I saw a lot of stuff that went way back. Since then, those parks have mostly been knocked down and sold out to developers. I was lucky to catch them before they went down.

What's your favorite dark ride? Do you still get a jolt?

I still love Spook-A-Rama at Coney Island. It's one of the last of the classics that's still around that I remember as a kid. This thing had an enormous impact on me when I was 8. It was a quarter-mile long and went through two dark buildings with a courtyard between them and was loaded with devils, witches, and other benign demons of the so-called simpler days of the '50s and '60s. God, I loved that thing. My dad was always saying "Why are you spending the day in there? Go on a roller coaster or something for God's sake, this is Coney Island." And it's still there, although it's been shortened and isn't quite as labyrinthine since they had to bring it up to the fire codes. Still has a lot of great black-light stuff and the same bumpy, noisy old cars. The place is a shrine to us.

If you could visit one funhouse or dark ride that no longer exists today,
which one would it be?

I'd probably like to have experienced the old "Pit" and "Bluebeard's Palace" funhouses that were at Revere Beach. Those had reputations of being downright diabolical. At Old Orchard, I remember getting electric shocks, being on chairs that were rigged to collapse under you, fun stuff like that. Then there were the air holes in the floor that blew up women's dresses back when they wore those old loose outfits in the old days. Of course, you can't have any of that stuff today.

Why did you decide to start learning about dark rides and funhouses?

I was always fascinated with them. I built them when I was a kid and had my friends go through them. Again, my parents were saying: "Go out and play ball. Get out of the cellar. And stop using all those extension cords." I'd go into every funhouse and dark ride I could, and that went right up until puberty when I started getting interested in other forms of amusement. After that, it was just one of those things you turn back to, trying to recapture your childhood. Plus, as I thought back to the old rides, it was occurring to me how creative they were. All these outlandishly lurid paintings on the outside. And inside, all these really, really bizarre figural designs and sculptures in these out-of-this-world colors. This is where black light was initially used, long before the hippie days and Halloween stuff. This is where all the weird, trippy, hallucinogenic stuff started.

Being involved in design work, I found the appeal of these rides to me was in the crazy, creepy atmospheres that were concocted by some unknown but truly wacked-out inventive geniuses. We later found out that one of these guys was the late Bill Tracy of Cape May, NJ. Tracy was a legend who a lot of old park owners we've talked to still remember with a few shudders. The guy had classical art training and was an art director for Macy's in New York before getting into dark ride design. He put together some really surreal scenes and had a real eye for the ladies. Lots of sultry, buxom women bound up in torture-type situations. He had one scene with a woman strapped to a table with a buzz-saw blade heading up between her legs. And he'd have a motor inside her chest to make her bosom heave. Basically, he was the Russ Meyer of dark ride design. Very "incorrect" stuff. But he was an incredible artist who did the most stylistic of all dark-ride work. He could take some chicken wire and papier-mâché and paint and slap it together and come out with some astonishing art. One of his greatest rides still stands, the Haunted House at Trimper's in Ocean City, MD.

Are there many resources to turn to?
How do you research such an arcane business?

No. If you do a web search you'll probably come up with our site most of the time. We did a lot of talking with amusement park owners and ride operators who went back to the old days. You're not going to dig anything up on this stuff kicking around Six Flags or Disney. We knew that we'd seen a lot of our childhood parks get demolished, so we concentrated on old places that were still hanging on, places like Coney Island, and others that very few have heard of, like Keansburgh Amusement Park in NJ, and Sylvan Beach Park in upstate NY, both of which have classic Pretzel dark rides that haven't changed since they were built, mostly because the little parks that own them can't afford to upgrade them. That's like finding the Lost Ark. And the owners still remember when the rides were installed and the people who did it. That's how we get a lot of our information.

When did you start laffinthedark.com? Who else works on it?

We started it around three years ago. We've had some other collaborators, but it's principally driven by George LaCross, who's an advertising copywriter, and me. I met George by chance at National Amusement Park Historical Association meeting, and found he'd had this same "dark-ride bug" all his life.

Why did you decide to create a website about dark rides and funhouses?

Well, we grew up and sort of circled back to these rides that we loved as kids, and found that their appeal was still strong. I think it's about re-discovering yourself through something that you connected with deeply when you were at that young, impressionable age. Again, we like to concentrate on the early pre-theme park rides, and we get a few complaints from people looking for Disney. But aside from the fun I always had with dark rides and funhouses, I started to appreciate it as an adult as this great retro art form. Instead of state-of-the-art animatronics and today's inclination to create a video game type of ride "experience," I wallowed in the "traditional" world of skeletons, witches, devils, "men from Mars," etc. I always loved the "cheapness" of the old rides. Instead of digital sound, you had clanging cymbals, cowbells, car horns, and buzzers. The stunts weren't computer driven. It was papier-mâché and painted plywood. I've always been in love with papier-mâché, and you had all these geeky, toothy, leering characters with those rough-hewn papier-mâché features and over-the-top colors. As a kid, I knew these things weren't real. I loved the artificiality of it. I was never scared by any of it. It fascinated me. And I always was crazy about "Laffing Sal," the fat mechanical laughing lady who was outside the funhouses. Lots of people remember her.

The only time I got really scared in a dark ride was at Revere Beach when I thought the car was stuck or stalled and I was going to get rear-ended or abandoned. That's when any amusement ride gets scary, when you think something's snapped. All the old rides, and the old parks themselves, were made of wood, which is why so many are gone. You'd get that musty smell of wood and grease as soon as you'd go in, especially if the sun had been beating down and heating it up all day. When we can go into an early ride today and smell that 50-year-old wood and machinery, well, at this stage in life, this is what you get high on. Plus, the rides always had a very appealing incoherent mixture of scary and funny, kooky stuff that didn't make any thematic sense. I loved that disorientation. So you had rides named Laffland, Kooky Kastle, Spook-A-Rama, LoonyLand, Wacky Shack, etc. Anyway, if you look at websites about amusement rides, you see mostly roller coasters. There's this huge thing today with multi-million dollar mega-coasters. Probably about 50 or more get built every year, which is incredible. I have no problem with that; anything that perpetuates the amusement park industry and staves off using the land for condos or football stadiums is okay by me. But, we weren't finding anything about funhouses. So we decided to put the stuff we gathered onto a website and see what happened.

What would you most like to achieve with the site?

We didn't want to sit on the information and photos that were sort of naturally accumulating. You have this compulsion to see if anyone else connects with it. We wanted to see if others would respond and maybe kick up some more history. We were also hoping that we could help the old rides to survive. We've been told by some park owners that people said they heard about them from our site and decided to visit. Raising the profile on traditional dark rides, which are typically overshadowed by the more spectacular attractions, might make park owners think twice before plowing them under for another food or game stand.

What kinds of reactions have you gotten from visitors?

Almost every day we'll get e-mail from someone who is overjoyed at the discovery of the site. Mostly people like us who loved those rides and thought they were the only ones who did and who never had anyone to share it with or a place to learn about them. We've attracted the recognition of some retro art sites that carry a link to us. That's given me a lot of satisfaction. We started out thinking we'd have a membership group, and people are always asking us how they can join. We might start one someday, if George and I can ever find the time or help to run it.

Has the site aided your research?

Yes, we get lots of contributions of people who grew up near an old, long-gone park and tell us what the dark ride or funhouse was like, or have old snapshots. Some of our articles came out of such contacts. That's the idea; that's the system working.

What would you like to add to the site?

Mostly personal histories of early dark ride and funhouse manufacturers and artists. There were a lot of extraordinary people who made these things and did it as a day job without any recognition and who passed into obscurity. We were able to interview Leon Cassidy's son Bill, who took over the Pretzel Ride Co. until it ended in 1979, and who's almost 90. Just a great guy who we got tons of information from that would have been lost forever. He was telling us that he couldn't believe anybody would be interested in this stuff or that we wanted to know how it was built and who did it. He was happy we enjoyed what he'd done, but he felt it was just a business and nothing special. He didn't think it was worth preserving. To us, it was.

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