US pleasure gardens liked to think they were more respectable places. The main gardens operated between the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the Civil War (1861-1865), an era in which, as historian Naomi Stubbs notes, the concept of American identity was particularly fluid. Ideas of the US being a self-sufficient, agrarian country competed with ideas of it as a technologically advanced, city-dwelling society. The gardens offered a fantasy environment in which these notions could be played with and explored "We can be in a garden while being in the city, we can play with ideas of the pastoral while looking at technological developments," says Stubbs.
In theory, the gardens' clientele exemplified the much-heralded egalitarian nature of US society but that proved to be little more than a fantasy, especially when it came to race. Although there were some gardens catering to a free black clientele in New York and New Orleans, signs forbidding entry to people of colour were common in both the North and the South of the country. "There are attempts at it, but it very much becomes apparent that it's an illusion," says Stubbs.
While exploring what it meant to actually be American, the gardens also offered the perfect environment for patriotic displays of nationhood, and became the natural home for Fourth of July celebrations. The French entrepreneur Joseph Delacroix, proprietor of a number of New York Vauxhalls, was particularly noted for the extravagance of his celebrations. The 1817 festivities included a grand concert, 29 firework exhibits, including a 12ft-wide Star of Freedom and several thousand lights and transparent paintings commemorating the peace treaties of 1783 and 1813.
The line between Pleasure Gardens and amusement parks gradually became blurred in certain Scandinavian and European venues. Tivoli Park in Copenhagen – which opened in 1841, and is thought to have inspired Walt Disney – began offering coconut shies and other games of chance, and gradually expanded to offer switchback railways, dodgem cars and a wooden roller coaster. Vienna's Prater had been open to the public since 1766, and eventually became home to the WurstelPrater amusement park famed for its ferris wheel which appears in Carol Reed's acclaimed 1949 film The Third Man.
But the concept of an enclosed, permanent amusement park undoubtedly originated with Coney Island in New York. The island had been attracting visitors since the 1800s but from 1897 to 1904 it created three lavish mini environments, Steeplechase Park, Luna Park and Dreamland, which would dramatically transform the concept of entertainment. Each had an individual entrance and admission fee, and offered ever more elaborate attractions. Luna Park had A Trip to the Moon in which the airship Luna took 30 passengers up past Niagara Falls and above the Earth's curvature before depositing them in grottoes where they could visit the Man in the Moon's Palace and come away with souvenir chunks of green cheese.