The Knife Thrower (23 page)

The moral outrage directed against the new park, the conflicting reports, the rumors and exaggerations, the death of Anna Stanski, all served to pique the public’s curiosity and increase attendance, despite the many people who declared they would never return; and such evidence as we have suggests that many of Sarabee’s most outspoken opponents did in fact return, again and again, lured by
forbidden pleasures, by the protection of masks and disguises, by the sheer need to know.

Even as controversy raged, and investigation threatened, and attendance rose, rumor had it that Sarabee was planning still another park. It was said that Sarabee was working on a ride so extraordinary that to go on it would be to change your life forever. It was said that Sarabee was developing a magical or mystical park from which the unwary visitor would never return. It was said that Sarabee was creating a park consisting of small, separate booths in which, by means of a special machine attached to the head, each immobile visitor would experience the entire range of human sensation. It was said that Sarabee was creating an invisible park, an infinite park, a park on the head of a pin. The intense and often irresponsible speculation of that winter was a clear sign that Sarabee had touched a nerve; and as the new season drew near and the last mounds of snow melted in the shadows of the bathhouses, small weekend crowds began to arrive in order to walk around the famous white wall, to stare at the great gates, the high towers, the covered elevator booths, to hover about the closed park in the hope of piercing its newest secret.

The opening was set for Saturday, May 31, 1924, at 9
A.M
.; as early as Friday evening a line began to form. By 6:30 the following morning the crowd was so dense that mounted police were called in to keep order. The eyewitness reports differ in important details, but most agree that shouts were heard from inside the park at about seven o’clock. A few minutes later the gates opened to let out a stream of workmen, concessionaires, actors, spielers, Mbuti tribesmen, ride operators, dwarfs, and maroon-jacketed guards, all of whom were gesticulating and shouting. The first alarm was
sounded shortly thereafter, and witnesses recalled seeing a thin trail of smoke at the top of the wall. Within twenty minutes the entire park was in flames. The great white wall, a highly flammable structure of lath and staff that had cost a small fortune to insure, quickly became a vast ring of fire; policemen cleared the streets as chunks of flaming wall fell like meteors and threw up showers of sparks. By the third alarm, fire engines were arriving from every firehouse in Brooklyn. As part of the wall collapsed, spectators could see the flaming rides within: the merry-go-round with its fiery roof and its circle of burning horses, the hellish Ferris wheel turning in a sheet of fire, the collapsing bridges, the blackened roller coaster with its blazing wooden struts, the fiery booths and falling towers. Suddenly a cry went up: from one of the rotundas leading to the first underground park, there rose a flock of flaming seagulls, crying a high, pained cry. Some of them flew in crazed circles directly into the crowd, where people screamed and covered their faces and beat the air with their hands.

By nine in the morning firemen were fighting only to contain the raging fire and save neighboring property; hoses poured water on the blistering facades of side-street boardinghouses, and a police launch was sent to rescue nine fishermen trapped at the end of a blazing pier. Suddenly a sideshow lion, its mane on fire, leaped over a flaming section of wall and ran screaming in pain into the street. Three policeman with drawn revolvers chased it into a parking lot, where it sprang onto the hood of a parked car. They shot it twenty times in the head and then smashed its skull with an ax. By ten o’clock a portion of ground caved in and fell to the park below, which was also in flames; spectators from the tops of nearby buildings could see down into a pit of fire, which was
consuming the two hotels, the six bathhouses, the shops, the restaurants, the underground roller coaster and House of Mirth. The fiery lower pier fell hissing into the artificial ocean, throwing up dark clouds of acrid smoke; and from the flames there rose again a flock of crazed and shrieking gulls, their backs and wings on fire, turning and spinning through the smoke and flames, until at last, one by one, they plunged down like stones.

By noon the fire was under control, although it continued to rage on every level all afternoon and far into the night. By the following morning Paradise Park was a smoking field of rubble and wet ashes. Here and there rose a few blackened and stunted structures: the melted metal housing of a Ferris-wheel motor, the broken concrete pediment of some vanished ride, clumps of curled iron. Somehow—the papers called it a miracle—only a single human life was lost, although innumerable lions, tigers, monkeys, pumas, elephants, and camels perished in the fire, as well as the seagulls of the first underground level. The single body, discovered in the debris of the deepest level and damaged beyond recognition, was assumed by many to be Sarabee himself, an assumption that seemed confirmed by the disappearance of the showman and the discovery, in his Surf Avenue office, of a signed letter transferring ownership of the park to Danziker in the event of Sarabee’s death. Some, it is true, insisted that the evidence was by no means conclusive and that Sarabee had simply slipped away in another disguise. Although the cause of the fire was never determined, a strong suspicion of arson was never put to rest; reports from inside the park suggested that the fire had not spread from one level to another but had broken out on all levels simultaneously. The papers vied with one another in proclaiming it Sarabee’s
Greatest Show, or Another Sarabee Spectacular; the crude headlines may have contained a secret truth. For as Warren Burchard expressed it in a memorable obituary article, the fiery destruction of Paradise Park was the “logical last step” in a series of increasingly violent pleasures: after the extreme inventions of Devil’s Park, only the dubious thrill of total destruction remained. Sarabee, the article continued, recognizing the inevitability of the next step, had designed the fire and arranged his own death, since to survive the completed circle of his parks was unthinkable. The historian can only note that such arguments, however attractive, however irrefutable, are not subject to the laws of evidence; and that we know as fact only that Paradise Park was utterly destroyed in a conflagration that lasted some twenty-six hours and caused an estimated eight million dollars in property damage.

It is nevertheless true that the brief history of Paradise Park, when separated from legend, may lead even the most cautious historian to wonder whether certain kinds of pleasure, by their very nature, do not seek more and more extreme forms until, utterly exhausted but unable to rest, they culminate in the black ecstasy of annihilation.

The ruined park was repossessed by the City of New York, which filled in the underground levels and turned the upper level into an extension of the parking lot that covered the remainder of the old Dreamland property; the enlarged parking lot became a public park in 1934 under the administration of Fiorello La Guardia and has remained a park to this day. Here and there in shady corners of the park, on hot summer afternoons, it is said that you can feel the earth move slightly and hear, far below, the faint
sound of subterranean merry-go-rounds and the cries of perishing animals.

In 1926 a paper presented by Coney Island historian John Carter Dixon to the Brooklyn Historical Society revealed that no one called Warren Burchard had ever worked for the
Brooklyn Eagle.
Later evidence uncovered by Dixon showed that the name had been invented by Sarabee as part of a promotional campaign. Although the author of the Burchard articles is unknown, Dixon suggests that they were written by one of Sarabee’s press agents and touched up by Sarabee himself, who appears to have had a hand in his own obituary notice.

Seventy years after the destruction of Paradise Park, Sarabee’s legacy remains an ambiguous one. His most daring innovations have been ignored by later amusement-park entrepreneurs, who have been content to move in the direction of the safe, wholesome, family park. Sarabee, himself the inventor of a classic park, was driven by some dark necessity to push beyond all reasonable limits to more dangerous and disturbing inventions. He comes at the end of the era of the first great American amusement parks, which he carried to technological and imaginative limits unsurpassed in his time, and he set an example of restless invention that has remained unmatched in the history of popular pleasure.

A book of photographs called
Old New York
, published by Arc Books in 1957 and long out of print, contains fourteen views of Paradise Park: nine pictures of the upper level, including two of Paradise Alley, and five of the first underground level. The one most evocative of a vanished era shows a group of male bathers in sleeveless dark bathing costumes standing with their hands on their hips in the artificial surf before the crisscross iron braces of the
underground pier, with its gabled wooden roof, its arches and turrets, its flying flags. Some of the men stare boldly and even sternly at the camera, while others, with powerful shoulders and thick mustaches, are smiling in an easy, boyish-manly, innocent way that seems at one with the knee-high water, the pier, the ocean air, the unseen festive park.

L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN
of Nuremberg. Distinguished guests. It is with no small measure of amazement that I stand before you today, on the occasion of the third anniversary of my arrival in your city. When I recall the brutish creature, half idiot and half animal, who appeared suddenly in your streets that day—a creature jabbering unintelligibly—stumbling—weeping—blinded by daylight—a hunched and stunted creature—lost—unutterably lost—a creature who from his earliest years had been shut up in a dark dungeon—and when I next consider the frock-coated and impeccably cravated young gentleman you see before your eyes—then, I confess, I am seized by a kind of spiritual dizziness. It’s as if I were nothing but a dream, a fantastic dream—your dream, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. For whatever I may be, I who was buried deeper than the dead, I am always mindful how very much I am your creation. Through the patient guidance of Professor Daumer,
to whom my gratitude is boundless, I have been formed in your image. I am you—and you—and you—I who only a few short years ago was lower than any beast.

I understand of course that my progress is far from complete. About this matter I have no illusions. When I enter a room I am fully aware of the stray looks of amusement or pity, to say nothing of those subtler and more harmful looks that may be described as the polite suppression of amusement or pity. Even now, as a full-grown man of twenty, I cannot hold my arms in a natural way, but can feel them hanging awkwardly at my sides, the fingers slightly outspread. My manner of walking is uncertain. This is especially so when I feel myself the center of attention: then I advance in a kind of delicate lurch, or as if I were falling forward and then quickly moving my feet in order to remain upright. Nor am I absolute master of my face, which now and then will break into a scowl, or reveal a look of childlike astonishment. Even my words don’t always emerge with the fluency I long for, but come forth in rushed clusters, or with unnatural slowness. Sometimes I stumble into a pit or well of sadness, a deep pit, a long fall; the sheer walls soar; and as I fall, never reaching the bottom, for there is no bottom, I stare up and see, far above, in the little circle of light that is always receding, faces peering down at me, faces unimaginably high up—and they are your faces, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. For though I have been formed in your image, yet at the same time I am so far beneath you that the effort of looking up at you makes me giddy. That much is clear.

Nevertheless, despite these flaws in my progress, I think I may say that I have come a remarkably long way. Certainly it is remarkable that I am able to stand upright before you today, after a lifetime
of being shackled to the ground. But I needn’t rehearse for you my well-known history. Let two examples suffice. I remember an incident that took place shortly after my arrival here, during the time when I was kept in the Vestner Tower of the castle. One day my prison-keeper, who always treated me gently, carried in to me an object I had never seen before. It was a kind of stick, which I could scarcely see, because in my ignorance of the world I could not yet distinguish objects clearly; but there was something bright and shining at the top, which pleased me and attracted my deepest interest. My keeper set it down on a table. With a feeling of excitement and delight I reached out my hand. The stick bit me. I gave a startled cry and snatched my hand away. I could see a look of alarm on my keeper’s face, an alarm that disturbed me even more than the dangerous stick. What had I done wrong? Why had the stick hurt me? Ah, the stick, the stick, ladies and gentlemen—you know the stick, do you? But as for me, I knew nothing except terror and pain.