West Hartford's Coney Island
Remembering Luna Park

Story by Steve Silk

Elmwood is a no-nonsense kind of place. Since the 1700s it has been a hub of industry, and home to those who have toiled in its kilns, mills and factories. So it’s hard to imagine this working class neighborhood had, once upon a time, a quite different reputation. Back in the day, it was the Coney Island of West Hartford. And the nexus of all that frantic fun was a place so out of this world they called it Luna Park.

It was a sweet thing, Luna Park, a short-lived confection whose past is already pixilated. Though it’s not that long ago that Luna Park disappeared – the whole complex was shuttered by 1930, impressions are all that’s left. Among the remains: a few photos, some memories, and a handful of newspaper stories. One who’s been trying to piece it all back together is Tracey Wilson, West Hartford’s official town historian. Wilson has scoured the public record to reassemble, as best she can, the bits and pieces of Luna Park, so she has as clear an image of the park as anyone.

And she tries to convey that picture to her students at Conard High School. Wilson, who teaches history at the school and presides over a semester-long course in local history, says, “It’s interesting to teach [about Luna Park] — there’s nothing left of it. The kids can’t believe it was here.”

Ah, but it was. And to browse through the faded black-and-white photos that document Luna Park is to embark on an armchair journey to another world. At its heart lay the midway, a grassy lawn dotted with gazebolike booths and surrounded by palatial walls that might have been transplanted direct from Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome at Xanadu. There are crenellated towers, steep-roofed turrets, onion-shaped domes and a thousand fantastical spires. It was a fortress of fun. Banners crackled in the wind like whips, and flags flapped back and forth.

Look at the faux Egyptian temple, supported by Karnak-like columns, and topped with a kneeling camel. See the Ferris wheel and the miniature train ride, the spinning carousel, and the corkscrew sliding board. At night, when management flipped the switch that fired up the 50,000 electric light

bulbs strung over every wall and tower, well, it was just enchanting. The Hartford Courant gushed; the paper’s reporter enthused, “The illumination was spectacular in the extreme, and the White City stood out in the darkness like some magic city flashed into being by the wave of a wizard’s wand.”

No wonder the place was mobbed. This being a time when apparently no one went out of doors without something on their head, pictures of the crowds offer an amazing study in headgear: men sport straw boaters, beanies, fedoras, caps and cowboy hats, while the women look like flocks of birds in their exotically feathered chapeaux. But folks didn’t go to Luna Park to show off their millinery. No, they paid their nickel entry fee to see attractions such as the Fatal Wedding, the Streets of India, Katzenjammer Kastle and the Old Mill. Ever on the lookout for singular attractions, Luna Park management advertised in the show biz trade paper Billboard, offering $4,000 for a two-week gig for any performers who could offer a “novel and highly sensational act that is a regular heart-beat stopper.” Oh, the thrill of it all.

If instead park-goers needed cheering up, perhaps they’d stop by the Palace of Fun or the Temple of Mirth. Or maybe they’d drop a few cents at the penny arcade, stroll through the Japanese Tea Garden, or catch a breeze on the Circle Swing. To the oom-pah-pah beat of a band, couples could take a twirl around the ballroom, the park’s biggest building. On a hot day, they could cool off with a 5-cent ice cream cone. Gosh, it must have been grand.

Luna Park brought its bright lights to West Hartford as an accessory to another of the town’s historic oddities – Charter Oak Park, which during summer months since 1873 hosted almost daily harness races, which attracted throngs numbering to the tens of thousands. Back then, West Hartford was a “Sporting Town” where swells wagered as much as $20,000 on a single race. Around the turn of the century, that was real money. The track’s oval was sited near the intersection of Oakwood and Flatbush avenues, a location so convenient it was often visited by some unofficial, after-hours speedsters — motorcycle cops used to race their bikes around the oval. Eventually, Charter Oak was known well enough that it came within a hair’s breadth of hosting the Hambletonian, a famous contest that was part of harness racing’s version of the Triple Crown.

To get more people out to the races, trolley tracks were being laid, and to get more people on the trolleys, someone had the idea to open an amusement park modeled, roughly, after Coney Island’s Luna Park. New Haven’s Chatford Construction Company kicked in $200,000 and broke ground in March 1906. About three months later, shortly after lunch on June 23, the Colt Band’s assembled musicians struck up a rousing version of The Star Spangled Banner. Cannons boomed. Luna Park was open.

The fun started, but so did the trouble. Promptly, the cops nabbed three pickpockets. “The opening of a large place of amusement like Luna Park naturally draws from the underworld” opined The Courant. The park also drew the wrath of a local preacher. Three weeks after it opened, the Reverend T.M. Hodgdon, of the local First Congregational Church, condemned the park’s owners for desecrating the Sabbath (and, no doubt, for cutting into church attendance), and humiliating West Hartford in the eyes of neighboring towns.

Meanwhile police arrested peanut vendors for trespassing, but didn’t bother to enforce laws against gambling and the consumption of liquor. Labor troubles broke out on the trolley line, where tensions flared between local workers and a crew of Italians, Poles and Hungarians who were brought up from New Haven to hurry the job. Work finally resumed when West Hartford’s deputy sheriff, assisted by seven Hartford cops, provided protection for the New Haven workers.

Luckily, there were no major disasters – in spite of the park’s slapdash construction. And, in spite of the low-cost building effort, nobody managed to make much money off Luna Park. The park opened under new management in 1907; again in 1908; and yet again in 1909, when new owners added a more Japanese flair to the midway. Somehow the park limped along, gradually morphing into a state fair, held to coincide with racing season. The fair reached the height of its popularity in the mid ‘20s, when the state passed anti-betting legislation. The Charter Oak folks appealed, but lost. The racetrack lost its allure. When the town refused to grant the park and its 112-acre grounds a tax-exempt status, the curtain closed. The property was foreclosed on in 1930. Pratt & Whitney snapped up the land, but nowadays the former fairgrounds are occupied by Home Depot.

Wilson says the whole episode offers a window into West Hartford’s psyche. “You can see the way the town works,” she says. “They’d rather have a Home Depot than an amusement park.” Be that as it may, one thing that can be said for sure about Luna Park, says Wilson: “It really gave the town some character.”

Steve Silk is a Farmington-based garden designer and writer. Visit his blog at www.clattervalleygardens.blogspot.com.