The Origins of the Amusement Park — A two-part series

• Part 1: Machines Not Built for Play
• Part 2: From a Spring in the Woods to the Theme Park (current)

The Origins of the Amusement Park Part 2: From a Spring in the Woods to the Theme Park

In the spring of 1583, a woman named Kirsten Piil found a spring in the woods north of Copenhagen, Denmark. At the time, the water in the city of Copenhagen wasn’t especially clean to drink, and rumors began to spread that this clear water bubbling up in the forest could cure illness. As people started flocking there to drink it, clowns, acrobats, and vendors followed close behind, drawn by the crowds.^[1] With acrobatics performed and stalls set up right beside the people who had come for the water, a corner of the forest turned, almost without anyone planning it, into a place packed with spectacle. What grew up there survives today under the name “Bakken” — recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest operating amusement park in the world.^[2]

English-speaking readers have a domestic version of this same story. Starting in the 1660s, London’s Vauxhall Gardens drew crowds to the south bank of the Thames with music, fireworks, and lantern-lit walks, and its name and format proved influential well beyond Britain: American cities including New York opened their own venues called “Vauxhall Gardens,” and Carstensen’s Copenhagen park was known in some early references as “Tivoli and Vauxhall Gardens.”^[15] Like Bakken and the Prater, Vauxhall began as informal land use rather than a planned business, and it took decades of added attractions before it became the fixture of London social life that Georgian and Victorian writers celebrated. It closed for good in 1859, priced out by the same urban growth that had once made it profitable — evidence that London’s own pleasure garden was, in the end, just as temporary a use of the land as the fairgrounds and hunting grounds discussed throughout this article.

Part 1 traced how the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, and the flume ride were each born for a different purpose before making the leap into becoming rides. But for these machines to come together in one place and form an “amusement park,” there first had to be somewhere capable of drawing a crowd. And it turns out those places followed the very same pattern as the machines. Not one of them was built from the start for play.

Bakken — What Was Left Behind by People Who Came for Water

The name Bakken tells you everything about this place’s identity. In Danish it simply means “the hill,” and the name itself preserves the fact that this was never planned as an amusement facility — it was just a forested hill that people climbed to fetch water. Once the crowds drawn by the spring began attracting clowns and vendors, it wasn’t long before the royal court designated the surrounding forest a hunting ground and restricted access. Because this had never been a space opened for play in the first place — play had simply wandered in — a single royal decision was enough to shut it back down. That restriction was lifted in 1756, when Frederik V reopened the forest to the public, and Bakken has operated continuously without interruption ever since.^[1][2]

There’s something worth pausing on here. Bakken predates Copenhagen’s Tivoli — commonly called the “world’s first amusement park” — by 260 years.^[2] And yet the title of “first” is usually given to Tivoli, not Bakken. We’ll get to why in a moment, but the short answer is that it comes down to how you define an “amusement park.” Bakken was less a designed facility than a market that sprang up on its own, while Tivoli was conceived from the outset by a single individual as a pleasure garden and built with royal permission. Both places have a legitimate claim to being the “oldest” of something — the two claims are just answering different questions.

The Prater — The Day an Emperor Opened the Gates of a Hunting Ground

Vienna’s Prater began the same way as Bakken. Since the sixteenth century, this land had served as the Habsburg imperial family’s hunting ground. Only nobles and court officials were allowed into these woods, where pheasant, deer, and wild boar roamed freely.^[3] Then, on April 7, 1766, Emperor Joseph II decreed that the Prater be opened to all citizens of Vienna.^[3][4] For a ruler who styled himself an enlightened monarch, this was likely meant as a symbolic gesture — handing a space once reserved for the privileged back to the people. But whatever the intention behind it, what actually followed was the transformation of a hunting ground into an amusement park.

Once the gates opened, cafes and inns sprang up, followed soon after by early amusements like swings, carousels, and bowling alleys.^[4] The district that took shape this way is known today as the Wurstelprater, Vienna’s amusement park. Vienna’s first fireworks display was held there in 1771, and a hot-air balloon flight was attempted there in 1784.^[4] A forest once used for hunting game had, within a single generation, become the liveliest entertainment district in the city. As with Bakken, the Prater was never a space designed and planned for play — it was a space with a different purpose that opened up, and play simply filled the gap that opened along with it.

Tivoli — What “First” Actually Refers To

Copenhagen’s Tivoli is often introduced in the media as the world’s first amusement park. But as we’ve already seen, Bakken came 260 years earlier. It’s worth pinning down exactly how Tivoli came to earn the title of “first.”

Georg Carstensen, a former Danish army officer, was inspired by pleasure gardens he had seen abroad and secured royal permission to open an amusement park of his own.^[5] Tivoli opened on August 15, 1843, just outside Copenhagen’s old city walls.^[5] What matters here is the difference in approach. Where Bakken and the Prater came into being as play seeped into a space built for some other purpose, Tivoli was a space that Carstensen, acting alone, set out from the very beginning to build for the explicit purpose of a “pleasure garden,” with the king’s permission secured in advance. Bakken and the Prater became amusement parks as an outcome; Tivoli carried the label “amusement park” from the planning stage onward.

So the phrase “world’s first amusement park” is more precisely understood as “the oldest surviving space that was designed and built from the outset as a pleasure garden.” Bakken’s claim to being the “oldest” and Tivoli’s claim to being the “first” are answers to two different questions. Carstensen himself left just five years after the park opened, departing in 1848 to fight in the Schleswig war, and was dismissed by the board for breach of contract. He died of pneumonia in 1857.^[5]

The Midway — A World’s Fair Lines Up Its Entertainment

Through the late nineteenth century, World’s Fairs were built not for play but to showcase industrial and civilizational progress. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago added something new to that formula: a roughly one-mile-long entertainment strip, clearly separated from the exhibition halls, called the “Midway Plaisance.”^[6] The music promoter Sol Bloom built out this district, mixing rides like carousels and the Ferris Wheel with “village” exhibits claiming to represent the daily life of various countries, alongside acrobatics and performances.^[6][7]

What makes the Midway significant isn’t any single ride but the layout itself. Earlier fairs had offered entertainment too, but the Chicago fair was the first to physically separate entertainment from the exhibition halls entirely and arrange it along a single path, so that walking down it meant encountering one attraction after another.^[6] The English word “midway,” now used for the row of rides and stalls at any fair or carnival, comes directly from the name of this district.^[6] The idea of funneling a huge crowd into one space and packing entertainment densely along its route was tested here for the first time.

That said, this district wasn’t a purely innocent laboratory of entertainment. Exhibits like the “Egyptian Village” or the “Javanese Village” turned non-Western cultures into spectacle for consumption, and from today’s vantage point they’re criticized for reinforcing racial hierarchies.^[7] The Midway’s legacy carries both of these sides at once. And yet, among the visitors who walked through it was a man who would go on to build America’s first full-scale amusement park: George Tilyou.^[6]

Coney Island — Building a Fence and Charging Admission

Before the Chicago fair, Coney Island’s rides were scattered haphazardly along the beach. Each ride charged its own separate fee, and the strip was a chaotic mix of bars, gambling dens, and brothels. George Tilyou, drawing on what he had seen at the Midway and taking a cue from Sea Lion Park — a fenced amusement park that Paul Boyton had already opened at Coney Island in 1895 — opened “Steeplechase Park” at Coney Island in 1897.^[8]

Tilyou’s approach was simple. He erected a large stone archway on Surf Avenue and charged a single admission fee of twenty-five cents.^[8] Once inside, visitors could enjoy roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, a haunted house, and the bathing beach, all for that one fee — but drinking, gambling, and prostitution were banned.^[8] An open marketplace where every attraction had once charged its own fee had turned into an enclosed space, fenced off and made safe by a single price of admission. The strategy of drawing in families worked, and for the following decade or so, Coney Island became a stage where competing large-scale amusement parks built on this same model vied for visitors.

In 1903, Frederic Thompson and Elmer Dundy opened “Luna Park.” On opening night, May 16, 1903, at eight o’clock, when they threw the switch, more than two hundred thousand light bulbs blazed to life at once across buildings crowned with 132 towers and spires, and forty-five thousand people poured in within five minutes of the gates opening.^[9] The following year, in 1904, William H. Reynolds opened “Dreamland.” Unlike Luna Park’s exotic ornamentation, this park was painted entirely white, directly borrowing the “White City” aesthetic of the 1893 Chicago fair.^[10] Its 375-foot electric tower was studded with one hundred thousand light bulbs, and Dreamland’s power contract with the Edison electric company was, at the time, the largest single electricity contract in the United States.^[10] Thanks to these parks, lit up as bright as day even after nightfall, amusement parks became, for the first time, places that could stay open after the sun went down.

Fences, admission fees, and electric lighting — combined, these three elements turned Coney Island from an extended marketplace into a self-contained commercial space in its own right. But there was still one thing missing. Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland had each simply gathered together a collection of different rides; none of them offered a single story running through the whole space. It was Disneyland that first filled in that missing piece.

Disneyland — Designing a Story, Not Just Collecting Rides

The story of how Walt Disney entered the amusement park business is a familiar one. He had taken his two daughters to ride the carousel at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and found himself frustrated sitting on a bench, only able to watch while his children played.^[11] But there was a more fundamental problem behind this personal irritation. Most American amusement parks at the time had settled into a reputation for being dirty and chaotic. The fence-and-admission model that Coney Island had pioneered was already nearly half a century old, and over that time the entire amusement park industry had come to be seen as low-rent entertainment. Disney wanted a clean, safe space that parents and children could enjoy together.^[11]

Disneyland held a preview opening for invited guests and the press on July 17, 1955, and opened to the general public the following day, July 18. The Disney company would later adopt July 17 as the park’s official opening date, and it still marks the anniversary that way today.^[12] What Disney poured the most care into wasn’t any individual ride but the structure of the space itself. He unified the entrance into a single gate to control the flow of visitors, and adopted a “hub-and-spoke” layout in which each themed area radiated outward from a central plaza.^[11] Wherever visitors found themselves in the park, the central plaza served as a fixed point of reference so they would never feel lost. Each themed area, or “land,” was given a landmark visible from a distance to naturally draw people’s footsteps toward it — Sleeping Beauty Castle being the prime example.^[11] And Disney made sure that buildings, signage, and even the design of trash cans were all unified to match the mood of each area. This is the design principle that would come to be known as “theming.”^[11]

This is the line that separates an amusement park from a theme park. Steeplechase and Luna Park were spaces that gathered a collection of rides inside a single fence. Disneyland, by contrast, was designed from the very beginning so that the entire space would follow a single story. Rather than placing the rides first and filling in the space around them, Disney designed the story first and then fitted the rides inside it.

That said, Disneyland doesn’t hold an exclusive claim to the title of “first theme park.” Santa Claus Land, which opened in Indiana in 1946, was built around a single theme — Christmas — from the very start. Unlike other parks that grew by adding rides one at a time over the years, Santa Claus Land had its theme defining the entire space from the moment it opened, which is why it’s called “America’s first theme park.”^[13] The Efteling, which opened in the Netherlands in 1952, also predates Disneyland by three years.^[14] So, just as with Tivoli, the answer to “world’s first theme park” depends on what standard you’re using. What is clear, though, is that Disneyland went on to establish and spread the design grammar that would become the industry standard for theme parks worldwide: hub-and-spoke layouts, controlled sightlines, and unified theming.

Nothing Was Built for Play

Part 1 showed how the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, and the flume ride each migrated from lance training, fairground curiosities, winter recreation, and logging infrastructure. The history of the spaces covered in Part 2 draws the same picture. A spring, a hunting ground, a World’s Fair — each drew people together for its own separate purpose, and play tagged along behind the crowds until, one by one, these places became amusement parks. Neither the machines nor the spaces were ever born for play in the first place.

The point where this long pattern was finally reversed came in 1955. Only with Disneyland did someone finally design an entire space from the ground up purely for play, rather than as the byproduct of some other purpose. It took nearly four hundred years from the moment clowns first wandered by chance into a spring in the Danish woods for play to finally stop riding on the back of something else.

Previous: Part 1: Machines Not Built for Play