SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Here's the part that kills me about all this. Everything that I would love to be able to reference is gone. I know. Like Playland Not at the beach does not exist. It's gone. Yeah. So sucks because it was so good. Yeah. It was so heartfelt. I mean, we'll talk about this. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

But anyway.

Kelly: 0:29

Hello and welcome to the Lowdown on the Plus Up, a podcast where we look at everyone's favorite theme park attractions, lands, textures, and novelties. We talk in, over, about, and through our week's topic, and then, with literally no concern for practicality, safety, or economic viability, we come up with ways to make them better. My name is Kelly McCubbin, columnist for the theme park website Boardwalk Times, and with me as always is Peter Overstreet, University Professor of Animation and Film History in Northern California. Hi everybody, Kelly here. Uh just wanted to let you know, uh, for the first 10 minutes of this episode, there's a little electrical artifact over the tops of our voices. Um I'm not sure what it was, probably some sort of weird grounding thing. You can hear us perfectly fine, but you'll hear a a little electrical sizzle. Um it's not your equipment, it's us. Uh we didn't want to re-record the whole thing, so uh if you don't mind bearing with it, uh it ends after about 10 minutes. All right, thanks, and enjoy Playland at the beach.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44

Hey Pete. Yeah. What are we talking about today? Today we're gonna be traveling to the West Coast over here, but the northern west coast, and specifically the San Francisco Bay Area for a much-beloved attraction, actually a full theme park that uh no longer exists. So this is a lost theme park that we're gonna go in today, and that is known as Playland at the beach. Playland at the beach.

Kelly: 2:10

Also for a time called Shoots at the Beach, also for a time called Whitney's Playland.

SPEAKER_03: 2:15

Yeah, let me let me cue up mad Sal, laughing Sal back here.

Kelly: 2:23

No one ever talks about Laughing Sal and describes her laugh as charming or funny or anything. They always talk about Laughing Sal and go, it was horrifying. Oh, yeah. That sound went on all day long.

SPEAKER_03: 2:39

All night. Yeah. People who lived out in the Sunset District of San Francisco at that era claim to hear her echoing off in the distance and hearing that laughter for blocks and blocks because sound really carried out there.

Kelly: 2:53

Yeah, and and and still does. And we'll get to Sal and we'll get to her missing head and we'll get to the multiple Sal's that exist. This this is an interesting story. And when you say we'll tr we're traveling to the West Coast, for you and I it's not much of a travel. No. We're we're pretty darn close. Both of us have lived in San Francisco at different times. I lived uh in a couple of different places, but the longest time I lived in the inner Richmond, which is not far from what we're about to talk about. Right. You lived in uh Fillmore?

SPEAKER_03: 3:25

I lived in the Castro. Oh, you lived in the Castro? Directly on Castro Street, right at the top of the hill there.

Kelly: 3:30

Dang, that was way cooler than where I live.

SPEAKER_03: 3:33

Maybe the parties were great. You know, and it's actually a very good neighborhood, but yeah, it there are San Francisco is really interesting as uh I'm gonna use finger quotes, even though this is my this is the place of my birth. I was actually born in the mission. Yeah. Viva la raza, baby. I was born in the mission in St. Luke's hospital. But you talk about San Francisco and everybody has a different idea of what San Francisco actually is. Absolutely. Because we have the hate, we have the mission, we have just one block over, you've got like Goat Hill, or you've got the Sunset District, and you have uh the tenderloin, you have and I wish this podcast could be something that could go into a lot of the lure of of San Francisco, like all the different parts, and some of that will come up in tonight's podcast. For sure, because we both have a lot of love for San Francisco. Sure. And and and we do have some spots of disappointment and hate, too. Yeah, yeah. And that's fine. That's anybody who lives in any particular location. Notice how we don't live there now. Yeah.

Kelly: 4:38

So I I just I defy anyone to go down near North Beach and look at that sign that I believe Herb Kane put up that says this is where Bridget O'Shaughnessy pushed Miles Archer to his death. Yeah. And not be charmed. I mean, it's just that is where the Multis Falcon happened. You're a block away from where Dashell Hammett was riding the damn thing. Right. Really just an amazing history. So many different amazing histories.

SPEAKER_03: 5:10

Absolutely. And I would make the argument that our story is actually going to start in our deep dive in our history here of Playland at the beach. Yep. It begins with a couple of neighbors to Playland at the beach. One of which is the more famous Sutro Baths. Sutro Baths and Museum, I think it was called for a while. Yes. Which, for those who do not know, it was a giant It's impossible to describe, right?

Kelly: 5:39

It's so weird.

SPEAKER_03: 5:40

It's a glass structure that was built on a cliff over a bunch of heated pools of water. Some were fresh and some were seawater. Yeah. With giant slides, and while you were swimming, wearing wool swimming trunks that you could rent, there would be a giant pipe organ playing in the place, echoing away, or they would have live bands.

Kelly: 6:01

Yeah, they would do theater there.

SPEAKER_03: 6:02

Oh, yeah. It's really weird. It was nuts. And the cliffhouse, the cliffhouse is what I was trying to remember. The cliffhouse is still there, kinda. Kinda. The original cliffhouse was like five or six stories tall. Yeah. And it eventually just became too unmanageable. There was a fire that leveled most of it. Well, the cliffhouse as it is today is nothing compared to what it used to be. So that's one neighbor. That's at the north. At the south, now San Francisco is famous for what particular mode of transportation? The streetcars. Specifically the cable cars. The cable cars, yeah. And before the cable cars and the electric streetcars, they were all horse-driven. Yeah. And at one point the city said, okay, we're gonna upgrade, we're gonna put in electricity. So they had all these leftover streetcars. So you could buy them for 75 bucks each one.

Kelly: 6:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 6:56

And there was a little community built on a beach on just south of Ocean Beach. And the first guy was a guy named Colonel Daly, who bought two of them, stacked one on top of the other. He actually put one on top of poles. One streetcar? A whole streetcar. He put a streetcar on top of poles and then built walls around the underside. So he had a basement. And he made a diner, a coffee shop out of it. And people thought, he just did it for beachgoers. Yeah. Thinking, I've got money. Well, people went, wait a minute. There's no who owns the property out here on the beach? Yeah. Nobody. All of these bohemians and poets, members of the not so underground homosexual community in the 1880s at the time, bought all these, all these art so became an artist community that bought all these trolleys and lived inside these trolleys like gypsies. Wow. And there was about 30 to 40 of these things. Yeah. Some had three or four of them stacked one on top of another. Some were kind of built around in an L shape. It's a little bit like today where people buy cargo containers and make like little little homes out of them.

Kelly: 8:03

Yeah, there's there's a whole cool complex in uh Las Vegas I saw last time I was there where they they built this entire shopping complex out of cargo containers. It's really neat. If you want to look this up, it's called Carville.

SPEAKER_03: 8:16

Okay. C-A-R-V-I-L-L-E. Can I get a cookie puss? Yeah, Carville.

SPEAKER_02: 8:22

Go ahead and get some cookie push and also forget Fudgy the Wheel. Forget Fudgy the Wheel over here. And if you turn it around, it's a tie for dad.

SPEAKER_03: 8:34

That's for all you East Coasters out there.

Kelly: 8:36

Just so you won't feel lonely.

SPEAKER_03: 8:38

See, this is how this is why this is why Kelly and I are such good friends. I am hip enough to know about Carvel. Carvel. Carvel's ice cream cakes. I had one shipped to me by a friend. That's right. For my 25th birthday, I got an actual Fudgy the Whale. He brought it with a dry ice container because he was flying back.

Kelly: 8:56

This is this is this is, by the way, the most useful thing we will ever tell our audience. You can order a Carvel cookie puss and have it shipped to you. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 9:09

And we're not sponsored. No. So Carvel's ice cream. Yeah, Carvel's ice cream. We love Fudgy the Whale. We even love Cookie Puss. Yeah. But anyway. We love Cookie Opus.

Pete: 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 9:25

Oh, yeah. Because it's almost March. We got to do our St. Paddy's Day episode. So yes, if so, Carvel Ice Cream, we are looking for sponsors right now, and we want to do an episode about the little man of Disneyland. So this would be a great tie-in.

Kelly: 9:39

And we're about to, to draw us back into this, we're about to get to another very, very famous ice cream treat that was invented. Yes, indeed. At Playland at the beach.

SPEAKER_03: 9:49

But I don't want to put the card in front of the street. Carville, yeah. The Carville lasted for a long time with all these very bizarre configurations of different streetcars. Some of them were cut in half, some were just put next to each other to make them wide double wide. And eventually the city went, wait a sec. You guys can't build on land you don't own. So they had to evict them. But some of them were industrious enough to buy little plots of land out there in the ocean beach area in those neighborhoods nearby, actually put up some of those they they took some of those streetcars and stacked them up, and they had little houses, double wide houses. Some of these houses were actually turned into a church. And the reason is why Carville remained up for so long, part of it was the 1906 earthquake. Because so many people were left homeless. Yeah. They could easily be housed over in Carville. Yeah. Because it was already kind of it was a nice town. It was a nice little community. It wasn't like shabby, but it was already kind of established as a community with its own coffee shop, its own grocery store, et cetera, and its own church and its own post office. But the refugees from the 06 earthquake could settle there in tents, etc. Right. But because of that explosion of population, that's when the city kind of went, uh dude, yeah, let's curb this a little bit. Yeah, this could this is a disaster in the making. Eventually, they took the the quote car out of Carville. Yeah. There was a church, it's the St. Andrew by the Sea Protestant Episcopal Church on 47th Avenue was one of these this huge church that was made out of like seven of these streetcars. Wow. And most of them finally were dismantled or burned down, etc. But there's still one out there in the Sunset District. Yeah. There is a small home. And I I went to this house. I was lucky enough to let the owner I talked him into letting me walk in because I told him I had found out about Carville. He goes, Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh. And it was one of these things. It had been given redwood shingling from the 1960s, 1950s, that era. So it didn't look like streetcars. But you can kind of see with the length forth that there are two streetcars with their long sides pressed against each other. And then you go up into the middle between them. So there's a space built in between the two of them. Okay. That's the long hall down the middle of this house. And then there's whole housing space on one side with the kitchen and the living room, etc. And the other side, there's all the bedrooms.

Kelly: 12:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_03: 12:28

And the best part is in the kitchen, right by the stove, there's still a bell. And if you uh you can still pull this rope that leads up into the attic, and it still has the streetcar bell that you can ding ding and you pull it and rings. That's so cool. So if you're out there in the Sunset District, look for this little it's got a red, uh red front door and a red uh, what do you call it, uh garage door. Okay. And actually, if you want to see it, the address is 1632 Great Highway. It was made from two old cable cars and a horse car. Wow. That's really cool that that's still there. Yeah. In 1995, it sold for$280,000. Which in 1995, that's a lot of money for that particular real estate. Yeah. Yeah. So nowadays, forget it. You're not gonna be able to afford something like that. But Carville does not exist anymore, but it it just shows the industriousness of people in San Francisco and the love that people have for Ocean Beach. So, do you about Mooneysville?

Kelly: 13:31

Tell me about Mooneysville. So Mooneysville, uh around the same period, a little bit earlier, where a lot of the story of Playland at the Beach is centered around transportation. Yep. So it's it's cool that you started with Carville. I had a plan. Yeah. So initially getting out to Ocean Beach was a bit of a chore before there was much transportation out there. And the only people that could really do it were fairly wealthy, which is why the cliffhouse is one of the earlier things that that earlier major structures that opens up there, because it's for rich people. Otherwise, it was it was tough. I I used to live on 9th Avenue in the Richmond, and I used to ride my bike to Ocean Beach, and it takes a while, and there's hills. Yes. And and I'm on the same side of the city as it. So it it it was a it was a deal to get there. Wow. And until they started putting public transportation in, the only people that did were pretty rich. And there was a guy named Mooney who decided, since no one else could get out there, that he was just going to declare that Ocean Beach was not a part of San Francisco. Of course. Of course, that makes sense. He declared Ocean Beach Mooniesville and invited all of his rich friends out there. His rich gangster friends out there. So they started moving out.

SPEAKER_03: 14:52

San Francisco peaky blinders, basically.

Kelly: 14:56

Walking in slow motion. We're going to Mooneysville. It lasted for about two months. Oh and then the city was like, okay, we're drawing the line there.

SPEAKER_03: 15:05

Yeah. I'm sure Adolf Sutra was like, hell no.

Kelly: 15:08

Yeah. And so this kind of thing went on for a while where it was like, we're not exactly sure what Ocean Beach is. It's tough for people to get there. But then transportation, as you just pointed out, starts making it out there. Yep. And it starts to become very popular. Yes, indeed. And tons and tons of little concessions start popping up all around. And you've got you've got the cliffhouse there, you've got the sutro baths, and you've got all of these little things. Right. Some of them are weird little attractions, some of them are kind of like gambling things, some of them are restaurants. Evidently, a huge and this this was true for uh most of the first half of the 20th century, a huge number of the food concessions out there were run by Greek Americans. That just was a community that kind of moved out into that area and said, This is what we do. So they that that was pretty cool. So come about 1912, something really interesting happens. There is an announcement that the World's Fair is going to be in San Francisco. And the announcement initially is that the World's Fair is going to be in the outer part of Golden Gate Park, which, for those of you who are not familiar with the area, is the part of the park that touches Ocean Beach. Right. So people start buying up property like crazy. Just anyone that can do it. Like they just start buying up and building concessions because they're getting ready for the World Fair. And then it doesn't go there.

SPEAKER_03: 16:51

Now, let's put a pause on this for just a second. Okay. Because in this same area, but about 20 to 30 years earlier, in 1894, US President Benjamin Harrison appointed Michael H. DeYoung, as in the De Young Museum in San Francisco as a national commissioner to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago.

Kelly: 17:18

Okay, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 17:19

Now, during that time, he recognized an opportunity to stimulate California's economy during this big time of depression that it was going through in the 1890s. Yeah. Because the gold rush was over, no one was flocking to San Francisco for the right reasons anymore. Yeah. Right? They approved, the Congress approved a fair to be held at Golden Gate Park. This was called the Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. Yeah. Now, here's what's cool about the Midwinter Fair. It had a giant search tower that was almost a precursor to the Eiffel Tower. It had that same look. Yeah. It had this beacon that was like a lighthouse that would shine around the entire park. There were main concourses. It was nuts. It also had a War of the Worlds dark ride. Whoa, really? For real. I've never heard of this. Okay. The only reason I know about this is because there is an attraction where, if you are gentle listeners who are out there who want to see one or two relics of Playland at the beach, one of which is Laughing Sal herself. Yeah. There's an attraction at uh Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It is called the Musée Mécanique. Yes, it's it's wonderful. It's wonderful. It's a bunch of coin-operated automatons, player pianos, and arcade machines from the turn of the century. They've got some modern stuff there too, but it is a history of coin-operated amusement. Yeah. But they have a whole display about the Midwinter Fair, the Panama Pacific Exposition, the Peapie, as we like to call it, short in San Francisco. Yeah. And also about some of the stuff at the Midwinter. And one of the things, and Playland. Yeah. And at the midwinter, there's one mention about some of the attractions. And right there it says there was a War of the Worlds Dark Ride. That is another attraction called Dante's Inferno. Uh-huh. In which you walked through hell. It was this giant demon head you walked into, these big wings sticking out of it. And it featured automatons, little automatons of dancing devils and all this other kind of crazy stuff with real fire. So you can guess what happened to this attraction after about eight or nine months. Yeah. There are no fo because no one was going to take any flash photography on the inside of it. Sadly, we don't know what the interior looks like. Right. But by all descriptions, it's pretty much like the end scene of Mr. Toad's wild ride. They burned little brasiers full of sulfur. They had people dressed up as devils, and they had like these little puppets of devils doing crazy things, all water powered. Yeah. Water wheeled. And it was an old mill style dark ride. Yeah. Same thing with War of the Worlds. It was the story of the War of the Worlds, the book, including a scene of the Battle of the Thunder Child, which is one of my favorite sci-fi moments ever. And I'm like, I want to see that ride. I want to see the War of the Worlds ride at the midwinter. But anyway, this was very, very popular. And it was only around for six months. From January to July. Wow. And that was it. It was done. So it the the the notion of having amusements that people would travel great distances to come to is started with the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco. And then we have the World's Fair that you mentioned.

Kelly: 20:44

Right. Which doesn't end up being in Golden Gate Park. So it doesn't happen there, but people have bought all of the stuff. One of the people that bought some land there and was starting to develop things was a guy named Charles I. D. Loof. Yep. Now this guy is fascinating. He we actually have part of the Disneyland origin story that connects to Charles I. D. Loof. Yep. One of the things he's most famous for is designing carousels. Some of my absolute favorites. One of the carousels that he designed is the one in Griffith Park. The one at which Walt Disney sat on the bench next to and saw his kids riding it and dreamed of Disneyland.

SPEAKER_03: 21:29

And we still don't know which bench it is, even though there's like five benches all over America going, this is the bench that Disney sat on. I know. There's one at the Disney Family Museum, there's one in Disneyland, there's one in Orlando.

Kelly: 21:40

I will at least give the Disney Family Museum credit for them saying that. They're like, this is one of the benches, we don't know which one.

SPEAKER_03: 21:46

Yeah, they're the only one that actually goes, we don't know, but it could have been. Yeah. It could have been. Maybe he flicked out his cigar he burned out his cigarette on this thing. What's interesting about Charles Luf is that he did he did menagerie carousels, which were unusual. And what a menagerie carous I'm a big carousel nerd. And one of the things about uh Luff's stuff is menagerie carousels are the carousels that feature a bunch of different animals. Right. Usually they would have what are called runners or dancers. Yeah. And runners are the horses are the horses with all of their feet off the ground. Little animation trivia with this. Okay. I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I'm gonna mention it here because it's context. Yeah. You can always tell that a carousel was made after 1875? Okay. Something like that. Yeah. The 18 it's always after the 1870s. When the horses who are running when they're running before 1870, the carousel horses, their legs are fully spread to the back and the front. Yeah. Like they're jumping. Yeah, yeah. Because that's how people believed all the the horses' hooves lifted off the ground while running. Until Moybridge. Until Edward Moybridge took his famous twelve photographs out and thanks to Leland Stanford paying for this. Yeah. And then later on you start to see the carousel horses where their legs are folded underneath them. Yeah. And runners. Prancers are the horses where their hooves, the rear hooves are attached to the floor so they don't go up and down.

Kelly: 23:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 23:18

They're the ones that but those are usually the ones that are actually the most decorated because they're stable and they don't they can be grounded. They can be much heavier. Right. Prancers are usually the ones that you see with lots of big suits of armor and stuff on.

Kelly: 23:31

Loof is interesting. So he developed early carousels at Coney Island. He the the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk carousel that is still there now the one with the ring toss that's a loof carousel that he designed. Yep. He all and he designed this carousel it was actually called the Louf Hippodrome because the carousel was inside the building. Yep but he designed it for San Francisco's Ocean Beach in 1906. Yep. Guess why it didn't go there initially right the great earthquake of 1906 and it was waylaid.

SPEAKER_03: 24:08

Yeah. And it went to the nearest possible city it could go. Seattle's Luna Park. And Luf hated it's that's from what I understand Luf hated Luna Park. Yeah. He hated it there.

Kelly: 24:23

Well and it eventually came back once things stabilized and and people were starting to move back in they were starting to move into the Ocean Beach area with concessions in about 1914 his carousel returned to or or it it made it to where its original destination was which was Ocean Beach and what was originally going to become Playland. Is that loof? I'm showing him a picture of showing me a picture oh my God those are the craziest he's got the greatest whiskers mustache ever yeah mustache but it's kind of not it's kind Yeah it's it's yeah his sideburns just come off down to his neck.

SPEAKER_03: 25:02

It's crazy. Anyway so that's that's that's loof.

Kelly: 25:06

You know what happened to this happened to this carousel? So after Playland closed which we'll get to in a little bit after it closed in 1972 it went oddly to Roswell New Mexico for quote unquote restoration. It was there for a while. Then it went to the to California's shoreline village and where it is right now? It is in the Yerba Buena Gardens. That is the the uh playland carousel that Luff designed it's in the Yerba Buena San Francisco San Francisco you can go ride it today.

SPEAKER_03: 25:44

And and if you hear like strange transmissions coming out of some of those animals you can thank Roswell New Mexico. It's weird because the horses all have these weird triangular shaped heads we really like these menagerie animals thank you for letting us ride it hello cox looks like a giant fried egg we are delighted. So back to the carousel and back to Playland at the beach.

Kelly: 26:19

So Luff opened his carousel there he starts to kind of his company starts to take over the management of a whole bunch of other concessions and and some attractions at play Playland he sort of becomes the the the central organizer. At this point it's not called Playland yet and something that causes it to get a name that's not Playland opens up which is a very very large if you can find pictures of it shoot the chutes.

SPEAKER_03: 26:50

Yes actually it it's a grandson of an older chute. Yeah the older chute which was on Fillmore and Turk streets in San Francisco it was originally built in 1894 to coincide with the Midwinter fair and it was built by this adventurer and like crazy guy from Ireland named Paul Boyton. And it was Paul Boyton's water chutes and it is the most dangerous looking thing I've ever seen in my life. It looks crazy. It's got this massive three-story building at the top of a tower that you get into and there are these boats that go up on a track and then circle around inside of a train and then this hook pulls them up to the top of this hill and then it just lets you go and you go down this waterfall but it's not on a track. No it actually like careens down this this wooden track filled with water and then hits this this lagoon and it and your boat could capsize if you were if you were off center. Because it was like so imagine riding like Splash Mountain on a boat with a keel. Yes because this thing would go back and forth and sideways and you never knew where you were and then this rowboats guys would go out tack you on and row you back to the main thing you get off and they'd row the boat over to the main track again. It's insane.

Kelly: 28:19

And I just every time I look at pictures of this and several other attractions around this period I'm like nope.

SPEAKER_03: 28:25

Well I don't know there's part of me that like I wish we had time travel time travel medical insurance so I can go back and ride these things knowing full well I'd probably have a broken limb of some sort by the time I'm done.

Kelly: 28:38

Oh my God this is this right here is a science fiction series you've you've come up with.

SPEAKER_03: 28:42

The insurance sales time travel insurance going to go back and take out and check out Shakespeare's plays? Well you have to have plague insurance.

Kelly: 28:50

Yeah or it could be kind of like Johnny Dollar like time travel insurance investigator.

SPEAKER_03: 28:54

I love that so you said you caught the plague but actually you just got gang fever. So that's not actually under the policy that's not covered under Time Traveler's insurance. One of my favorite photographs of the shoot the shoots actually and by the way the original shoot the shoots were not powered by any sort of cable oper or chain operation to get them up the hill just the boats. Yeah the boats had to be pushed up by a dude dragging this boat uphill by hand with a staircase next to it and then he'd like all right everybody get in all right get off that was like the earliest version like now you go it wasn't until later of like earning enough money from the thrills of careening down this dangerous path. But my favorite photograph is this photo op in which they put a boat right in front of the ride somewhere on land. So this is great like side by side comparison. Yeah there's all these people in the boat going it's a splash mountain photograph. Yeah. Only they're on dry land and then what would happen is the photography go all right act like you're going downhill click and the placement of it makes you look like you're actually splashing down in lagoon. Okay. But my favorite part is when they exposed the sheet they had these special little celluloid clear pieces that we put or glass plates with black flecked onto it on the lower half of the glass that they would actually use to interrupt the light so it would keep the paper white so it looked like water spray on the bottom of it. Wow. So it's this artificial water spray spray done with trick photography. It's so complicated. But it's awesome it's this brilliant little little trick. So some photographic genies like we can make it look like they're actually going downhill waiting. Yeah oh I don't know why you'd want to do that. Aren't they wet already? No no it's perfect. All we have to use is some of the photography what goes in here must come out there.

Kelly: 30:50

So yeah at the at this point the shoots become the main attraction the the whole area becomes known as shoots at the beach. Sort of informally at first and then and then they kind of take it on as a real name. Fairly soon so at this point we've got a whole bunch of different stuff there there's there's dozens and dozens of small little attractions going on. Lots of restaurants lots of stands that there's at least one scenic railway I'm sorry I'm sorry to interrupt you.

SPEAKER_03: 31:20

I just learned a majorly sci-fi geeky moment. Okay. Okay. Boynton the guy who created the original shoot to shoot and Boynton's shoots he actually came up with a diving suit a rubberized diving suit that he had a patent on. Yeah that was featured in Jules Verne naming it directly Boynton's diving suit. Wow in his book Tribulations of a Chinaman in China as a lifesaver for the hero and his three companions. Wow so Boyton was actually immortalized by none other than Jules Verne.

Kelly: 31:57

Wow that's amazing that's right up there with Tigger inventing the artificial heart somebody else do that's full Spregs how often you gotta get through those bullet move those blood buff that's true right Paul Winchel was the the first person to actually patent an artificial heart. Are you kidding me? No I'm not making that up he really was I did not know that it was not it was nothing that was ever actually he was because he had a medical degree as well as being the voice of Tigger not the right Piglet so much if you have a cardiac infunction get an artificial heart installed oh no Piglet has a DNR it's all that bacon I've been eating Piglet why are you eating bacon shut up Pooh that's how you get mad cow so he did he did some of the some of the things though that were in his design did get used in the first artificial heart.

SPEAKER_03: 33:01

That's wild.

Kelly: 33:02

So yeah anyway we've we've fully gone down a cul-de-sac here okay back to playland at the beach the the big thing that's about to happen is there is a roller coaster that is built in Oakland California across the Bay. Huh it is a very large roller coaster it is called the Big Dipper. Loof says I want a big dipper he had wait he had dipper envy he had dipper envy he's clearly making up for something with those mutton jets so he's compensating. So he so there's a little bit of a controversy here. Loof in later years claimed that he designed the roller coaster that was about to go in at Playland at the beach which he also named the Big Dipper. But he probably didn't it seems like he hired a company to do that. He did however design the Giant Dipper down in Santa Cruz which is still there and is one of the greatest roller coasters ever.

SPEAKER_03: 34:07

Love that ride. And if you've if you want to know what that's like for those who've never been able to go to Santa Cruz just watch the Lost Boys. Yeah they actually do an on onboard camera first person viewpoint of some of the the twists and turns on the giant dipper.

Kelly: 34:22

It's also featured in the Sting 2. Oh yes yeah absolutely because you know everybody saw that all you Mac Davis fans hey now Jackie Gleason was in it. Oh yeah I got I got no complaints about either of them it's gotta be get me a Dr.

SPEAKER_03: 34:37

Peppa and make it fast.

Kelly: 34:38

Oh we'll just call it the midseason replacement sting.

SPEAKER_03: 34:42

So it's the Darren Zing sting yeah sorry. Oh man okay anyway so the big Big Dipper Plain Land's Big Dipper.

Kelly: 34:50

Big Dipper opens it's massive this is a huge roller coaster. This is like 1921 22 that they they opened this thing. When you see pictures of that your jaw drops oh my god yeah this is several blocks long it is it is almost it I think the best comparable one belowdown on the plus up is a boardwalk times podcast. At boardwaltimes.net you'll find some of the most well considered and insightful writing about the Walt Disney Company, Disney history and the universe of theme parks available anywhere.

SPEAKER_00: 35:39

Come join us at BoardwalkTimes.net I think the best comparable one uh on the West Coast is Goliath over at Six Flags Magic Mount.

SPEAKER_03: 36:15

Yeah. For the sheer scope and scale of a wooden roller coaster. Yeah I think you have to understand these roller coasters don't have lap bars. No they have handlebars that you hang on to but when you go down some of those things you will actually kind of get airborne a little bit. Yeah people got their arms legs hands fingers broken on roller coasters at this time.

Kelly: 36:38

Yeah at least uh the Big Dipper had a surprisingly good safety record considering Yes. Yeah but at least one person did die on it and it was because he stood up because there was nothing to stop him from doing that. Except for the sign that said please don't stand up. Which is what killed him yeah please don't stand up.

SPEAKER_03: 36:55

Yeah right he hit the sign. Like this wily coyote cut out of it he stood up it is it'd be a solid object lesson. Yeah pretty much pretty much when does there's another gentleman who's behind all of this George Whitney?

Kelly: 37:12

George Whitney Yeah when does he come into play in this? We're coming right around the corner here Leo and George Whitney the Whitney brothers George is really the primary one. Yeah um they open a photo concession at at what is it at that point called Shoots at the beach. They're operating that they start opening up a couple other concessions some really interesting things are kind of happening along this time. The fun house opens which is where we get our friend Laughing Sal. Originally it was called the Bug House but then they found that they decided that was a little offensive and then maybe they shouldn't do that. Yeah probably not but the the Whitneys slowly kind of took over the management of the Shoots of the Beach from Louf. And eventually they managed it completely and they changed the name this was 1926 they changed the name to Whitney's Playland at the beach. At that point there was about 15 like full-size original attractions it was like dark rides it was the roller coaster there was the chutes there was like four full-size restaurants a ton of stands it was it was really starting to take off public transportation was getting out to Ocean Beach so a lot of people were going there and this is interesting this is the first time that we are going to run into a character that we have run in before that is not a major Disney Imagineer Wait Jay Stein no we're gonna hit Rolly Crump and and we're gonna hit Bob Gurr and we're gonna hit all the Claude Coates a million times but here's where we run back into our old friend Lori Hollings. Ah okay Lori Hollings from Frontier Village please please go back and and have a good listen to the Frontier Village episode to hear a lot about the fascinating dude that was Lori Hollings. Oh yeah like he was born in South Africa. He and his family moved here he kind of started education and then was like I don't need it so he he became a set designer for the San Francisco Opera. He became a uh a taxidermidermist like working on the gorilla displays at the California Academy of Sciences. Which were terrifying which were terrifying he uh he seemed to have been briefly part of Willis O'Brien's team working on King Kong he is is about to he did he did the giant head in King Kong.

SPEAKER_03: 39:56

Oh okay that was there are close up shots in which Kong eats a villager or he's grimacing he it's it's euphemistically known as the burping head. Yeah. Because that's there's this big close up and he's like and he's doing this kind of crazy grinning face at the camera. And that's what Lori Hollings did. That's what he worked on. That's what he was known for working on.

Kelly: 40:18

So he's he's in in around the time the Whitneys take over he's hired it's unclear what he was hired to do but he seemed to be kind of a jack of all trades and be pretty talented. But one of the most interesting things about Lori Hollings and Playland at the beach is that most of the photos that we have of Playland from the 20s and 30s were taken by Laurie Hollings. Wow we look at these Pete and I were looking at this the other day there's a a book that came out called Playland at the beach the early years and there's one called the Golden Years too and they're well worth taking a look at many, many if not most of those pictures are Laurie Hollings pictures. Wow that's cool. Yeah we would not nearly have a record that we do have if it weren't for Lori Hollings and he's gonna come in and out of these stories a lot. Well he he joins up around the same time that the Whitneys are taking over and and this is where Playland starts to really come into its own. Yeah. Moves into the late 20s they invent one of the greatest ice cream treats of all time is invented there.

SPEAKER_03: 41:26

The It's it. It is my favorite ice cream goodie. Yep so how that happened was the story goes is that someone had the brilliant idea of making this ice cream cookie put it together and somebody said what is this called he goes I don't know it's it is what it is what do you want from me? Just eat it pay me my five cents and eat it and to to this day you can get it. You can actually have them like Carville's ice cream cakes. Yes and by the way it's it corporation we're looking for sponsors so if you want us to advertise it trust me I'll do it just for free samples that's how much I love these dang things. To quote the Great Jerry Garcia we've been selling out for years just nobody's buying so for those who do not know what an It is an It is a scoop of originally vanilla ice cream between two large oatmeal cookies and then dipped in crispy chocolate and put in a wrapper and there you go. It's it's that's that's all you hit. It's 850 calories per ice cream sandwich but I don't care. It's so amazing.

Kelly: 42:38

And if you're if you're in the Bay Area just goes you probably get it your safe way if you need to.

SPEAKER_03: 42:43

Yeah eating it is safe you can find it all over and it's great. And from where we are actually where we are sitting right now in Vallejo, California, there's a smaller town north of us called Sassoon and there they have an It's it outlet where you can go get crates of It's an It's it paraphernalia.

Kelly: 43:00

Oh I wish you hadn't told me that because now I'm in trouble.

SPEAKER_03: 43:02

Now we're yeah now we're gonna have to take a road trip to go get some it's it's for next episode. So anyway that's the birthday It's it's it's there's another type of food item that that rises at this time which is fried chicken. Yeah and we can cringy folks but the only place to get the best fried chicken in grits and the whole nine yards complete with a dessert of a slice of watermelon is Topsies. Topsies Roost. Yep Topsies Roost all you need to do if you really want to jump out of your ever loving skin is to Google image search Topsies Kitchen and if it and it is as racially insensitive as you think. It wasn't meant to be I'm not going to excuse it no no no but this was the air it was But it didn't last long. Topsies? No, Topsies lasted for a long time. Well, with the decoration, apparently it was kind of phased out after World War II. Yes, that's right. So but in the twenties, it was so for 20 some odd years, it lasted. And it was like this bizarre and expanded too.

Kelly: 44:16

They they uh they uh franchised out there was one in El Cerrito and there was one in Los Angeles. Oh yeah. Duke Ellington played at the one in Los Angeles. Oh yeah, frequently crazy because if you got so the reason it's called Topsy's Roost is it's named after the character Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is mostly chicken and biscuits. It literally said says on the menu that that utensils are forbidden.

SPEAKER_03: 44:41

So you could get a half spring chicken for 50 cents, chicken taglianini for 50 cents, ham and eggs, Topsy style, 50 cents. I don't know what that means. I don't know. Crab Louis, 50 cents, oyster and crab cocktail, 25 cents, sliced tomatoes, 25 cents, combination salad for 25 cents, chicken soup for 15 cents, hot biscuits, hot corn pones with honey, waffle potatoes, homemade apple pie, alimode, an extra 30 cents, and it sit on the side for 50. Coffee, 10 cents, bottle like so. This is their old, and no service less than a dollar per person after 9 p.m.

Kelly: 45:22

Yeah. And then because this was a dance hall. It was. Some of the earlier uh menus said things like we use only the best colored cooks. Yep. Yeah. And they were this various Mammy's apple pie.

SPEAKER_03: 45:35

Yep. And the souvenir menu was actually kind of cute because it was this it's a cutout of a chicken that if you folded it over, it became like a little chicken in a chicken coop. So you could take that home with you as the souvenir menu.

Kelly: 45:46

And have you still exist? Have you seen pictures of the Topsy's car going around town?

SPEAKER_03: 45:53

It looks like something out of a Fleischer cartoon.

Kelly: 45:56

Yeah, it's crazy. They have this car and designed to look like a chicken coop with these super racist caricatures and chickens.

SPEAKER_03: 46:05

There's a lot of Sambo caricatures, etc. It's very, very cringy. So this is the one thing where I kind of go, oh, it makes my teeth fuzzy.

Kelly: 46:13

Yeah, but it is what it is. It was incredibly popular. They would serve up to like 900 people a night. Later, they expanded and served more. There is a there's a dance floor, a huge dance floor at the bottom of the thing. And if you were in like a a table, like a the they called them your your chicken coop was your booth, and you wanted to dance, there were slides. Yeah, you would slide down onto the dance floor. Get out of your chicken coop and slide to the dance floor and just start dancing. It was insane. Madness.

SPEAKER_03: 46:44

And here's what's even scarier is the fact that people would go to this back window outside of the dance hall for takeout chicken.

unknown: 46:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_03: 46:54

Now this was later. This was like 30s or 40s, back when everybody was getting everybody was getting a chicken in the pot and an automobile at home, right? So this is the birth of the automobile craze in America. Yeah. But takeout fried chicken from Topsies became a thing. And next door, get an ItSit. Yeah. And I'm not joking, like that's where you would find it. Like the Itzits were sold right next door to Topsies Takeout.

Kelly: 47:16

Yeah, and and as as uncomfortable as Topssies is, it was the thing that drew a lot of people to Playland for a very long time. Also, they seemed to have a fairly liberal take on alcohol during the prohibition. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 47:38

They didn't serve it, but if you brought it, uh they didn't think too much about it. Yeah. Now my favorite, it's the least racist thing at Topsies.

Kelly: 47:48

And believe me.

SPEAKER_03: 47:51

Yeah, I was about to say it took it takes a while to figure it out. But but it's my favorite thing of Topsies are these giant lanterns that overlook the dance floor.

Kelly: 48:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 48:00

They were these octagon-shaped lanterns that were little chicken coops. And when they were lit from the inside, you'd see the shadows of roosters and chickens and chicks all on the inside, these little floating chicken coops. Yeah. Like I actually kind of want to make just that replica. The rest of it. But the rest of it is so oh my god.

Kelly: 48:21

And do you know what Topsies became when it closed? It became Oh.

SPEAKER_03: 48:29

Seaside dance hall or something like that?

Kelly: 48:30

No, it became briefly for like a year a skating rink that was partially owned by Art Linkletter. What?

Pete: 48:37

Yeah.

Kelly: 48:40

And for those of you not in the know, Art Linkletter was a kind of fascinating weird celebrity from the uh 40s and 50s. And one of the things he's most famous for now is hosting the Disneyland opening day event that was on television.

SPEAKER_03: 48:59

Standing next to Ronald Reagan.

Kelly: 49:00

Yeah, and and the reason and he they couldn't pay him to do it. They didn't have enough money left over when they were trying to build Disneyland. The deal he took was he he got the rights to the photo concession at Disneyland. So he made a fortune.

SPEAKER_03: 49:16

So if you really want to get, by the way, uh this tax pack to one of our earliest episodes about Sleeping Beauty's Castle. We are that episode actually opens with Art Link Letter talking to his kid, like, what are you most excited to go see?

Pete: 49:31

The castle.

SPEAKER_03: 49:32

So there you go. Okay, quick little, quick little deep dive history thing about roll-you mentioned roller skates, so I gotta talk about them. Okay. We're gonna go way back for this one. This is the 18th century, late 18th century. Okay. The industry for making automatons. Mm-hmm. And this will lead us to one of the most famous automatons, actually, at Playland. Yeah. But automatons are moving figures. They move on their own, whether they are clockwork and later electric or hand cranked. Right. These are figures that appear to be little creatures or people that do things on their own. Some draw, some paint, etc. Yeah. Now the reason why a whole industry was built up on this was because of the trade between Europe and China. Uh-huh. Because Europeans would travel over to China looking for silk, looking for tea and for spices, and they would show up to all of these big wealthy Chinese dealers over on the coast of China. And they'd say they'd be from France or from Belgium or from the Netherlands, and they would say, Hey, we've got tons of gold, we want to buy your stuff. And the Chinese dealers would say, We've got gold, we don't need you. One of them was trying to do a deal with a tea salesman and his watch went off. He had an alarm. And the alarm was a little feather and wooden bird that popped out of the watch and went, and then the Chinese dealer's like, What is that? And he goes, Oh, that's my watch. Yeah. Wanna see it? Yeah, set it off again. He was so enchanted, he goes, I'll give you whatever you want. You give me your watch. And the guy said, okay. And he came back. He goes, We gotta make more automatons. These guys are crazy for him. Yeah. Yeah. Now, for those of you who might think that this sounds familiar if you're a fan of this program, that's the same type of singing bird mechanism that we talked about during one of our bird sing words episodes about the tiki room. That's right, yeah. We I and I actually played one of those because my parents own one of these automatons of a singing bird. So you can actually hear it on our program of an actual working singing bird automaton. Yeah. On our program. Yeah. But anyway, the so these a huge industry was built on just making automatons, and they would hire these very brilliant watchmakers and designers. Right. Now you might be thinking, where is he going with this? Why is he talking about this? We were just talking about roller skates. Well, one of the greatest, greatest automaton makers was a guy who was from Belgium, and his name was John Joseph Merlin. That was his real name. It was not an affectation. Okay. Merlin was from Belgium. He is, by today's standards, would be considered transgender. Okay. Because he loved to go to parties and dress as a barmaid with a special dress that had a bar that went all the way around him, and he could serve drinks out of these little cubby holes while he's dressed as a barmaid in full drag, playing the fiddle. Now he's just showing off. I'm not done. Because while he's doing all of this, he's also rolling around on his earliest invention, roller skates. Whoa. John Joseph Merlin invented roller skates. Okay, that's fascinating. Uh he also invented this fabulous silver swan.

unknown: 52:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 52:53

Just look up on if you want to go on YouTube, you can find it. It's very easy. It is this beautiful, full-size swan that is floating in water, and it is a hand-cranked automaton made entirely of silver and glass. Wow. And it is a lifelike, very lifelike swan that kind of looks around, finds a little fish, and pulls it out of the water and eats it while this beautiful music tinkles away. And it even has these kind of twisted glass bars that, as they rotate, it looks like water reflecting on the underside of the swan. It is the most beautiful thing. I've seen this thing in person in Europe. It is the most beautiful automaton I've ever seen. And I've seen drawers, I've seen painters. I got to see Antonio Diavolo do his stuff one time. Amazing. The only thing he didn't invent breaks. Because there's a famous account in which he was performing at Buckingham Palace as a barmaid, and he smashed into a 10,000-pound mirror at the end of a hallway, smashing it, destroying his fiddle and moving himself grievously. Oh. So yeah, not so smart. Yeah. So anyway, that's my little thing about roller skates. That's my deep dive on roller skates.

Kelly: 54:07

That's amazing and fascinating that the one kind of automaton-like figure that we're talking about, Laughing Sal, is advertising a place with many mirrors. Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_03: 54:18

That is why I mentioned it. But it's a great way to get. So let's talk about when was Laughing Sal introduced to the park?

Kelly: 54:24

Oh, yeah, I believe she came in with the fun house or the bug house in 1924. Wow. There it is. Yep. And the bug house. And one interesting thing about Laughing Sal is that there were many, many Laughing Sal's. Dozens. They were produced by a company called the Chicago Toboggan Company. I have no idea how you get from toboggans to Laughing Sal, but Chicago or Philadelphia?

SPEAKER_03: 54:50

I thought it was Chicago, but could I could be wrong. I'm seeing Philadelphia Toboggan Company, the PTC. Okay. They were known for making role they they are the world's oldest existing roller coaster manufacturing company in the world. It's from Germantown, Pennsylvania. Yeah. And it subcontracted the old King Cole Paper Mache Company of Canton, Ohio. And that's why Mad Sal is made out of paper mache. Original sales were made out of paper mache. Okay. The figure stands at six feet ten inches. Yeah. So almost Kelly's taller by an inch. Right. But they're huge. Yeah. And they're terrifying. These Oh God, they're terrifying. Don't Google it if you don't want to sleep.

Kelly: 55:34

So the laughing sal that went into the fun house at Playland at the beach, she so they they had two of them. Yes. And because they tended to malfunction from time to time, so they needed to have a backup. But the primary one stayed there for pretty much the entire run from 19 uh 26 to when Playland closed in 1972. Yep. She was there. When they closed it down, she was still in the window. And they were going to take her and move her somewhere. But after there was a whole lot of chaos when Playland closed. And by the time they got there to move her, someone had stolen her head. Oh, Jesus. So Sal's head was missing. They they had Oh God.

SPEAKER_03: 56:26

Oh God, all day long. All day long. Yeah. The laughter was actually recorded on a giant wax disc. Huh. And that's how it played. It was actually off a wax disc that was on a loop. So it would play over and over and over again, this long, and it is scratchy, it is tinny. Yeah. And you could hear it from blocks because Plainland was open from noon to midnight.

Kelly: 56:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 56:49

So you'd be out on a near ocean beach and you could hear off of the distance. So what happened to the head of Mad of Laughing Sal? I keep saying Mad Sal because we b there was a show at a at a Dickens Christmas fair called Mad Sal. So I make this mistake a lot, but it's Laughing Sal.

Kelly: 57:05

So the the the two uh laughing sales that were at Playland, the backup one went to the Museum Mechanique. Yep. And that's the one that's there now. And you can make her laugh. You can. You can go there and do it. There's some confusion about what happened to the other one, but some part of her is at the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk. It may be that they actually got the head and reconstructed a body for it. Or it may be the other way around. It seems very unclear. But some part of the main Laughing Sal is now at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, sitting uh outside Neptune's Kingdom.

SPEAKER_03: 57:49

Oh wow. Yep. There are many, many references of her in popular culture. There are. She's in the film The Princess Diaries. Is she? Yep. 2001. There's a Laughing Sal appears in the Princess Diaries. There is a Laughing Sal appearing in the 1950 film Woman on the Run during the closing scenes filmed in the Ocean Park Pier. There is the opening scene of the 1951 version of M that also shows Laughing Sal at the Ocean Park Pier.

Kelly: 58:16

There's a 1951 version of M.

SPEAKER_03: 58:20

Anon-Fritz Lang version. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot less pedophilia in that one.

Kelly: 58:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 58:28

Laughing Sal appears briefly in the Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, A Tangled Web, first broadcast in 1962, starring Robert Redford and Zorha Lampert. There's an episode of Perry Mason, an episode of The Magician with Bill Bixby. Laughing Sal is immortalized for all you Harold and Maud fans. He's in Harold and Maud. She was made a subject of a cartoon strip on Zippy the Pinhead in 1998. She appears in number issue number five of DC comic book series Gotham City Sirens. Let's see. God. Oh yeah, she's everywhere. She appears in the 1963 Roger Corman film X, The Man with X-ray Eyes. Oh yeah. Laughing Sal is seen and heard in the background of the comic book shop of the Frog Brothers in The Lost Boys. She's also in a brief scene at the carnival in Darkman, when Peyton wants his pink elephant. A pink elephant, if you please.

Kelly: 59:27

Oh my God, please no.

SPEAKER_03: 59:29

The first one was perfection, like, well, you don't need two and three. Like the first one was great. Just end it there and we're done. Yeah. I think Sam Raimi's involved, though, which is a good thing. Okay, that's that's hope there's hope yet. As long as Arnold Vosloo isn't playing Darkman again. No offense, Arnold. You were no, you were like if we get Liam. You're no Liam Neeson now. If we get Liam Neeson back, that'd be great. That'd be awesome.

SPEAKER_02: 59:49

I have certain skills. That's Dark Man now.

SPEAKER_03: 59:52

I mean, if he's gonna do a naked gun movie, we could Dark Man. Okay, anyway. So Sal's been everywhere, and Sal's ubiquitously associated with Playland at the beach.

Kelly: 1:00:00

There's another really famous film associated with Playland, The Lady from Shanghai, 1947. The Lady from Shanghai, the last section of the film is set in Playland, ostensibly set mostly in the funhouse in Playland. But what's interesting is almost none of it was shot actually at Playland. There's a couple of brief shots at the very end of the film that are actually Playland, and the rest of it was built in a soundstage.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:29

Okay. You want to have a fun weird connection to history thing? All right. That movie now, as we know it, was directed by Orson Wells. Yes. Who Orson Wells took that project from at Columbia Pictures?

Kelly: 1:00:42

No.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:43

The great William Castle. No way who was a That was a William Castle film? He was a major fixture at Columbia Pictures working under Harry Cohn. Huh? And because Cohn was like a terror at Columbia. He was there were people who said there's only two people in the world I would consider to be evil, Adolf Hitler and Harry Cohn.

Kelly: 1:01:02

And and I've got a few more on my list just in the last year.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:06

Yeah, and Bill and Bill Castle wrote the screenplay for Lady of Shanghai, and it was bought by Orson Wells. And this led to the reason why this happened, this connection, is because of Bill Castle's connection to Orson Wells in utilizing his theater, which he sabotaged by painting svastikas all over the place and writing a telegram to Adolf Hitler saying no. So yeah, that's a Bill Castle connection there.

Kelly: 1:01:33

Wow, fascinating.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:34

No idea. So I'll bet you anything, I'll bet you anything that Playland the Beach was not an Orson Wells idea. That smells like Bill. Yeah, smells like Bill Castle.

Kelly: 1:01:46

But I'm guessing what is Wells' idea was that they barely use Playland at all and they rebuild it all on the sound stage. It is interesting too. If you go look at pictures from Lady from Shanghai and compare them to actual pictures of Playland at the time, so 1947, they did an amazing job. Oh, yeah. Like they did a really incredible job. It looks great. Yeah, absolutely. It does. It actually looks better than Playland. Sadly, yes. So this kind of coming into World War II, we actually, before we get to World War II, I want to ask you about something because I'm fascinated by this, but I don't know anything about it, and I'm hoping you do. What is the deal with the game fascination?

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:28

I don't know, but it's fascinating. You know what I'm talking about, right? I do know. So the game of fascination. Yeah. It's weird. It's skee ball. But there's gambling. But and keynote because this has everything to do with the playland at the beach, Midway. Yes. And the Midway had a lot of the usual carnival games of trying to knock over punks with a with a baseball. It was knocking over kitty cats.

Kelly: 1:02:53

There was there was a place called Babyland where you actually knocked over babies with the baseball. Not making that up. That's not a joke that really is happening.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:01

Which is kind of cool. I'm joking. But yeah, but the Midway, apparently, you could accept the prize, which was usually like chalkware, like Cupie dolls. Yeah, yeah. Chalkware is like Randatti skulls. It's basically plaster paris with an enamel coating. Kind of cool, cool Tchotke stuff. Yeah, they're cool. They're cool. Yeah. But when you have them, you have them, you don't want to do it again. Yeah. But instead of taking the prize, you could win the big prize if you're really good at it. Yeah. And you take the money equivalent of the prize. Oh. So that was their way of making it a gambling game and getting away with it in California.

Kelly: 1:03:39

That's interesting. So w when I first moved to San Francisco, which was 1991, I was baffled by this place smack in the middle of Market Street. Right. That was a fascination parlor. Yes. And I was like, what the heck is this? And you go look, and it looks like a whole bunch of it looks like the same people that you would see in a really run-down Las Vegas casino. Oh yeah. Who are just sort of like blitzed out and and like they have a cigarette in their hands. And there's a pint of beer next to it. Right. But instead of pulling a jackpot lever, they're looks like they were playing skee ball. I could not make heads or tails out of it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:22

So what it is, it's it's a table that's roughly about six or seven feet long. Yeah. And it has a grid of holes at the end of it. And you have to roll it. You can't throw it, you can't toss it, you have to go under this sheet of glass that's kind of a buffer to keep you from tossing it wrong. Yeah. And you can't and it also keeps you from bouncing the ball because the balls are made of rubber. Yeah. Red rubber balls. And what it is, hard rubber balls. Yeah. And you're given a certain amount of balls and you put money on the glass to say, okay, I'm going to play this game. Okay. If you got four in a row, diagonal, straight up, or left or right, by rolling the ball into those holes, it would go into the hole and basically hit a little trigger that lights a grid that's on a glass screen, kind of like a pinball machine. Right, yeah. This back glass that's set up, and a light would come on. Yeah. And then you try to get it to line up. If you got it, the number on the top would go ding ding ding ding. Yeah. And it would, you would win. Yeah. Now, if you put money on there, you double your money. Oh. Or triple your money, depending upon where you put the money on the glass. If you didn't put money, you would win like little wiggly things that you would put on your fingers, or the little plastic jumping frogs, or vamp creepy vampire teeth. So that's how they got away with it is that kids, yeah, I win. I win something. Right. But adults would do it as gambling. But because it couldn't either be classified as a pinball machine, a slot machine, or anything else, it was fascination.

Kelly: 1:05:55

So interesting. I've always wondered about this, and it happened to pop up when I was doing research. On Playland, I was like, oh, they had fascination parlors. And I gather that they made the vendors quite a bit of money. Anyway, sorry, sorry to digress there, but I was just like, oh, P probably knows about fascination.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:11

Here we go. If you go to if you look up Fascination on Wikipedia, there's a long list of locations where they are still fascination parlors that you can go to today. Huh. If you're in California, folks, go to Long Beach, California at Loof's Lightaline.

Kelly: 1:06:24

Oh, there's there's Mr. Loof again.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:26

Mr. Loof. This location has the pinball style version of the game, and it pays out money instead of coupons and so it is a gambling machine. Okay. If you're in Indiana, go to Monticello at Indiana Beach. Jersey, go to Wildwood. There's the retro arcade and fascination relocated from the Boardwalk Mall in 19 uh in 2019. And it's the only fascination game in the state of New Jersey.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:49

And they're they're everywhere. And Jersey and New York still have the highest population of fascination parlors. There's like 12 in New York and about 10 in Jersey. Yeah. Isn't that wild? That's crazy. So yeah, it's very, it's it's very old fashioned. If you really want to feel what it was like to be on a boardwalk or be at one of these amusements in the 20s, go play Fascination. It'll really, it feels old and you feel yourself get older. Yeah. Yeah. Like you can feel yourself start to look like Ernest Borgnight as you're playing it. It's pretty amazing. Okay, anyway, that's fascination. So back to Sal, really quick, because she was really, really important at a very important location at Playland, which is the fun house. And the fun house had some insane stuff in it. Yeah.

Kelly: 1:07:42

And a lot of stuff that sort of seemed m uh more conventional back then. It's not stuff that we would see in a funhouse now, but there was so much of it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:52

Oh, yeah. Well, one of the things was the joy wheel. Yeah. Which is this giant centrifuge in the middle of this. So imagine a giant wooden disc that's peaked in the middle. Yeah. Because it's gotta it's gotta get rid of you somehow. Yeah. And you would sit on it, and there would be these big groups of people that would sit on it, and then it would start to go faster and faster and faster and faster and faster, and it would fling you out to the outermost reaches. Yeah. And everybody would giggle because there's raising up. It flings you off the wheel. Yeah, it throws you out from the center away from the wheel. And then there was the barrel of laughs, which was a large tube that you would get in, and it was basically like getting inside of a giant clothes dryer.

Kelly: 1:08:30

Yeah, yeah. The wheel, there's a great movie where you can see this. The Fred Astaire movie called A Damsel in Distress. Yes. A P.G. Woodhouse written thing. It's really good. George Burns and Gracie Allen are in it. It's terrific.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:43

But he's still playing George Burns.

Kelly: 1:08:45

He's still playing George Burns. George Burns never played a character not named George Burns until the Sunshine Boys.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:52

That's pretty cool.

Kelly: 1:08:52

Yeah.

unknown: 1:08:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:55

Well, that's after the Sunday. Oh, I see. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. They also had the moving bridges. Yeah. Which are connected gang planks that went up and down mechanically. Uh-huh. They had the uh skirt blowers, basically. Yeah. And they also had a thing, uh, a machine that slapped you in the butt. You'd go through like these styles that would whack you in the ass. What? It's crazy. And they had the rocking horses, which were attached by strong springs to a moving platform, creating quite a galloping sensation. Uh-huh.

Kelly: 1:09:24

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03: 1:09:24

There's rickety catwalks, steep moving and rocking staircases, the topsy turvy barrel, and the three-story climb up to the longest, bumpiest indoor slide in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It was 200 feet indoor slide. Yeah, it was huge. Yeah. Huge. It's uh the interior of the fun house at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk was the same. It was the same building. Oh, the exterior looks different until it was remodeled in 1983. So it looked the same. Oh wow, that's really cool. So there's a uh the Lady of Shanghai's the mirror sequence that was filmed in Hollywood. Yeah. That was actually the last building to get torn down. Right. Yeah. In 1972. Yeah. We'll get to that in a little bit.

Kelly: 1:10:10

And that and and I think it was a fairly old building, I think, that they occupied. Actually, the the one of the oldest buildings that was on the land at all is the place where Topsy's Roost was. That was like five different buildings before they moved to that restaurant. Yep. And became several others. Absolutely. I just wanted to wish everyone that uh ran what may be the last ever uh Disneyland Half Marathon last weekend a hearty congrat congratulations. I've done it a number of times, and I really wished I could have been out there with you. Uh great job, guys.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:14

Funhouse was changed later on to the crazy house in its later years, but still, it's it it is what it is. Let's talk about some of the rides. Yeah, yeah.

Kelly: 1:11:25

So leading into this, as we move into World War II, um Playland starts to become more and more popular. This is for a lot of reasons. One reason is because we were in the war, a lot of sailors were stopping in San Francisco, and officially there was no drinking on the midway. So what would happen is that the commanding officers would say, Boys, you're going on leave. Might I suggest playland? Because they were hoping they wouldn't get too wrecked and have to be picked up by the MPs or anything. Of course, it was incredibly naive because you could get booze. And and just because there wasn't booze on the midway, like across the street, you certainly could get plenty of booze. You could bring booze into topsies. Anyway, but so popularity started to really grow because a lot of sailors were starting to go there. And there was the fallout from the 1939 World's Fair on Treasure Island. Yes. Which so the Whitneys were smart. The Whitney brothers would buy at dips. So when things started to kind of slack off and businesses started to struggle, the Whitneys would buy them. So the Whitneys started buying up Playland. By 1948, so after the war, the Whitneys owned all of it. Wow. All of it. They eventually owned the Cliff House. Wow. So there was there was a saying that they owned everything from Golden Gate Park to Seal Rock. Wow. So they were they were really, really smart. But one of the other things that they did was at the end of the 1939 World's Fair on Treasure Island, they bought a bunch of those attractions. So that's where the diving bell comes from. Yep. Yeah, there's the the Skylark, which is different from the SkyTram. There was a couple other, there's like some dark rides that came over. They got all those for cheap because they were just being abandoned after the World's Fair.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:35

Let's talk about the diving bell for just a second here. This is one of the most interesting and yet one of the most depressing rides ever. Yeah. There's a for those who are geeky fans out there, you may have heard of a little fan film called Hardware Wars. Yeah. It was directed by a guy from the Bay Area named Ernie Fasilius. And Ernie's still around. He's a bit of an eccentric, and I adore him. Every time I've met him, he's been great to talk with. Yeah. Because I love his other film, Porcalypse Now, which is a parody of Apocalypse Now. But anyway, he's interviewed in a documentary film made in the 90s about Playland. And he talks about the diving bell. And he remembers it as a kid. Yeah. And he said, I remember going on a thing knowing full well that it probably wasn't safe. And you get into this giant bathosphere. It's basically like, imagine the submarine ride at Disneyland. Yeah. But it's in a ball. Yeah. And you would be slowly lowered in this wading pool made of concrete painted teal with water that was a little algae-filled in its later years, especially in the 50s and 60s. Yeah. And there was always like, ooh, we're deep in the depths of the ocean. Yeah, look at it. Look at the itzit wrapper floating just by. And the fish were kind of dead. It was just bad.

Kelly: 1:14:52

This was a big part of the problem with the diving bill that the fish that were in there would die.

Pete: 1:14:58

Yeah.

Kelly: 1:14:59

And and they they there was a small like saltwater pool that they'd built around it, but just ultimately you're pushing this thing into the water with these fish, they're just not going to survive very long. So it's it's really sad and it was expensive because they had to keep trying to restock it. Oh, yeah. Eventually they figured something out, though. The diving bell, of course, because people have to breathe in it, is pressurized. Right. So what they figured out was that if they didn't just release the thing gradually and just pulled the brakes off, it would pop up like a cork. Yep. That was the thrill. So they turned it into a thrill ride. Right, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:39

You're diving, you're drowning underwater, there's a blue. Oh my God. Oh, so little side note. Yeah. If anybody is listening to this program and you want to own a piece of the history of Playland at the beach. Yeah. Yeah. I know someone who has all of the stained glass windows that used to surround the carousel building. Playland at the beach. It's over in this guy I know. If you want, contact us, I'll hook you up. They're not in they're in kind of rough shape, some of them, but some are in really good shape. They this person has acquired had acquired them a long time ago after it had closed in the 70s and put it in storage and have been sitting there for years and they're trying to get rid of them now. So if you want a piece of this, give us a shout. I will hook you up. I will I will put you in touch with the person. So those those would be like the hippodrome walls. Yes. Yeah. The hippodrome rolls. Because and they were like they've got blue and and frosted white glass and surrounded by a normal pane of glass. So you could turn this into a really nice piece to hang in front of another window or something like that. They're really cool. But yeah, they're they're for sale. So you can you can acquire. So yeah, email us through this podcast and I'll hook you up.

Kelly: 1:16:50

So it's it it's so it's interesting, and it occurs to me that we might want to have a mention of the beach itself. Yes. So this is Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Yeah. No, this is not like the Santa Cruz Beach board. No. Ocean Beach in San Francisco is beautiful. I love it. I used to ride my bike out there to watch sunset all the time. You would sit there with hundreds of people who would just sit on the seawall completely silent watching the sun go down. Beautiful. It's beautiful.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:20

Yeah. It's so picturesque.

Kelly: 1:17:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:22

So stunning.

Kelly: 1:17:23

However, it is not the most pleasant bathing beach in the world. No. It is lucky and cold. So this is this is not kind of Playland is not a boardwalk-like attraction where you go and you're wearing your swimsuit and you go to no.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:39

Yeah, this isn't Pony Island with all of all of the Italian gals underneath the boardwalk changing. No, this is not the place.

Kelly: 1:17:45

And people did do stuff on the beach, but it's it's it's very different. That wasn't really the attraction out there.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:51

Yeah, there's quite a dangerous undertow there. Just no, don't do it. New new no new no new.

Kelly: 1:17:55

But so coming coming into World War II and through the end of World War II, they're adding all of these rides. Yeah. So you're getting the diving bell, you're getting the God, what was it called? Dark Mystery? Dark Mystery. Okay. Dark Mystery, also uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_03: 1:18:14

Yes. Very uncomfortable. Because it was capitalizing on the Witch Doctor and frankly the gorilla picture craze of the 1930s. So it's the earlier version. Oh, there's a lot of Witch Doctor stuff, a lot of voodoo, and a lot of very trippy visuals. Like from a from an artistic standpoint, yes, cringy, but really weird, like almost Salvador Dolly-like visuals.

Kelly: 1:18:40

Yeah, and and when they the early versions of it. So it was it was uh built by the pretzel corporation, is what they were called. Yep. And interestingly enough, the early cars looked like they had pretzels stenciled on the side. Yes. Which is pretty neat. But they the early version is just it's pretty dumb. Like just bad paper cutouts. This is pre-blacklight.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:05

So they said that like the coolest thing ever was this giant eyeball that would stare at you as you move past it, but that was about it.

Kelly: 1:19:12

But later they did exactly what you're describing. They started turning it into this almost like deco thing with like Salvador Dolly pieces. They incorporated black lights, and it started to become really interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:27

Yeah, Dark Mystery stopped being the racist headhunter extravaganza with lots of oogaboogah stuff thrown in there. And then there's uh there are pictures of it with these cutouts of native girls scantily clad, startling, thrilling, dark mystery, right next door to topsies. It's just terrible. It's just awful. But then, yeah, the dark mystery later actually becomes like this crazy 50s drug trip.

Kelly: 1:19:54

Yeah, so cool.

SPEAKER_03: 1:19:58

Yeah, it's crazy super cool.

Kelly: 1:20:00

Also coming in around the same time, and this came from the World Fair 2, was the Skylark. Yep, which I don't have a ton about, but it seemed to be some sort of fake rocket something or other.

SPEAKER_03: 1:20:16

Okay. Yeah, it was a weird, it was like a weird rocket swing kind of thing.

Kelly: 1:20:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:20:21

Then there was the kookie cube. Oh, I don't I didn't even see that. You know what the kooky cube is? Spelled with Ks, K-O-O-K-Y, Kookie Cube. Oh. The kookie cube. And if you want to go back to one of our previous episodes, you can learn all about these attractions. It was a gravity shack. Oh, hey. And it was one of those classic leaning to the side gravity gravity attractions based off of some of the gravity attractions, which we talked about in a previous episode. It apparently in the 60s, that was where you went in the 60s to go smoke some weed, go get happy, and look at black lights and lean back and forth and giggle, maybe get a few other things going on because the 60s are free love and all right. Like that was the place to go as a teenager, right? Oh, limbo, that not laugh in the dark, limbo. Limbo. Limbo is the one with the giant skeleton.

Kelly: 1:21:14

Yeah. Yeah. There there was another dark ride called Laugh in the Dark that was was much bigger. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:20

Limbo was teeny. And Limbo opened in 1958. Yeah. It was it was added post the removal of the Big Dipper.

Kelly: 1:21:28

The Big Dipper gets pulled out in 1955. Wow. Okay. And several of the attractions move into its place. One of which is actually Dark Mystery. It actually gets moved there. So does the diving bell.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:44

Yes. So I was wrong. Limbo was not the same thing as dark mystery. Dark Mystery was a another attraction.

Kelly: 1:21:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:50

They were separate.

Kelly: 1:21:51

It's really interesting. But before we get to, because then we're starting to talk about the decline of Playland. There I have I have a quiz for you. Okay. There is one attraction at Playland that the building still exists and is still the same attraction. Know what it is? No. I don't. The camera obscura. Oh, oh, of course. The camera obscura. So the camera obscura is a honey, wh what do you call those things?

SPEAKER_03: 1:22:23

It's a camera obscura. Yeah, it's a camera obscura. It's a pinhole camera, basically. It's it's a Leonardo da Vinci invention, actually, that operates, and basically it is a giant rotating pinhole camera. So you could turn it 360 degrees and look. These days it's out by the cliffhouse and you can see the vistas of the ocean.

Kelly: 1:22:41

Yeah, which which is kind of where it was, but it was sort of considered an adjunct to pla to playland. It's an example of duck architecture. Yep. So originally does so duck architecture is a building that is designed to reflect the thing that it does. So originally the Camera Obscura building was designed to look like a ship because the the image you saw on the giant round disk was the ocean.

SPEAKER_03: 1:23:09

Right. And that was the projection screen, basically, of the pinhole camera.

Kelly: 1:23:12

Right. And then later it was redesigned to so that the building looked like a camera. And that is still what it is. That is so cool. Yeah, it it it got became part of the National Historical Registry. So it is oddly more protected than the cliffhouse itself.

unknown: 1:23:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:23:31

Oddly enough. Yeah. Yeah, sadly. The cliffhouse keeps like, well, now it's closed. Now it's open. Now it's closed. Now it's open. Yeah. Yeah. I uh Yeah, it's it's it's really wild what has survived and what hasn't. By the 60s, that that's that's where we're gonna get to here. Okay, well, wait, before we get to the quick thing.

Kelly: 1:23:48

So early 50s.

SPEAKER_03: 1:23:49

Yes, early 50s.

Kelly: 1:23:51

Walt Disney shows up at Playland to ask the Whitneys about how they run their business. Uh-huh. Because he's thinking about opening something. So he talks to them, they give him a whole bunch of advice. He's he's interested in what they're doing. They end up sending two people with him to help design Disneyland. One of them is George Whitney Jr. Employee number seven. Really? Working at Disneyland. That's cool. Yep. And the other one? Lori Hollings. Ah, nice. Nice. Who is an er uh what is eventually the group that's going to be called Imagineers, but he is an early web employee. That's so cool. And he goes down and works on Frontierland. Wow. Stays there for a little while. Wow. And then eventually returns to Playland. And he works to design the Fun Teertown section of Playland.

SPEAKER_03: 1:25:02

Which was meant for kids. Meant for kids. It was meant for kids because at this point, actually, Playland had started to get a little seedy. Yeah. Really seedy. Well, there was the bad element starting to hang out there. That family element was kind of going away at this point. Yeah. They wanted to add this to make it a place where children could go and be feel safe.

Kelly: 1:25:24

Yeah, and they had a their their iconic thing was they they had a cowboy that was that George Whitney Jr. actually took credit for designing, but didn't. It was actually designed by Laurie Hollings, but it was a cowboy figure called Woody. He and we we know this because there's a snake in my boot. George Whitney Jr. claimed to have done most of Fun Tear Town at Playland. Later we found it was found like there was a bunch of conceptual drawings that Laurie Hollings had done and signed had signed himself. So he did the major amount of it. Woody himself, which is the same kind of uh composite figure as the seal on Seal Rock, which Laurie Hollings also built. Nice. Same kind of thing. Laurie built that, and it is now in the Cliff House.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:16

Oh, wow.

Kelly: 1:26:17

You can see Woody.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:19

Nice. That is so cool. Yeah. I love that. Little bit of Laurie Hollings. Ah, that's so cool. I love when stuff like that is saved. Yeah. You want to know something really weird? Well, we'll talk about this in a moment. I'll say same put a pin in this.

Kelly: 1:26:34

Coming out of the 50s, the 50s is a real turning point. There's obviously some Disneyland influences in the late 50s, including Frontier Town. Uh there's a the Sky Tram, which is just basically a thing that goes from the cliffhouse to like some rock somewhere and back real slowly on a wire. Yeah. But it carries like 20 people.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:56

Right, yeah. It's kind of creepy.

Kelly: 1:26:58

But yeah. So there's that. But but coming out of World War II and into the early 50s, people are starting to get cars. Yep. Everyone has cars. Suddenly you are faced with the choice of do I want to drive a half hour to go to Playland at the beach, or do I want to drive an hour and a half and go to the Santa Cruz Beach boardwalk where it's sunny and I might actually be able to go on the beach. Yeah. This really takes its toll on Playland.

SPEAKER_03: 1:27:28

Which is a real shame. Yeah. Because Playland was just so it's so bizarre. Yeah. Like you ever watched like old Scooby-Doo episodes or like old sixties and seventies, like Batman comics or Batman cartoons. Yeah. And the Joker inevitably sets up his lair in an old abandoned fun house. It's got a ghost in it. A ghost. Right. When you look at old house. Photographs of Playland.

Kelly: 1:28:01

I just thought I'm suddenly seeing like Scrappy Doo and the killing joke.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:06

Let me at him. Let me at him. He's Commissioner Gordon naked with a collar. Let me at him. I'll splat him.

Kelly: 1:28:16

Velma's crippled.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:19

I'm sorry. Scooby-Doo, the killing joke. The Creeper's Revenge. It's the killing joke. Oh my. Okay, Warner Brothers, you own both properties. Do it. You can do this. Guys, you did Velma. Yeah, come on. You can get away with it. Okay. Anyway, but what I love about Playland, like it is that quintessential, creepy old theme park. It is. It really is.

Kelly: 1:28:42

As you move into the late 50s and early 60s, oh my God, it is. It starts to become pretty seedy things. Like a lot of uh local gangs start to kind of occupy it. It becomes a lot less family friendly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:56

It's the place to go to meet your pusher. Yeah. And a lot of the rides you just couldn't maintain because also keep in mind, a lot of these rides are metal. Yeah. And what is hell on metal? Salt air. Yeah, and salt air. It's right across the street.

Kelly: 1:29:09

Salt air, also hell on wood, which is part of the reason that they took the Big Dipper down in 1955. It was kind of two big reasons. That was one. The other one was that it was so big. I mean, it was taking up many, many blocks of space, and you couldn't run that many people through it. So the Whitneys felt like, oh, let's tear this down and make a whole bunch of smaller things that can really cycle people through. They had already gotten rid of the shoot the shoots. I know. So at that point, once the Big Dipper came down, the iconic rides were gone. I know.

SPEAKER_03: 1:29:44

Yeah. And more's the pity because they were gorgeous. They were gorgeous. Gorgeous wild rides where you're just like, they got away with this? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:52

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_03: 1:29:52

Oh, it's just amazing. This this is the noir theme park of your dreams. It is. Yeah. It absolutely is. Like, yeah, this is Oh, I'm surprised Dashell Hammett never did actually a mystery set in it or anything.

Kelly: 1:30:05

So, yeah. So we're we come into the 60s, things are starting to look unpleasant. On the weekends it still did okay. Yeah. But the weekdays, you could roll a bowling ball down the street and wouldn't hit anybody. Oh, yeah. Complete with tumbleweeds. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:21

It was like, yeah, it was it was creepy. Yeah, by the and unfortunately, much to the chagrin of many San Franciscans who grew up with it in 1972, they finally shut it down.

Kelly: 1:30:33

Yeah, right after Labor Day weekend. So it got it got bought by a company that was going to develop condominiums in in its space. It and you would think the closing of a sort of iconic famous park like this would cause some stir, some outrage, but it really didn't. No. It kind of passed its prime. It was done. The sutro baths were long gone. And by the way, you can go to Ocean Beach and see the remains of the Sutro baths. They were just it looks like like Grecian remains. It's kind of neat, actually.

SPEAKER_03: 1:31:06

But the uh That's gonna be another episode. It's just Sutro baths, because that is crazy. Yeah. Because it was like Barnum and Bailey by the sea. As a matter of fact, George Whitney was called the Barnum of the Golden Gates, right?

Kelly: 1:31:17

The cliffhouse was was at its one of like it was closing down. There just wasn't much going on out at Ocean Beach anymore. So it shut down. They started demolition almost right away. This was when they a couple of days later they discovered someone had stolen Sal's head. But the company that was about to build the condos in that place Owned by Jeremy Etz Hotkin. Do you know who that is? He was a millionaire developer. Well, evidently not a millionaire enough because they ran out of money. Yep. So they did some demolition and then the whole thing stopped. And for twelve years, it was just nothing. It was a ruin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:32:00

Yeah, it was a ruin. You want to know who actually put in a bid to work on those condominiums? Who? A certain James F. Overstreet and his son Robert James Overstreet. My dad and my grandfather did not get the bid, but they did put in a bid to work on those condos because they were construct, they were building stuff in San Francisco at that time. Wow. And I remember being a kid being driven out there by my dad in his little Ford Courier pickup truck to go look at that. And he told me about Playland. Oh, this used to be in music. Can we go? This is 1983, and I'm like a little, I'm like nine years old, going, Can we go? That sounds amazing. He goes, It's it's all ruined. And I go, No, I want to see it now. Like, I want to see the Joker hiding in the creepy old fun park.

Kelly: 1:32:54

Like And I don't even think the uh Playland Not at the Beach Museum was open at that point. No, not yet. So they yeah, and it just it sat there as as wreckage for a long time. Eventually a kind of a safe way opened up over there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:33:06

So depressing. So depressing. So depressing.

Kelly: 1:33:08

They finally got some development money and started kind of building the condos. But ultimately, if you go out to Ocean Beach now, there's not much there except for the go out at sunset and sit on the beautiful seawall and watch the sun go down with all the other really cool people who do it. It's what it's well worth doing some one time in your life.

SPEAKER_03: 1:33:27

So Playland at not at the beach. Yes. In El Cerrito, California, in order to commemorate this fabulous, fabulous theme park, there was a museum. And it wasn't any just a muse any museum. It was called Playland Not at the Beach. Yeah. And it was like this marvelous. It was done with such love. Yes. You when you walk through this man, you knew I went to this thing constantly. Yeah. I became a member for a year, so I could go anytime I want to and play Fascination. But it was opened, it was it was a dream started by a guy named Richard Tuck in the late 1990s and was finally open on May 30th, 2008. Yeah. And they were open for 10 years. And in 2018, the building supposedly was purchased to make housing exactly like the theme parks. Oh well. But the building has never been touched. Huh. It is still the same building. It has not been used for housing at all. Are the exhibits still in there? They get them out. No, they're out. Okay. Well, it's probably good that they're saved somewhere. Yeah, and I don't know where they are. Don't know what happened to all of it. There is still a website, playland not at the beach.org, that you could check out. Yeah, it's very nice. Yeah, it's it's a marvelous little thing. So it has a map of all the attractions forth. So when you walked into the walked into the place, you had full run of the place. Yeah. And it was basically like this retail stretch of retail spots that were all linked together. Yeah. And you had this maze basically that took you through, they had a penny arcade. They had a replica of dark mystery. Whoa. And it wasn't that great, but it was it was still it was card, it was it was blacklight, it was like spooky stuff. And they had the carousel carnival, Santa's Village, the world of Charles Dick. A lot of these were like these marvelous little vignettes of Christmas decorations and stuff. Right. But again, it was done with such love that you just can't help but just fall in love with the place. Yeah. They had a hall of memories that talked specifically about the theme park. There was Circus World that had this gigantic model of a Barnum and Bailey circus and how involved it was. How many thousands of people would work on a traveling circus at one time? Yeah. Especially in its heyday in the 30s and 40s. They were we think of the circus today as one tent and a bunch of acrobats. Yeah. No. We're talking a circus that would travel around on three trains. Wow. And would have one of a train was just for the staff, the other one was for the animals, and the last one was all the stuff. Yeah. And it's this massive replica of what it was like. And it was carved and made by a guy who used to work for Barnum and Bailey. Oh, neat. And he was a roustabout. He was one of the guys that would actually pound the stakes into the ground with a giant hammer. Yeah. I still have my roustabout hammer that I bought. And it was from a Barnaman Bailey Roustabout guy who retired in Gilroy. And I bought it from him at a garage sale. He goes, Yeah, that's an actual Barnum Bailey Roustabout hammer. I went, What? And it's got the big metal rings, thick iron rings around the tips. So great. I use that whenever I play The Joker as my pop. It had a pinball, it had a pinball hall, it had a fascination parlor. Yeah. It had a it was just and they had a laugh in the dark. My favorite was a sideshow gallery. Yeah. They had a bunch of gaffes and and gags that would be in a sideshow. Yeah. It was and they had a whole section about the genius of Walt Disney and the park's influence on him. But they had a thing about Sutros.

Kelly: 1:37:01

I love that the Walt Disney thing, this two-way influence, like the Playland influenced him, and then in return, like Lori Hollings and George Whitney Jr. brought things back from Disneyland to Playland.

SPEAKER_03: 1:37:14

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, they all they liquidated everything. Wow. In September 15th, 2018, they had a public auction and they sold all the memorabilia. Everything. Wow. So it literally all that stuff. The collection of Richard Tuck, Tim Sauer, and Frank Beafour, assisted by many, many dedicated volunteers, it just got sent to the nine winds. Yeah. All that's left is the on the wind is the sound of laughing sal. Yeah. Over at Musée Mechanique, that's it. So if you really want to get a feel though, if you really want to get a feel for what it felt like. Yeah. The closest thing, there's two places that you can go to this day that give you the closest approximation. And if you really want to make if you're from out of California and you're coming here, make a trip of it and either start in Santa Cruz and work your way north, or start your way in San Francisco and work your way south. Yeah. But go to the Musee Mechanique over on Fisherman's Wharf. I forget what pier it is, but it's out there. It's easy to find. Bring 20 to 40 bucks. Yeah. They still have the old change machines, and you get 20 bucks, you get a big handful of quarters and you go from machine to machine. All day long. I can be there all day long. And they've got some marvelous machines there, some of which are almost 200 years old. Yeah. They're fantastic. And then the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, obviously. Because you can ride the giant dipper. You can ride. They used to have a fascination parlor there as well, but it is gone. It is now turned into like a beach ball sales point.

Kelly: 1:38:47

Actually, let me add a couple stops because there's two other things. You can stop in San Francisco at the Yoruba Buena Gardens and ride the original Louf Carousel there. There you go. I might, as just kind of a loose aside here, recommend that you stop in Alameda at the Pacific Pinball Museum. Yes. To see pinball machines that are a hundred years old. And to play them. Who are a devo a devotee of this podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 1:39:09

Oh, are they really? Yep. Oh, I love those guys. Yeah. Pinball Museum, we love you. Yes, the Alameda Pinball Museum, the Pacific Pinball Museum.

Kelly: 1:39:17

Pacific Pinball Museum. Great. Yeah, like like stop there. You can say that's another big playland thing you can still do is you can ride the Louvre Carousel in the Yerba Buena Gardens. See the see the pinball machines, and yeah, go down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk because as goofy as it has kind of gotten and as as modern it is as it has gotten, there's plenty of that old charm there. And we will probably do a future episode just on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

SPEAKER_03: 1:39:46

Oh, we're just going to do one just on the cave train. Oh, heck yeah. It's Enrico Palazzo. That's for you, Robert Moser, if you're out there listening.

Kelly: 1:39:58

All right. I think we have come to that point in the show where we need to gird our loins and ratch up our britches and do all those other things. There's children listening. We need to talk about the second half of our title. The plus up. Yeah. Who wants to go first? I can if if you would like. If you would like me to, I can.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:26

Go ahead. Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 1:40:28

It's lame, we're tired. I can if you don't. Me winning isn't you don't. I am no man. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:37

I am not a number. I am a free man.

Kelly: 1:40:40

Sorry, I'm in a big prisoner. Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, there's nothing wrong with that. No. My plus up would be along the lines of obviously I the Playland itself probably not only is it not viable, but it just doesn't make a lot of sense in San Francisco anymore. But I would love to see something like the Playland Not at the Beach Museum reconstructed. But I would like to see it for a lot of these old like seaside parks and and funky turn-of-the-century regional parts. I'd like to see a real solid museum that collected memories of this stuff. Like really, really put them all together so we could see this side of America, this side of Americana. Really, really preserve, try and give give people a sense of what it was like to go to places like that. So that would be my plus up. Let's let's let's build us a big museum, kinda a little bit like the Disney Family Museum, but specifically devoted to these kinds of amusements.

SPEAKER_03: 1:41:56

I I I'm actually very much in agreement with you. Yeah. I'm uh it is it was it was very, very heartbreaking for me. I I literally actually cried when Playland Not at the Beach shut down. Yeah. In El Cerido because I was such a devotee of that museum because of the heart that went into it, and to see it just get scattered to the nine winds really bothered me. Yeah. A lot. Kelly and I have had this conversation numerous times over waffles and and pancakes.

Kelly: 1:42:23

Which we don't eat with utensils because that's what we learned. Yeah, we use our feet.

SPEAKER_03: 1:42:27

We uh we've we've talked over time many, many times in which we've had this idea of doing a pop-up theme park. Yeah. And the notion of this is not unlike some of these seaside attractions. Yeah. I would love, and this is beyond a plus up, like this is actually something that I would kind of love to try and do or try to organize. I would love to try and find a nice warehouse space for 5,000 square feet somewhere and build a playland homage, like you were talking about. Yeah. Where it's not just, yeah, you could have museum stuff, but it is very much like come and play. Come and see this stuff. Even if it is like amateurs putting and again, made with all these artists. There's so many artists out there that do Burning Man, especially here in the Bay Area. Yeah. Artists are being starved out of the Bay Area and giving them a centralized location for them to play in, yeah, and giving them a central goal to contribute to, I think it'd be fascinating and really cool to actually have like a little miniature dark ride. Yeah. And let's do dark mystery, only the non-racist version. Let's know what I mean. And and and do some, have a flea circus. Come up with ways on how to simulate some of these things so that way people can enjoy, like what Kelly was saying with his plus up of knowing what it was like to have that kind of homemade feel of entertainment, safe but fun. Yeah. And and from the heart. Because we talk about all these theme parks like Universal and Disneyland, and we talk about Six Flags, and we talk about all these bigger parks with lots of money, but there's something about the kitschiness of these smaller amusement parks that just sink in. Coney Island is legendary. Luna Park is legendary. Yeah. Playland, the pike, they're all legendary because of this heart that goes into them.

Kelly: 1:44:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:24

And it and that homemade feel of it that I would love to see. And I think something like that that could be reborn again would just make me super happy. I could die happy if I was involved in something like that.

Kelly: 1:44:36

Yeah, me me too. Absolutely. By the way, Luf designed the carousel with the pike.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:44

And I don't know if I talk uh we did talk about this at the con in the Conan episode. Uh-huh. Speaking of the Pike, go back to our Conan the Barbarians Sword and Sorcery Spectacular episode, and you get to learn about the sordid affair of Elmer McCurdy, who existed on the Pike. Yes. Real dead body. Great story. Yep. All right, guys. I think we've hit our mark here. We'll go out laughing as uh Sal would do. Yep. And uh I'm Peter Overstreet. And I'm Kelly McGubbin. And you've been listening to The Lowdown on the Plus Up.

Kelly: 1:45:30

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Lowdown on the Plus Up. If you have, please tell your friends where you found us. And if you haven't, we can pretend this never happened and need not speak of it again. For a lot more thoughts on theme parks and related stuff, check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at BoardwalkTimes.net. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I at Lowdown on the Plus Up on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Instagram, and all the other socials. Or you can send us a message directly at comments at lowdown-plus-up.com. We really want to hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. Our theme music is Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy by Kevin McLeod at Incompitech.com. We'll have a new episode out real soon. Why? Because we like you.