Sarah Toton, Vale of Amusements: Modernity, Technology, and Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Park, 1870-1920; Southern Spaces

This essay explores Ponce de Leon Park, a popular turn-of-the-last-century amusement park two miles east of Atlanta, through postcards, photographs, video, and historical analysis. Now long gone, the park once served as a gathering place for weekend picnics, concerts, performances, and rides, and served as a microcosm for an emerging modern southern city with evolving social relations. The electric lights and mechanized rides on display at Ponce de Leon Park (pronounced "pän(t)-s di lE'än") offered Georgians a playful glimpse of new technology, which developed in step with the growing metropolitan area that surrounded it. While Atlanta’s first baseball stadium eventually rose on the site of the park, this essay explores transportation, technology, and social interactions at Ponce de Leon Park from 1870-1920 — a period of electrification, modernization, and the rise of Jim Crow.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, privately-owned amusement parks dotted the American landscape, and by 1920, between fifteen-hundred and two-thousand parks with names like Electric, Riverside, and White City stood outside small towns and major cities. Locals flocked to parks' mechanical rides and novel attractions; historian Lauren Rabinovitz describes the early twentieth-century amusement park as "an Erector-set world of mechanical thrill rides, shows of human and animal oddities, saloons and swimming pools, beer gardens and ballrooms, restaurants and roller skating rinks…characterized by its dynamism — its brash colors, constant noise, and continual movement of people and machinery."1 Filled with newfangled rides and novel attractions, these parks drew an assortment of patrons searching for new ways to spend their leisure time.

Although these venues offered numerous open-air attractions, privately-owned parks were enclosed by fences and other barriers designed to prevent "undesirables" from entering. In fact, these sites were not the harbingers of mass culture, but carefully regulated spaces that emphasized the social conventions established outside its walls. Park owners, particularly in the American South, upheld the segregationist practices of the larger society, often allowing admission only to white patrons or carefully regulating times and reasons for people of color to enter the park.

The structure of these spaces reflected other cultural ideas of the period as well. While parks advertised an array of rides, shows, and attractions, their physical location also allowed visitors to indulge in popular mid-nineteenth century pastimes associated with "healthful" rejuvenation through communion with nature. Mechanized parks near cities were frequently built on the site of a picnic grove or spring already popular with local city dwellers seeking escape from urban life. Enterprising individuals often bought the property where these natural spots were located and built a panoply of mechanical attractions to draw more patrons.

Local streetcar companies also developed amusement parks to increase revenues. Trolley parks were enclosed amusement parks situated at the end of a trolley line. Although these parks often offered free admission, trolley companies still benefited financially from their existence in several ways. The park's location at the line's end helped ensure that cars traveled at near full capacity during their entire route, rather than departing and arriving at the end station with no passengers. Also, because many of these parks were located on the outskirts of cities, trolley lines could charge an added five or ten cents to their standard fare. Popular amusements also assured that more people would ride the trolley outside of their daily commutes, particularly on weekends. The trolley park taught people to see and use the trolley for their leisure activities in addition to daily transit.

Most early amusement parks offered similar attractions like the Ferris Wheel, Giant Swing, Shoot-the-Chutes, or Scenic Railway. In addition, owners marketed their operations in ways that attempted to exploit the cachet held by famed parks like Luna Park, Dreamland, Steeplechase, and White City. As electric parks like those on Coney Island became more popular and financially lucrative, smaller versions opened outside towns and cities of every size across the nation.

Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Park followed this trend. Established at the end of the nineteenth century, it offered Atlantans not only a venue for amusement, but also an interactive stage for emergent technologies. While bubbling springs and fragrant azaleas initially drew visitors to the park, the Ponce de Leon Springs site evolved over four decades into a complex array of manufactured amusements that kept visitors coming back. Equipped with a theater, electric lights, mechanical rides, man-made lakes, picnic grounds, outdoor gardens, and, eventually, a baseball park, Ponce de Leon Park became a nexus between nineteenth-century naturalism and twentieth-century modernism. However, the city's location in the American South meant that the technological utopianism of the early twentieth century would be articulated within a prevailing ideology of Jim Crow segregation and racist exclusion.