100 years of reaching for the brass ring
Don’t feel sorry for him: He runs the Balboa Park Carousel.
He’s stayed on the job that long because he enjoys working at a place where fun is the object and everybody is in a good mood. Now man and machine have become inseparable, preserving for San Diego an attraction that’s more than an amusement ride. It’s a time capsule.
The carousel is almost exactly as it was when it started operating in Balboa Park 100 years ago this month. Pretty much the same menagerie of 52 hand-carved wooden animals and four chariots, put in motion by the same 10-horsepower General Electric motor. Same military band organ playing the same music. Same oil paintings adorning the decorative panels. Same opportunities to grab the brass ring.
All that makes it a rarity, even among the few thousand “Golden Age” carousels built between 1890 and 1930. About 150 remain scattered across the country in various stages of original splendor.
Yet this is no museum piece, gathering dust. In 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the carousel was ridden more than 102,000 times.
While riding it now, a thought comes to mind: What other attraction in San Diego offers an experience essentially unchanged across 10 decades?
Sitting on the sand at the beach, maybe, if you close your eyes.
There’s another old carousel at San Diego’s Seaport Village, circa 1895. But it’s been here only since 2004, moved from Burbank after stays in other cities, including Dallas and Portland, Ore. Some of its key features have been modified over time.
The San Diego Zoo, incorporated in 1916, looks nothing like it did in its earliest days as a ragtag collection of cages. The Giant Dipper roller coaster in San Diego’s Belmont Park dates to 1925, but its passenger cars aren’t original.
And the Hotel del Coronado, built in 1888, is intentionally a shell of its former self. Though it looks in places much as it always has, inside and out there are modern luxuries.
About the only things modern on the carousel are the LED lightbulbs overhead, a bow to the increased efficiency in illumination that time and electrical engineering have brought.
That the ride has remained essentially intact all these years is a testament to its handful of owners and to the equally small number of managers who have meticulously passed down, mostly by word of mouth, the how-tos of carousel maintenance and operation.
The not-so-simple secret of its longevity, according to Brown: “We take good care of it.”
Carousels trace their beginnings to 12th century jousting and cavalry training in Asia and Europe. Horsemen rode in a circle, spearing small rings with their weapons. In time, a version of the exercise was adapted for children, and carousels cropped up in parks and at festivals.
They spread to America and became popular in the 1880s as cities grew and leisure time expanded. Trolley lines took people to beaches and parks where carousels and other amusements were a big part of the draw. Several firms manufactured them, adding mirrors, lights, music and more elaborately carved animals.
The one in Balboa Park was built in 1910 by Herschell-Spillman Co. in North Tonawanda, N.Y., just outside Buffalo. It went first to Luna Park in Los Angeles and then, three years later, to Coronado’s Tent City, a summer attraction erected on the strand.
By the early 1920s, the U.S. Navy wanted the land in Coronado where Tent City stood. The carousel owner, Harold Simpson, was squabbling with the city over licensing fees.
On March 17, 1922, the San Diego Union ran an article about building projects in Balboa Park. It quoted Simpson telling a city committee “that he will open for business tomorrow with a merry-go-round, just inside the entrance to the street railway at the east end of Balboa Park.”
That spot, where the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center is now, was home to the carousel for the next 46 years. In 1968, with plans underway to widen Park Boulevard, the carousel and the building that houses it were moved on a flatbed truck to their present spot near the zoo entrance.
Late last year, the city approved an application for the ride to be designated as a historic resource. The designation means the city formally recognizes the carousel as a landmark that must be protected and preserved.
The nonprofit Forever Balboa Park, which bought the carousel in 2017, has raised $3 million to refurbish it.
There’s always work to be done on something that’s more than a century old.
