The American Path: From the Pleasure Garden to the Amusement Park

Authors

  • Naomi J. Stubbs LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Abstract

Pleasure gardens were ubiquitous in nineteenth century America with most cities hosting multiple venues. Beyond amusing the masses, American pleasure gardens served several important roles in defining national identities, including navigating the transition from agrarian to industrial nation. Yet despite their importance and popularity, they all but vanished from the American landscape by the mid-nineteenth century.

In this article, I examine what happened to the gardens in both physical terms, and, more importantly, in terms of what happened to the social space they created. I demonstrate that the amusement park is the chief successor to pleasure gardens, and that (unlike their British counterparts), this transition took place via public parks and world's fairs. The legacy of pleasure gardens is argued to continue through many forms, including the theme parks, shopping centers, and museums of today.

 

Author Biography

Naomi J. Stubbs, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Naomi J. Stubbs is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Stubbs’s areas of research include nineteenth-century American theatre and popular entertainments and critical editing. Her first book, Cultivating National Identity Through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment, will be published in September with Palgrave Macmillan. In this study, Stubbs examines the once-popular outdoor entertainment venues known today as “pleasure gardens” as sites for the experimentation with and performance of American identities. She is currently working with Amy E. Hughes on an annotated critical edition of a nineteenth century actor/manager/playwright’s diary, tentatively titled A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century American Actor. Stubbs is the co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and has published articles and chapters in The Pleasure Garden, From Vauxhall to Coney Island; Theatre, Performance, and Analogue Technology; and the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She holds a PhD in Theatre from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an MRes in Editing Lives and Letters from Queen Mary, University of London.

Downloads

Published

2014-09-27

How to Cite

Stubbs, N. J. (2014). The American Path: From the Pleasure Garden to the Amusement Park. Popular Entertainment Studies, 5(2), 6–23. Retrieved from https://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/kulumun/index.php/pes/article/view/107

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright for all material published in Popular Entertainment Studies resides with the Author.

Readers of Popular Entertainment Studies may, however, save and/or print any files from the journal for their personal use, as long as no alterations are made to the material and any subsequent citation is properly acknowledged. For any other use/reproduction of material (e.g. for course materials), express prior permission must be obtained from the journal's General Editor.

Authors are welcome to re-use/reprint their work elsewhere, as long as such publication includes due acknowledgement of the work's prior appearance in Popular Entertainment Studies. Authors are individually responsible for obtaining any necessary copyright permissions for images, photos, or other materials reproduced in their articles and for including any required credits. Copyright clearance for their use must be lodged with the journal if your submission is accepted for publication.

For more information, please refer to the copyright form.