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

While some businessmen looked to trolley transportation for financial fortune, others experimented in entertaining Atlanta's growing population. Steve Goodson notes, "the vast extension of the railway system and the corresponding development of a national market had sparked an enormous expansion and centralization of the entertainment business."12 While the Peters family laid track inside Atlanta, new railroads connected the city to distant areas and entertainment centers. Local theatrical stock companies and traveling celebrities provided new forms of live entertainment. In 1870, Laurent DeGive opened Atlanta's first opera house, DeGive's Opera House, on Marietta Street. Through the 1880s and 1890s, the opera house catered to a growing cosmopolitan audience by featuring international stars like Edwin Booth, Adelina Patti, and Sarah Bernhardt.13

As traveling opera stars and Shakespearean actors entertained audiences at DeGive's, dime museums, traveling tight-rope walkers, medicine shows, and vaudeville acts all offered cheap amusements to Atlanta's booming population as showpeople set up on streets and in local parks. In the summer of 1886, "Professor Leon" entertained Atlantans with a bird exhibit near DeGive's before moving to Grant Park.14 Medicine salesman and entertainer Yellowstone Kit brought his traveling festival to Atlanta in the fall of 1887, attracting both white and black Atlantans and influencing the repeal of Atlanta's 1885 prohibition law.15

Atlanta entrepreneurs often blurred the line between entertainment and transportation in their financial endeavors. In 1879, DeGive partnered with cotton merchant Samuel M. Inman to found Gate City Street Railroad with a specific intent to get Gate City patrons to popular entertainment spots. Gate City's charter "contained the unusual proviso that construction of its line from Wall Street to Ponce de Leon Springs begin within two years of the date of charter and continue in 'bona fide' progress."16 The line to the Springs, however, was not actually completed until 1884, ten years after the first line had been established by the Atlanta Street Railroad Company.

While Laurent DeGive worked to build his streetcar business, Richard and E.C. Peters began the process of transforming Ponce de Leon Springs into a premier attraction. In January 1888, the Atlanta Street Railroad leased Ponce de Leon to N.C. Bosche, a prominent Atlanta businessman and partner in the paint firm, Bosche & Donahue. Bosche dreamed of transforming the park into a refined beer garden and made plans to add a ten pin alley, additional outdoor seating, and a larger pavillion near the end of the streetcar line. Two years later, further remodeling plans were pursued by W.A Hemphill, president of the railway company that owned the park. In 1890, Hemphill brought in Julius Hartman, a local landscape designer who had successfully esablished another local park called "Little Switzerland" (adjacent to Grant Park, Little Switzerland's site became White City amusement park in 1907). Hartman envisioned enhancing the "natural beauty of this restful spot" by adding rustic benches and graveled walking paths as well as a lake covering four acres, and improving the pavillion through the addition of a music room (equipped with a piano) and a ladies' reception room.17

In a history of the roller coaster, Dana Anderson refers to the almost symbiotic relationship between transportation moguls and entertainment entrepreneurs, noting that out-of-the-way attractions brought passengers and added weekend income.

[T]he roller coaster owes its privileged status to an earlier, much less thrilling vehicle of leisure: the trolley car. As both Griffin and Mangels note, the proliferation of attractions such as coasters and assorted carnival rides materialized from the commercial exchange between trolley companies and the power syndicates which provided their electricity. The syndicates, which charged a flat fee for power use, profited immensely by the public's infrequent weekend use of trolleys. Traction companies subsequently realized that encouraging weekend family excursions was their best chance at maximizing their power usage. Investors descended upon gardens, parks, and other typical bucolic leisure locales and enlivened them with enough shows and rides to pique the interest of the most sedentary families. As Griffin summarizes, "the appeal of picnicking in a shady grove after working in a dingy factory all week, plus the novelty of music and the thrill of rides, made the Sunday trolley excursion almost irresistible." Thus, the conflation of park space with commodities of spectacle and sensation effectively created and fulfilled a leisure need in the American working public, packed the weekend fare boxes with nickels, and initiated "the development of amusement parks as an American institution."18

For the already electrified trolley companies, setting up smaller versions of the vehicles they already ran on city streets in the form of early rides like the scenic railway or the miniature railway represented another strategy for economic diversification and added income generation. City dwellers did not need to ride the trolley to work on weekends, so trolley companies created desirable destinations to entice users into the streetcar.

In their plan to bring patrons to Ponce, Atlanta entrepreneurs envisioned a number of novel attractions. However, most of their inventive plans never made it to the park. Ponce de Leon Lake, a man-made body of water measuring approximately four acres, and Pairs Pond, a small lake surrounded by shaded walking paths and nearby summer houses, were added in the summer of 1890. However, despite dreams of pavilion-covered springs and bucolic beer gardens, the main attractions added in the late 1880s and 1890s were the picnic grounds, a dance hall, a stock theater company, and a few children's rides.

Image:

Ponce de Leon Lake, ca. 1895

This lake was filled in to make way for the Atlanta Crackers baseball field in 1907. The portion of the lake featured here is now the parking lot for the Midtown Shopping Plaza.

Image:

Looking West from Ponce de Leon Springs, ca. 1895

This image looks towards what is now Atlanta's Midtown area.

In January 1903, forty-seven acres surrounding the springs were purchased by what would become the Ponce de Leon Amusement Company. Organized a few weeks after the sale of the Springs by J.G Rossman (President) and William Sharpe (Secretary and General Manager), the Ponce de Leon Amusement Company set out to turn the property into "an outdoor amusement resort such as one finds in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis and every big city in the country."19 Work began on a small theater near the entrance of the park on February 22, 1903. Construction of several additional buildings and a merry-go-round began shortly thereafter.

During the months between the sale of the property and the grand re-opening, Rossman, Sharpe, and park Superintendent William H. Labb hyped the upcoming amusement venture. On April 2, 1903 the Atlanta Consititution reported that "Five Car Loads of Boats" along with many other purchases had been made for the new park.

Superintendent William H. Labb, under whose direction Ponce de Leon is being transformed into a thoroughly up-to-date summer amusement place, returned yesterday from New York and Philadelphia, where he has been for several days overseeing the packing and loading of the large carousel to be used at Ponce de Leon. Mr. Labb stated that the machine was one of the very finest of construction and nothing similar had ever been erected outside of Coney Island and Atlantic City.

According to Labb, the "five car loads of boats of various designs" were shipped from the Northeast to the Atlanta park and included in this shipment were "electric gondolas and two electric launches of the latest design."20 The emphasis by Labb on these "latest attractions," which had not been seen outside of nationally renowned parks on Coney Island and Atlantic City, demonstrates the park owners' efforts to use the latest in amusement technology in order to brand the park not only as a cosmopolitan venue, but as a nationally known competitor to the most famous amusement resorts in America. This change in focus from the natural to the mechanical represents a subtle but significant shift from Hartman's vision ten years earlier to transform the park by bringing out the site's natural beauty.

Image:

"Ponce De Leon: The Coney Island of Atlanta, Ga."

This image of a park pavilion and picnic grounds appeared on postcards for the park until the early 1910s.

Other versions

Although owners expected Ponce de Leon Park to open the first week of May, construction delayed the official start of the 1903 season by a month. The Ponce de Leon Casino, leased by Jack Wells, opened in the park on Monday June 1, 1903 with a performance of the comedy "The Lady Slavy" by the forty-five member Giffen Musical Comedy Company. The rest of the park likely opened a few days later on a rainy Sunday, June 6, 1903: "there were thousands of people on the grounds, while the new theater, the Casino, was packed to its full capacity with the Griffin Comedy Company as the attraction."21 In addition to the Casino, a summer playhouse modeled after the Ocean View Casino, the park also offered "Coliseum" (a sixty-foot oak platform that served as the park entrance from the trolley line) was complete. From here, patrons could visit "the theater, the merry-go-round, the laughing gallery, the cave of the winds, the penny arcade, the Japanese ping pong parlor, the Ferris wheel, the pony track, the miniature railways, the Gypsy village, the shooting gallery, the knife and cane boards, the baby racks, two attractive restaurants, pop corn and candy stands and two elegant soda water pavillions [sic]."22

In 1906, the Ponce de Leon Park Association was created to purchase and manage the park. Ponce de Leon Park Casino lessee Jack Wells became President of the Association and, along with association Treasurer Joseph Whitehead and Secretary and Manager Hugh L. Cardoza, invested $50,000 into park grounds, updating and adding new attractions like an ostrich farm. Their renovation marked a high point for the park as the city's premier amusement destination. On May 13, 1906 the Atlanta Journal ran an article praising the Ponce de Leon's new and improved appearance. In contrast to the park's pastoral scenes and diverting amusements, outside the park fences 1906 marked a horrific year in the city's race relations with a riot on September 22-24, during which rampaging whites killed and wounded dozens of black Atlantans.