A Retreat for the Chautauqua Movement

The place oozed romance, right from the get-go. Glen Echo started as a retreat for the Chautauqua movement, which aimed to spread culture from the well-to-do to the masses. There were prayer vigils and lawn tennis, songs and storytelling. Sunday was set aside for religious observance. There were also campfires sure to ignite the unapproved spark, and twisty-turny paths ideal for a rendezvous, lit by small colored lights with cedar signs extolling nature’s beauty. The Chautauqua chancellor imposed a curfew, but it met with small success, his own daughter a reported multiple violator.

The 1920s brought the vote and social freedom for women, both sexes done to the nines in pictures from the period. Questing for a kewpie doll, a sheer-sleeved flapper hoists a .22. The park was a swinging hot spot, with a Tunnel of Love and the new coast-to-coast craze, the Caterpillar.

“Here was the little car, barely wide enough for two,” Sam says. “You have to be pretty friendly with someone just to get in. Then it takes off, undulating round and round until it hits peak velocity. A canvas cover descends over you and your sweetheart, and you’re careening at breakneck speed, pushed next to each other, in the dark. This is an era when couples not only dressed formally, they acted formally, regardless of their emotions. You have to believe we haven’t changed much in 80 years. The park gave you a little license to do what’s natural.”

Flash forward three decades and it’s lights, camera, libido on the Milt Grant Dance Show, live from Glen Echo Amusement Park. Pompadoured or page-boyed, stag or drag, you came to gyrate. One performer’s swimsuit went opaque as she emerged lip-syncing from the pool, to the delight of cameramen. “The park set the stage for a memorable experience, creating a desire to come back,” Sam says.

It all started with the streetcar. “The ride was as much fun as the park–until you got to the park,” a visitor recalls in the film.

Drivers went pedal to the metal as soon as they hit a private right of way outside Georgetown, whizzing through an instant countryside of horses and geese and pigs and sheep, a fairy tale of chasm-leaping trestles along a wooded shelf precipitously peering down on the river.

The trolley company–proprietor of the park–is the key to the history. “Admission was free, but you were already a customer when you hopped on the car,” Sam says. “It was a national phenomenon. From coast to coast, north to south, east to west, every city had a park. The proof is on eBay. Plug in ‘amusement park’ and ‘postcard.’ Every day you’ll get 200 to 400 hits.”

It was a paragon of pleasure, just a streetcar ride away. Smiling girls and sailors, lashing a wooden horse. A metal lady, laughing maniacally. Sno-cone bombardiers, joysticking a flying scooter. Quadruple dips of danger, hair slicked into a Fonz.

“At the top of the big drop, the macho-type guys would always want to show off,” one visitor says in the park film. “So they would stand up as the thing was in descent. I always thought it was like putting your life on the line.” Glen Echo saw its first fatality in 1918.

When brazen patrons took the fall, a park could be damaged by publicity or done in by legal settlement. Still, there was no stopping the headlong rush for faster and scarier–cars that zigzagged or switch-backed, cars that jumped gaps, cars that raced. New rides replaced them as fast as theywere built. Coasters got higher climbs, deeper dips, with names like Cyclone Racer, Tornado, Mr. Twister, and Shooting Star. Chicago’s Riverview Park boasted seven of them. The coaster became the billboard, the outward sign of a new visual signature. Willard Scott– weatherman for the Today Show and a native Washingtonian–recalls in the park film: “As a kid I used to go over to the corner store, eat 25 Twinkies and gulp two big 16 ounce RC Colas, then ride the coaster. You can imagine what happened after the third or fourth trip.”

Sam says, “You put in a new coaster, it paid for itself in a couple years, then ran for decades at a profit. There was no scrimping. You got the best you can get.” At Glen Echo, the carousel animals were hand carved out of wood, the mirror frames–a delicacy in plaster–all molded, gilded, and painted by hand. “ They did that to make an impression on you,” Sam says. “And it worked.”

The 1920s were the golden years, but most parks went under with the Depression. Glen Echo’s heyday followed the fortunes of the city, whose population exploded with the New Deal and WW II. Patrons wanted rides they could control, like gas-powered motorboats and the Flying Scooter, whose hinged rudder let riders “dive” towards the ground, an amusement park first.

A million people came through the turnstiles in 1942. By 1953, attendance was so high ticket sales had to be centralized. Workweeks were shorter, weekends longer. “Glen Echo was the social spot to be,” Sam says. “If you were white.”