Importance Of Amusement Park

One of the major themes from week eight focused on the emergence of amusement parks, how they became such an important part of American leisure time and how they helped transform American culture. Amusement park attractions have undergone major transformations over the past century, modern day amusement parks are equipped with the latest technology, popular culture icons and current trendy movie merchandise which is a luxury past theme parks were not able to enjoy. However, more than a century later, amusement parks still have the same goal of attracting crowds and providing people with the chance to escape everyday life and experience complete wonder and joy which is important, even if that pleasure is just for a limited amount of time. While

Amusement parks allow individuals to look forward to an adventure and after the visit they provide memories that tend to last a lifetime. Amusement parks play a significant role in society, their ability to promote a happy and free environment allows visitors to escape their everyday life and experience complete happiness. It is important for people to be happy because it serves as a reminder that even though one has responsibilities and that life is not always perfect, it remains important to relax and experience joy once in a while. Amusement parks were successful because they were able to appeal to the general public, one historian notes that “amusement parks ‘turned engines of work into joy machines’ and afforded Americans opportunities to escape from the oppression associated with their nation’s rapid rise to industrial prominence and the repression associated with Victorian culture” (Rydell and Kroes 77). It is important for people to have an environment they can escape to, even for a short period of time, to remember happier times and experience freedom. Amusement parks allow people to escape reality and become completely engulfed in a fantasy world which allows people to balance work with leisure. Amusement parks are flawed in some ways, but despite their imperfections amusement parks have proved to be a popular phenomenon over the past century. Many Americans have flocked to the parks to experience entertainment and displays, more parks were built to accommodate the high demand. Parks experienced a high volume of visitors, “Coney Island inspired the creation of similar amusement parks around the country-about 1,500 of them by 1919-among them Olympic Park in Irvington, New Jersey; Riverview Park in Chicago; Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio; Kennywood, near Pittsburgh; and Columbia Gardens in Butte,