Up and down, 'round and 'round -- carousels of New England

By David Maloof, Globe Correspondent, 08/23/02

HOLYOKE — Colorful horses, spirited music, children's smiling faces. A carousel is undeniably romantic.

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But look more closely at the horse. The side that shows to the outside of the carousel — the right side, known as the "romance" side — is rich with decorative detail. Yet the left side is almost plain.

For there are two sides to every horse. One is the typical carousel image of children, faces beaming and small hands gripped tightly to pole or reins. But when my 5-year-old daughter and I step inside the Holyoke Merry-Go-Round one recent Tuesday afternoon, the only riders are four women, mostly white-haired, only the youngest — Maryellen Fisher of Holyoke, who brought the others — riding a "jumper" (a horse that goes up and down). Fisher's companions hold onto a jumper, or grip the pole of a stander (a stationary horse), or sit alone in a chariot.

Two of the women are on their first carousel ride in 70 years (five years before this particular carousel was built). But as one of them explains, "I can't get on the horses anymore."

By the time the white-haired ladies leave the pavilion, kids and parents have taken their places, and my daughter and I mount adjoining jumpers and ride and smile to the sounds of an aggressive, bittersweet waltz. When the ride inevitably ends, my daughter turns to me and says, "Daddy, the next one I want to be by myself and I want you to leave."

Rendered an emotionally involved chauffeur, I watch her on the horse alone, repeatedly entering and leaving my sight, while I half-fear that on each turn she will age one year, eventually emerging pierced and sullen and dismissing me in a word: "Whatever."

The Holyoke carousel meets our tour qualifications. We're not looking for carousels at zoos or amusement parks, overshadowed by nearby bears or roller coasters or park admission prices, or those small carousels at traveling carnivals or shopping malls. We're seeking full-size, stand-alone merry-go-rounds, typically urban or seaside, that survive, if not thrive, on their own.

While the Holyoke Merry-Go-Round stands apart from city noise, the Bushnell Carousel in Hartford sits on the edge of Bushnell Park, bordered on one side by city traffic and buildings. But approach the pavilion, and you may be pulled in by the whirlpool of motion and sound.

A birthday party is going on, and a 10-month-old boy, balanced on a jumper by his dad, is taking his first carousel ride, the boy's face a study in bewilderment and awe. When the carousel empties for singing and birthday cake, Julie Ahlstrin and Albert Landry, co-workers from the nearby Connecticut Department of Administrative Services, ride a pair of jumpers, ignoring "the looks you get from adults," according to Ahlstrin.

The survival of stand-alone carousels requires not only a kind of salvation (many are bought from defunct amusement parks), but restoration: removing up to 30 layers of paint, and maintaining the original design while repairing, sanding, priming, painting, and redecorating.

At The New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, Conn., tour guide Claire O'Neill reveals some of the non-romance side of carousels, including the various money-saving strategies (hollow horses, painted wooden eyes replacing glass eyes, and using unpaid apprentices to carve the horse's left — or "apprentice" — side).

Some carousels featured farm animals, and craftsmen would carve tongues hanging from the animals' mouths "to mock the riders."

Carousels began in medieval times, as training machines for lance-wielding knights. Sounds romantic — unless you were one of the pages required to push the damn thing.

More romantic, perhaps, is that a resin rounding board (a decorative piece on the outside top of the carousel) was purchased as a wedding gift for a newlywed couple to use as their bed's headboard.

Never mind the gift; what about the whole wedding? For as my daughter, wife, and I begin our tour of southeastern New England carousels one Saturday afternoon, the Fall River Carousel at Battleship Cove is closed, rented for a wedding. Manager Barbara Peters offers us a private ride — but without the band organ playing.

The silent spinning is almost eerie, underlining O'Neill's explanation of the two purposes of a carousel band organ: to drown out the sound of the carousel mechanisms, and to attract people outside the pavilion. But this carousel offers rare visual reward: brilliant-colored horses, a shining brass railing surrounding the platform, and fleeting, repeating waterfront views through the pavilion's second-floor windows. Once we disembark, Peters lets the band organ play, and we wish we had experienced the two together — or had been invited to the wedding.

The wedding drill is not new to Peters. She was half of the first couple married at this carousel, in May 1993. (It had been open for a year, after an 18-month-long restoration.) But withhold any pictures of a white gown flowing from a noble steed: "My minister said `I'm not going to marry you while you're going around.' " So Peters sat next to her betrothed in one of the carousel's two chariots on the stilled platform. "It was just like a fantasy being married on it," she says, as if pointing to the romance side.

And then: "I was a wreck. My brother had to drag me up the stairs."

The Fall River Carousel was moved from Lincoln Park in North Dartmouth after it closed in 1986, while the Crescent Park carousel in Riverside, R.I., was saved while the rest of the park disappeared. What's left are four chariots, one camel stander, and 61 horses. As the ride picks up speed quicker than I expected (maxing out at 13 m.p.h), my horse seems to buck, and I recall the climactic scene of Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train." (Rent it the night before you head out to a carousel, just to add a little terror to the experience and drain off any remaining notions of pure romance.)

Crescent Park's worn pavilion floor and paint-starved rounding board remind us not only that this carousel was built in 1895, but that carousels aren't exactly cash cows (or horses, or camels) — and how impressive it is that any of them can look as glorious as the one in Fall River.

But Crescent Park offers three things that many don't: that camel, easy bicycle access (the East Bay Bike Path, which runs 15 miles between Providence and Bristol), and a ring machine. Outside horses are favored for their access to the tempting steel rings, and riders reach out eagerly from the passing horses — though one goateed dad stands at the platform's edge, extending his arm with all the enthusiasm of a toll collector.

At the Atlantic Park Beach Carousel in Misquamicut, R.I., the merry-go-round seems traveling-carnival size and, at 5:45 on this Saturday afternoon, is without riders. Who wants to get on a little, empty carousel?

Our daughter does. I pay the $1.50 (the highest price of the carousels we visit) and she rides while I note the adjoining game room (Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede are still standing) and the diversions from beach to bars to bumper cars.

It turns out that the carousel owner has replaced some of the original horses with less impressive ponies, after years of water damage from the beach. Still, if Misquamicut is the downstairs of carousel neighborhoods, the upstairs awaits a few miles away in Watch Hill. A young man entering the pavilion at Misquamicut sported a heavily bandaged nose. There, you'd figure "spontaneous fistfight." At Watch Hill, you'd surmise "elective rhinoplasty."

Ironically, the carousel is quite minimalist: only two rows of horses (rather than the usual three or four), a simple solid-color paint design on its rounding board, and no platform — the horses hang on chains suspended from extended bars. And rides are only 50 cents for an inside horse, $1 for an outside one.

Outside horses cost more because this carousel also features a ring machine, but here you'll find no grown-ups snatching rings, as the ride is only for kids age 2 to 12.

Our daughter quickly warms up to the ring challenge, and after three misses, snares one — and is thrilled. To her, it's no romantic metaphor about elusive success. It is literal success.

But there is always that other side. Several turns into our daughter's fourth ride, a little boy begins crying, and the ride is stopped. It starts again, and a 2-year-old girl crosses over from romance to reality, and cries out as well.

Each time, the two attendants efficiently and gently pluck the kids from their horses and into a parent's arms. The music plays on rather softly — it comes from a CD playing behind the ornamental band organ — while the survivors ride on, each straddling the two contrary sides of the horse.

David Maloof is a freelance writer who lives in Belchertown.