Click here for the Wikipedia article of discussion!
This 150-foot-tall eccentric Ferris wheel at Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park in Coney Island in Brooklyn, NYC, aside from being a beautiful sight, has something special that makes it stand out from the rest.
And that is that some of the cabins aren’t fixed to the Ferris wheel like many other Ferris wheels, but rather slide around to make it way more exciting.
As you can see in the above image, the blue cabin on the left is mid-slide!
The Wonder Wheel was designed by Charles Hermann, built for Herman J Garms Sr. between 1918 and 1920.
William J. Ward, the landowner of Coney Island provided the land for its construction, and officially opened on Memorial Day, 1920.
Originally called the “Dip-the-Dip”, promising, according to Hermann, “the thrill of a scenic railway, the fun of a Ferris wheel, and the excitement of the Chute-the-Chutes”, the Wonder Wheel provided a “real thrill like you have probably never had before—at least not at this great height.”
With 200,000 people riding the Wonder Wheel each year, it has a surprisingly great safety record. The only time it ever stopped against the operator’s control was during a blackout in 1977. With a backup hand crank, incorporated specifically for these types of risks, they were able to hand crank the Ferris wheel to evacuate all of the passengers.
Did you watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? If you did, they actually filmed an entire scene on the Wonder Wheel, depicted in the 1960’s!
I personally rode on the Wonder Wheel multiple times! The photo above is actually of a photo that I personally took on a beautiful summer day in Coney Island back in 2015.
As a New York City resident, this is one of those outings my family went on for years. And it’s always a blast!
I’m actually offering this photo as a postcard on my brand new Etsy shop! It’s very cheap, at only $2.79 with free shipping to anywhere in the US! I’m not making any money on it or anything, but I wanted to try offering one of my photographs as something tangible that I can offer to you folks 🤗
Check them out on my Etsy shop by clicking here!
Click here for the Wikipedia article of discussion!
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter! I’m so sorry I had to take a break from posting daily articles here. It’s been extremely difficult to do as I recently had a change of work, and it is really intense. So I don’t expect to be able to post a new article every day, but I’m going to attempt to post every week or so. If you want more frequent posts here, let me know and if there’s enough response it may motivate me to be more frequent in my posts.
Anyway, once again I hope you learned something new today about the Wonder Wheel!
Have a great week!