The title of this post is a little bit of a “gotcha” for Coney Island fans. The fact is, Coney Island’s Luna Park was so culturally influential that scores of amusement parks all over the world pirated its name and its iconography and opened copycat regional parks. Many of them confused matters by pirating the Funny Face icon, which actually represented Luna Park’s Coney Island rival Steeplechase Park. Luna Park’s creators Thompson and Dundy were dead before most of this intellectual property plundering went on, else this might have been unified as one big empire. Anyway, if you’re interested in Coney Island’s Luna Park fire(s) see my earlier post here.
At all events, the Luna Park we’re concerned with today was built in Sydney, Australia in 1935. The original park lasted until June 9, 1979 when a devastating fire on the Ghost Train ride resulted in the deaths of seven people: one adult and six young boys. It’s on my radar on account of the three-part docu-series Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire (2021), which I caught last night on Netflix.
The show was produced by journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and I’m pretty sure it’s the most impressive piece of investigative journalism for television I have ever seen. Those who wonder “What’s to investigate?” are apparently innocent with regard to the concept of suspicious fires. I happen to come from Rhode Island where many a fabulous resort hotel has been torched for the insurance over the centuries. And knowledge of the crooked politics of Coney Island (and everywhere else) informs the discussion as well.
Sydney’s Luna Park Fire sounds like one of those stories everyone kind of knew the answer to but no one took the trouble to run it down and get the receipts. Surely it was worth doing — children were murdered. Everything about it stank. The tragedy had happened in the evening, just prior to closing. By 3pm the next day, newspapers had already declared that it was an accident, an electrical fire. The remains of the ride were demolished and carted off within hours. A coroner’s inquest was selective and perfunctory in the evidence it presented, ignoring dozens of witnesses who had testified information very much at odds with the official narrative. Underground cartoonist Martin Sharp, who had created original artwork for the park, took up the cause, and spent years researching the events, gathering evidence, and relating his message to anyone who would listen. Sharp was an eccentric, however, (his other obsession was American singer Tiny Tim), so it appears that few people took him very seriously. Sharp died in 2013, but his archives are most definitely the jumping off point for Meldrum-Hanna’s story.
In spite of the passage of over 40 years, Meldrum-Hanna’s investigative team managed to gather an overwhelming amount of testimony, including people who had actually been on the ride that night, people who had witnessed likely arson suspects; and people who had been intimidated by police into changing their stories. They amassed hundreds of damning documents, and also have interviews with the families of the victims, police, prosecutors, lawyers, and other relevant parties. The presentation works backwards from the disaster to the ultimate malefactor.
And I’m going to spill the beans here because this is a documentary, not a fictional murder mystery. The facts are already out there. The upshot is that a loathsome criminal kingpin named Abe Saffron, greedy to get his hands on the waterfront property occupied by the park, hired some bikers to torch the place. The bikers, being callous, dimwitted, or both, lit the fire when the park was still open, in that liminal time when it was just about to close, probably gambling that they were on the night’s last ride. But the ride operators were still admitting people. In one particularly tragic case, a dad jumped on with his two small boys while the mom was getting ice cream. She turned around and they were gone. All three died. The mom lost her whole family. She understandably expresses bewilderment that has persisted to this day about why the family would jump on the ride without her. I think I have the answer. It was clear that the park was about to close, so the dad made a snap decision while there was still a window to get in one last ride. They had traveled a long way, it was their first big trip, and they likely wouldn’t get there again for some time. And he figured they’d be out of the ride in a couple of minutes, before the mom even returned with ice cream cones.
As that anecdote indicates, the series is not just effective for its airtight case, but for the vividness of its storytelling. Some is accomplished through very well-done re-enactments, some by simply letting people talk. I found myself drawn in on multiple fronts. As it happens, I am precisely the same age as the quartet of tweens, excited to be on their first independent outing without their parents, who lost their lives in the blaze. (My first amusement experience was Rocky Point, Rhode Island, when I was just a hair younger, on a summer day camp excursion). And the ride itself — almost identical to Coney Island’s dark rides The Spook-a-rama and The Ghost Hole. Most of us, I think, can place ourselves there, and to feel the grief and survivors guilt of the families, and the folks who’d been on the ride but made it out.
It’s that empathy, and that identification that makes us want to see justice done, and that fuels the indignation against the crooked high-level cops and politicians who buried the truth for their paymaster Saffron. People who’ve watched the likes of Trump and Giuliani operate with impunity for decades will feel this story in their bones. One could be forgiven for giving up on the human race, until you remember that in addition to all the crooks and monsters there are also people like the ones who got to the bottom of this story and presented it to us. As of this writing, an investigation of the event has been reopened.
