Luna Park, Melbourne
 
|
|
| Slogan | Just For Fun |
|---|---|
| Location | St. Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Coordinates | 37°52′05″S 144°58′35″E / 37.868036°S 144.976369°ECoordinates: 37°52′05″S 144°58′35″E / 37.868036°S 144.976369°E |
| Owner | Linfox, Virtual Communities, and Liberty Petrol |
| Opened | 13 December 1912 |
| Operating season | All year round |
| Rides | |
| Total | 20 |
| Roller coasters | 2 |
| Website | www.lunapark.com.au |
Melbourne's Luna Park is a historic amusement park located on the foreshore of Port Phillip Bay in St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria. It opened on 13 December 1912, with a formal opening a week later, and has been operating almost continuously ever since.
This was the first of the five Luna Parks that were built in Australia, of which only Melbourne and Luna Park Sydney are still operating. The other three, now defunct, Luna Parks were at:
It took 2 years to build The St Kilda park was developed by American showman J D Williams, in company with the three Phillips brothers (reputedly from Seattle), who had all had experience in the amusement and cinema industry in the US. Williams returned to the US in 1913 to help found First National Films which subsequently became Warner Brothers. The Phillips brothers stayed on and ran the park until their deaths in the 1950s.
In the years before World War I, the park was a great success, with attractions such as the Scenic Railway, Palais de Folies (later Giggle Palace), River Caves of the World, Penny Arcade, a Whitney Bros 'while-u-wait' photo booth, the American Bowl Slide, as well as live performances in the Palace of Illusions and on a permanent high-wire. Closed for the war, it did not re-open until an extensive overhaul in 1923 added new and improved attractions, such as the Big Dipper roller coaster, a Water Chute, a Noah's Ark, and a 4-row Carousel made in 1913 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company.
Between the wars, a number of new attractions were made, including Dodgem cars in 1926-7, and in 1934, a Ghost Train. In the 1950s, the park was refurbished, including the addition of The Rotor in 1951. The park remained popular throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the late 1970s, when some of the earlier attractions began to be replaced by modern mechanical rides. A fire in 1981 destroyed the Giggle Palace, and in the same year the River Caves were declared unsafe, and demolished. In 1989, the Big Dipper was demolished in anticipation of a new large roller coaster which never eventuated. The ride was also demolished due to safety concerns with its age, following a major derailment, that injured 20 people, on the older rollercoaster, the Scenic Railway.
...
Wikipedia