Amongst the family-friendly bowling alley, ice skating rink, and playgrounds in South of Market’s Yerba Buena Gardens sits the LeRoy King Carousel, the storied remnant of a historic San Francisco amusement park.
An amusement zone anchor
The carousel was completed in 1906 by renowned Danish craftsman Charles Looff in his Rhode Island studio. The carousel’s intended home was an amuseument park on Van Ness and Market in San Francisco, until that spring’s catastrophic 1906 earthquake and fire severly derailed those plans. Instead, the carousel was shipped to a Seattle amusement park by boat (Luna Park), where it stayed for several years until a fire destroyed most of the park—but not the carousel.
When Looff was able to install his carousel on Ocean Beach in the 1910s—which had finally made its way back to San Francisco—it helped grow the small collection of carnival games and quick-photograph stands that had sprung up around the Park and Ocean Railroad terminus at today’s intersection of La Playa and Balboa streets.
As more and more city residents traveled out by train on Sundays to go to the beach and visit places like the Cliff House and Seal House, Looff’s son Arthur teamed up with candy stand operator Charles Friedle to start a real amuseument park with rides and attractions. Called Chutes at the Beach in reference to its “Shoot the Chutes” water attraction, by 1921 a fun house, bumper cars, and Ferris Wheel had joined the carousel as well as more carnival games, souvenir shops, and food stands.
Later that decade, under the consolidating control of the Whitney family, the amusement zone grew to become “Playland at the Beach,” where the carousel continued as a starring attraction for over forty years.
Saved at auction by a carousel “grande dame”
Playland at the Beach met a faded, dingy end and closed for good in September 1972, and an auction was held to find new homes for the amusement park’s rides and memorabilia.
While someone else almost claimed the carousel, it was eventually bought by Marianne Stevens—whose obituary in 2012 lauded her as a “a pillar in, if not grande dame of, the close-knit world of antique wooden carousel lovers and aficionados.”
A housewife and mother of three in Roswell, New Mexico, Stevens had immersed herself in the history and culture of the carousel and went on to cofound the National Carousel Roundtable/Association and the National Carousel Society. The Looff carousel was one of the few special carousels that Stevens found and successfully restored over the course of her life. After rescuing all the carousel’s parts from Playland—where its individual parts could have scattered to the wind in the hands of different bidders—she restored it and operated it on a lease at Shoreline Village in Long Beach starting in 1982. There, it entertained southern California amusement seekers for 16 years before San Francisco called it back once again.
A new life
Marianne Stevens sold the Looff carousel to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in 1998 for $1 million, where the city installed it in a new glass dome within a new section of Yerba Buena Gardens—the final centerpiece of the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area at the Moscone Center.
Redevelopment Agency Commissioner LeRoy King, who helped this block-sized center for children’s activities move through the development process, had urged the city to purchase the carousel as part of the new park. King and his wife-to-be, Julia, rode the carousel in 1950 at Playland on their first date.
Warren Crandell, whose family helped steward the carousel during its Playland days, became emotional when seeing the restored carousel in Yerba Buena Gardens:
I think what got me was when I saw the carousel at Yerba Buena Gardens fully restored and that moment I stood there and cried. I thought here’s the most beautiful piece of machinery, that had once been part of my family, and I started feeling a real sense of pride that my family had been such a big part of San Francisco history. I had my daughter with me, and I thought I’d be just a damned fool if I don’t start asking people about Playland.”
When the Looff carousel returned to San Francisco for the second time, Marianne Steven’s family kept the magnificent “Sneaky Tiger,” a recurring tradition where pieces of a carousel stays with the seller after it is moved. Also in the move however, a row of horses went missing, and a fiberglass lion had been placed where a hand-carved one once stood. This version of the carousel remains part of the carousel’s modern identity in the South of Market.
In 2014, the carousel underwent a $330,000 rehabilitation—paid for by the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, successor to the Redevelopment Agency— with every piece, including all its 70 animals, disassembled, repaired, and put together again. Jan Drees and Brian Linke managed the restoration, and the carousel to once again ran at top speed. It reopened to great fanfare on May 17, 2014, and newly rechristened the LeRoy King Carousel.
Today, the carousel continues to enchant a new generation of San Franciscans.
Share your memories
Did you or a friend or family member ride Looff’s carousel, either at Playland or at Yerba Buena Gardens? Share your memories with us by emailing kyoung@sfheritage.org.
Sources
Lee, Stephanie M. (2014, May 17.) S.F. Carousel Takes a Turn for the Better After Repairs. SF Gate.
Kepka, Mike. (2014, May 12.) Carousel Out of Rehan Set for a Spin. SF Chronicle.
Western Neighborhoods Project (2002.) “Warren Crandell” https://www.outsidelands.org/crandall.php
Carousel History (2014, October 17.) “Marianne Stevens, 1929-2012” https://carouselhistory.com/marianne-stevens-jan-1929-sept-2012/
For our Heritage in the Neighborhoods: South of Market month, we are spotlighting the history and heritage of this “South of the Slot” neighborhood.
