CONEY LOOP SENDS GIRL TO ASYLUM! (1901)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** “Oh, mamma! They tied me in the ‘loop the loop’ and I shall die. My head is on fire!” So cried Bertha Zwickler who earlier that day had ridden Coney Island’s latest “attraction,” the “Loop The Loop,” a sort of looping roller coaster that was among the first ever built. The day after her ride on what the New York Evening World referred to as the “idiots’ joy,” Bertha lay babbling incoherently on Ward’s Island in the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES It was a strange story. It was not the reasoning, though, behind this new “rage against the machines.” It seemed that the powers that were in the city had simply had enough of the madly raging carnival atmosphere of Coney Island, which, according to its chieftains, had broken out and gone beyond all moral and ethical boundaries for the period. The Evening World sensed this wickedness incarnate and the political atmosphere brewing, and so they decided to make hay with this story. They literally foamed at the mouth over the Loop the Loop, describing Zwickler after the event: “She was the main support of a family of seven, and in her ravings the helplessness of those to whom she devoted her young life is […]
