Palisades Park

by Alan Brennert

  So each Friday morning Eddie and Lew would scrub down the candy stand until it shined … until one Friday in late June when Eddie had to do it on his own, since Lew was nowhere to be found. As the morning wore on, Lew continued to be a no-show, and Eddie had to stock the shelves by himself. It wasn’t until eleven thirty that Eddie found out why, when Anna Halpin herself appeared unexpectedly at the stand and announced, “You’re Eddie, right? Lew’s having his appendix taken out. Show me what he does.”

  “What?”

  She entered the stand through the side door. “Show me what he does, I’ll fill in for him until Chief Borrell can find somebody else to bring in.”

  Eddie was momentarily nonplussed. “Uh, Mrs. Halpin, you’re going to get your nice dress all sticky and dirty.”

  She just laughed. “If I cared a hoot about that I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in this business. I’ve handled a popcorn popper before but not a candy floss machine—show me how it works.”

  Eddie did as he was asked, Mrs. Halpin observing as he put in a batch of sugar and pink food coloring, then switched on the heater and set the spinner to spinning. Halpin had a plain, serious face, but she smiled a little when the liquefied sugar was forced out of the spinner’s holes: “Like a pasta maker,” she said, “only with pink pasta.” He demonstrated how to capture the pink strands on a stick, making an artful cloud of sugared cumulus. She nodded once, said, “Okay, I’ve got it,” and made the next batch on her own, letter perfect. By the time the park opened at noon there were the requisite number of cotton candies in the display case waiting to be snapped up.

  Eddie went into his grind, Mrs. Halpin working the counter, until his throat started to get sore and Anna stepped in and took over, even if she did have to stand on a couple of phone books at the counter:

  “Cotton candy!” she cried out to the crowd. “Sweeter than a mother’s kisses, lighter than a cloud! Get your cotton candy here, heaven on a stick!”

  Goddamn, Eddie thought: she could actually build a tip. The stand enjoyed brisk business for the next hour; finally, during a lull, Eddie told her, “Nice grind. You’ve done this before?”

  “Oh, I’ve done a little of everything,” she said. “I started out working for my uncles at Savin Rock Park as a cashier. I carried change to the concessionaires, but I made it a point to watch every concession agent and ride operator to see how he did his job. By the time I became manager I could pinch-hit on almost anything, if need be.”

  “The rides, too?”

  “Sure. I worked the Whip, the Water Scooter, the Airplane Swings … I may be small but I’m no weak sister.” Now Eddie realized: she wasn’t trying to catch Palisades’ ride operators lying down on the job, she wanted to see how they did their job. “It’s been a while since I’ve worked a grab stand, though. The past few years I was boxing promoter at Golden City Park Arena.”

  “You were?” he said, doing his best not to sound disbelieving.

  She smiled at the skepticism in his voice. “We had a few comers we brought up at Golden City. Canada Lee, Tony Canzoneri…”

  “Canzoneri? The guy who beat Lou Ambers for the lightweight title?”

  Anna nodded. “Eddie, you know what I was going to be when I grew up? A piano teacher.” She laughed. “Imagine that—me teaching kids to play ‘Chopsticks’ all day. I met my husband at that park too—that cashier’s job was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

  A customer stepped up to buy a cotton candy, another asked for popcorn, and that was their last chance for small talk for the rest of the morning. By midafternoon Chief Borrell had brought in a man from one of his hot-dog stands to take Lew’s place until he recuperated from his appendectomy. Eddie actually found himself sorry to see Anna return to the front office.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Halpin,” he said. “You can work my stand anytime.”

  “I’m here if you need me, Eddie,” she told him—and he believed her. It wouldn’t take her long to win over the remaining doubters.

  * * *

  Monday, July 1, was warm and sunny, a perfect day for the fifteen hundred visiting children—white, black, rich, poor—who, in May, had received free tickets to Palisades at Hearn’s Department Store. They came from New York City, swarming eagerly over the park, riding the coasters, the Carousel, the miniature train, and flocking to the George Hamid circus troupe two blocks away, to be entertained by clowns, jugglers, acrobats, and the trained animals of Captain Walker’s Jungle Wonders.

  Most of those kids were at the circus at 4:45 that afternoon when Eddie—having just handed some cotton candy to an eight-year-old tyke, one of perhaps fifty left on the midway—felt his nose twitch at a familiar, ominous smell and then heard the cry most feared by carnies everywhere:

  “Fire!”

  Eddie’s head jerked up. A park staffer was running up the midway, sounding the alarm—as behind him clouds of bilious black smoke rose from the Old Mill, only a few hundred yards down. Licks of flame charred the low wooden roof of the ride as cinders ignited the walls of the squat, rambling structure. In the time it took for Eddie to lock his cash register and jump the counter, the flames were consuming most of the Mill.

  Other concessionaires now jumped their counters, the ones closest to the Mill unfurling a long fire hose. It quickly inflated and began spraying water onto the blaze like an elephant spitting water from its trunk.

  Eddie looked across the midway to Adele’s stand and saw her standing inside, frozen to the spot by the fiery spectacle. He ran across the midway, grabbed her by the wrist and said, “Get out of there! Hurry!”

  That shook her out of her daze, and she quickly clambered over the counter. In the distance came the sound of approaching sirens.

  But when they looked back at the fire they saw that the flames had spread to the Spitfire ride next door to the Old Mill. It was not lost on anyone that the fire was now blocking the path to the park’s front gate.

  Among the spectators were dozens of children standing there transfixed, drawn like moths to the raging fire and the billowing clouds of smoke. “Somebody’s got to do something about all these kids,” Adele said. Before Eddie could reply she ran up to a ten-year-old boy enraptured by the flames, grabbed him by his shoulders, and turned him around:

  “Get out of here! Run!” she told him. “There’s an exit by the pool, you know where that is?”

  “Uh, yeah,” the boy said, “I think so.”

  “Up to the end of the railway, turn left, run straight out! Go!”

  The boy did as he was told and Adele rushed up to a young girl, giving her the same instructions. As Eddie got as many kids into the hands of Hearn’s employees as he could, the Spitfire lived up to its name and began spewing hot cinders across the midway—where they quickly ignited the fencing around the Whip. From there the sparks jumped to the Fascination game booth next door, its canvas roof erupting into flames with a rush of air like the beating of giant wings. The flames raced down the roof supports as if they were fuses and in less than a minute the entire booth exploded.

  Eddie could hear the crackle of timber being consumed and felt the heat being pushed up the midway on an easterly breeze. The smoke was so thick he could no longer make out the Old Mill, or what remained of it.

  “Shit,” he told Adele, “we’ve got to get out of here, now!”

  They herded together as many kids as they could and led them to the Hudson gate near the pool. There were thousands of visitors hurrying to leave the park, but no panic, as park employees calmly guided people to the available exits. When Eddie and Adele reached the Hudson gate they found a fire company from Fort Lee waiting and left the children in their care.

  By now the fire engines of seven communities—Fort Lee, Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Englewood, Leonia, Fairview, and Ridgefield—had begun converging on the park. The engines pulled up to Palisade Avenue, hooked up hoses to hydrants, and began dousing the flames, or trying to.

  “There are still dozens of kids in there,�
�� Adele told the fire captain.

  The smoke had now enveloped much of the midway; when Eddie looked back he could barely make out the rides through the sooty clouds. Captain McDermott organized his squad and asked for volunteers from among the park employees to help find and retrieve the remaining children. Eddie and about a dozen other men volunteered, and he soon found himself heading back into the conflagration.

  Adele said, “Eddie, be careful—”

  “I will,” he promised. “Find a phone and call your mom, tell her you’re okay. She’s going to be worried when she hears about this.”

  By the time the firemen and volunteers made their way back to the main midway it was totally blacked out by smoke. In the midst of this false night Eddie and the others could hear the sounds of children crying in the darkness. Captain McDermott had the men put wet handkerchiefs over their mouths, then form a human chain behind him, the last man standing just outside the clouds of smoke, Eddie somewhere in the middle. It was hotter than hell, and the handkerchief didn’t do much to filter the air. At the head of the chain the captain groped in the darkness until he found a child, passed him or her to the man behind him, then the next man, until finally reaching the end, where a fireman escorted the child out of the park.

  Eddie coughed constantly, wondering if he was breathing in the incinerated remains of his own stand … or worse, some luckless person who had been trapped in the path of the flames.

  Finally, after twenty minutes of shepherding children along the chain and assuring them everything would be all right, Eddie was relieved when McDermott called out, “That’s the last of ’em,” and gave the order to leave.

  Once back outside the Hudson gate, Eddie coughed up black soot and drank down as much water as Adele could hand him, his throat coarse as sandpaper. They walked around to Palisade Avenue, where long fire hoses sprayed arcs of falling water onto the flames. As the Stopkas approached they saw Chief Borrell talking with the fire captain from Cliffside Park; when the Chief saw Eddie with his face smudged black from the smoke, he hurried up to him and asked, “Jeez, Ten Foot, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, “but I got a feeling your stand’s seen better days.”

  “It’s just wood and money, Eddie,” the Chief said with a shrug.

  By six o’clock the fire was finally out. When the smoke cleared it could be seen that one-eighth of Palisades was in ruins: a charred forest of smoldering building frames was all that remained of the park’s northwest corner. Among the structures burned to the ground were the Old Mill, the Whip, the Spitfire, the Motor Parkway, the roller-skating rink, and fifteen concession stands and storerooms—including the Chief’s candy stand.

  But though ten firemen suffered from smoke inhalation, there were no serious casualties, and no fatalities. All the children, thanks to the quick thinking and heroism of the fire department, were sent safely home.

  Almost as remarkable, no sooner were employees and concessionaires okayed to enter the grounds than a squad of workmen roped off the burnt area and began cleaning the soot from the seven-eighths of the park that was undamaged. Despite the cataclysm, that evening at nine P.M. Palisades Amusement Park reopened for business. The indefatigable Arthur Holden performed his scheduled high dive, even though the tank he was diving into had been drained of a foot of its water in order to fight the blaze.

  Since both their concessions had been wiped out, Eddie and Adele left and took the trolley to Marie and Frank’s to pick up their children. There Eddie shouldered a drowsing Jack, who woke up long enough to sniff his shirt and declare, “Daddy, you smell.” Eddie laughed: “Don’t I know it.” Marie, grateful that her daughter and son-in-law had escaped unscathed, drove them all home to Bergen Boulevard. It was only after Adele put the kids to bed and kissed them goodnight that she sat down at the kitchen table, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed into helpless tears—the stress and terror of the past five hours finally taking their toll. Eddie went to her and held her, feeling kind of shaky himself.

  “Sssh, sshh,” he said soothingly, “it’s okay, we’re all okay…”

  “We could’ve been killed,” Adele gasped out between sobs. “Antoinette and Jack could’ve been orphans!”

  “But they’re not. Everybody got out safe.”

  “Eddie, what if they’d been there? What if my mother had taken them to the pool today?”

  “They still would’ve gotten out safely.”

  “I’ll never let them set foot in that damned park again!”

  “Fires can just as easily happen in apartment houses.”

  “Oh, go to hell,” she snapped, but she only held him tighter.

  When Eddie dropped by the park the next morning, he saw hundreds of workmen busily hosing down the midway, tearing down the gutted remains of rides, digging up the blackened stumps of trees, and rebuilding concession stands. Eddie helped out a little with the latter, cutting some corner posts and roof joists, until construction boss Joe McKee wandered by and told him, “If you think you’re getting paid for this, you’re nuts.” Eddie laughed but McKee was serious: “For Chrissake, Eddie, you ate enough smoke yesterday to fill a chimney. Take a break, will ya?”

  The park opened as usual at noon, and for the first time since his trip here in 1922, Eddie found himself at Palisades without a job to do. So he did something he’d wanted to do for years: take a roller-coaster ride. The Big Scenic had suffered fire damage, the troublesome Cyclone had been demolished last year, so that left the Skyrocket. It was a great ride with steep climbs and stomach-churning hairpin curves—and at the summit of the first hill, Eddie looked down and saw again that enchanted island in the sky, no less magical than it had been thirteen years ago.

  By July Fourth weekend, Eddie was working at a newly rebuilt stand with a brand-new cotton candy machine and popcorn popper, alongside the same old Lew (minus one appendix). Lew fancied himself a jaded carny who’d seen it all before, but even he was impressed: “Jumpin’ Jesus,” he said, chewing around his cigar. “These Rosenthal boys really mean business.”

  * * *

  After a brisk Fourth, life at the park proceeded as usual. In a publicity stunt, an American Indian wrestler named Chief Little Wolf began training for the world wrestling championship at Palisades and performed exhibitions in the ballroom. The ballroom manager, Clem White, also had a good instinct for musical acts, and “Whitey” belied his name with his interest in black jazz musicians. One of the first such bookings came in August, when the ballroom hosted an all-Negro band fronted by “Mrs. Louis Armstrong”—Lil Hardin Armstrong, Satchmo’s wife and the composer of some of his biggest hits. The music drifting out of the ballroom that evening reminded Eddie of the blues songs he had heard down South, and he longed to visit the ballroom on dinner break, if Lew could spare him. “Yeah, sure,” Lew said, “but God knows what you see in that nigger music.”

  There was a time this word, spoken as off handedly as Lew used it, would not have drawn Eddie’s attention. He might’ve even used it himself in the Ironbound, when players were selected for sandlot softball teams: Okay, you get the Polack, the wop, and the Mick, and I’ll take the nigger and the Jew. It was, he thought then, more descriptive than derogatory.

  Or so he thought until the day he was walking down a street in rural Alabama, and a young colored man walking ahead of him was suddenly set upon, like dogs on a crow, by three enraged white men. “Uppity coon,” one of them spat out, “where the hell you think you’re goin’?”

  He punctuated the question with a fist into the man’s solar plexus.

  Doubled over in pain, the colored man tried to speak between gasps of air: “I—I was just goin’—to the drugstore—”

  Eddie came running up and cried out, “Hey! What’s going on?”

  Cold, hateful eyes glared at him. “You takin’ this nigger’s side?”

  The word no longer sounded descriptive. It sounded like a cocked gun, ready to go off.

  “But—what’d he do?” Eddie
asked.

  “He knows what he done,” another man said. “Don’tcha?”

  He kicked the colored man’s legs out from under him, toppling him. Eddie jumped in, pushing the attacker away from the Negro. “Stop it!”

  “Yankee Doodle’s a nigger lover.” The first man slugged Eddie in the jaw, staggering him. Then all three dogs were on him at once, hammering at his face, his stomach, and the coup de grâce, a boot-kick to the balls.

  Eddie collapsed and blacked out.

  When he awoke he found himself lying next to the colored man—face bruised, battered, and bleeding, like Eddie’s—who was just coming around himself. Oddly, they were now on the opposite side of the street, as if dragged there. “You okay?” Eddie said, helping the man to his feet.

  “Yeah. Thanks for tryin’ to help. But it was my own damn fault.”

  “What was? What did you do?”

  “I was in a hurry gettin’ to the drugstore, and I went walkin’ on the wrong side of the street. The white side.”

  Eddie was dumbstruck. He couldn’t imagine this ever happening in the Ironbound.

  He never used that word again, and couldn’t hear it now, even from affable Lew, without seeing that young colored man’s bloody, battered face.

  * * *

  When Eddie and Adele arrived in the Palisades ballroom they found the place packed with dancers—all white as the driven snow—stomping to a blend of swing, blues, and hot jazz tunes. Mrs. Armstrong was a handsome woman in her thirties wearing an elegant white gown and matching top hat, conducting the band with a baton when she wasn’t herself performing at the piano. She attacked the keys with gusto, no daintiness about it, whether it was in the swing-flavored number “Hotter Than That” or the more down-tempo “Lonesome Blues,” in which her forceful piano punctuated the mournful saxophone of George Clarke—the latter identified by Clem, who was standing at the back of the ballroom, beaming as he watched. “I just knew Palisades dancers would go for these colored bands in a big way,” he told the Stopkas. “Never could convince the Schencks of it.” Eddie and Adele even had time to do a little stomping of their own.