Carousels Preserved

Once a children's delight in hundreds of towns and cities, carousels in the U.S. now number fewer than 100. Amusement parks have been replacing costly old carousels with modern plastic and aluminum rides that are both peppier and easier to maintain. Carousels, meanwhile, are chopped up, their horses turned into bar stools, heads cut from bodies, and carved wooden animals sold to antique dealers. "Carousels are diminishing to a terrible extent," mourns Frederick Fried, author of A Pictorial History of the Carousel. To halt the destruction, more than 200 lovers of that old amusement-park staple gathered in Sandwich, Mass., on Cape Cod not long ago to form the National Carousel Roundtable and dedicate themselves to ensuring the future of the merry-go-round, the whirligig and the flying jinny--as carousels have been variously known in their 95-year history in the U.S.

The group will be on the lookout for melodious menageries that may be headed for the electric saw. Is there still room in the American imagination for the quaint, circling beauty of a carousel aglitter with colored glass and alive with organ music? "The carousel is an art form," says Fried, "the greatest mobile. I consider them to be like great American landmarks."

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