Giddy-Up! Coney Island Style Carousel Horses
Two Extraordinary New Acquisitions on View For the First Time at the Jewish Museum
Did you know that Coney Island is not only famous for its terrifying rides and hot dog eating contests? The amusement park is also known for its style of carousel horses. Two of the most well-known carousel horse carvers, Charles Carmel and Marcus Charles Illions, helped develop the Coney Island style after fleeing from antisemitism in Eastern Europe in the late 1880s and settling in New York.
The Coney Island amusement park on the Atlantic Ocean in Brooklyn, New York, opened in the 1870s. Still a fun destination to this day, it has an endless appeal, from the bizarre sideshows to the entertaining rides.
Carousel horses were being carved widely in England and Germany prior to their popularity in the United States toward the end of the 19th century. Around the same time that artists like Carmel and Illions immigrated to America, the demand for elaborate carousel horses grew, making the practice the perfect outlet for their artistic talent.
Carmel (1865–1931) was born in Russia and trained in wood carving as a young man. He was steeped in the Eastern European Jewish tradition of intricately carved wooden Torah arks, replete with lions, deer, eagles, and other symbolic animals. After immigrating to the United States in 1883, he settled in Brooklyn, and soon began applying his skills to the crafting of carousel horses at Charles Looff’s and William F. Mangels’s workshops. There, he met three other Eastern European Jewish master carvers — Marcus Charles Illions, Solomon Stein, and Harry Goldstein — who, like himself, translated their artistic repertoire from the sacred realm of the synagogue for secular use in the amusement industry.
Carmel’s horses were characteristically highly naturalistic, strong, and aggressive with windswept manes, open mouths, and batwing saddles. Horses with these attributes became known as the Coney Island style. However, not all Coney Island style horses stayed in Coney Island. For example, Carmel’s white horse from circa 1914, seen above, was last in use at Eldridge Park in Elmira, NY.
Marcus Charles Illions (1865 or 1874–1949) is acknowledged as a great master, and was called “the Michelangelo of carousel carvers” by The New York Times.
Born in Vilnius, Illions became immersed in the Eastern European Jewish tradition of magnificent wooden Torah arks as a young apprentice at a carving shop. In his teenage years, he spent time in England where he continued to hone his artistic skills, this time for the amusement industry, by carving the sides of wagons for an animal show. By 1888, he was in New York, where he soon established his first workshop, employing young apprentices who, like himself, carried on the Eastern European Jewish wood-carving tradition. Assisted by his four sons and other family members, Illions opened a new workshop in 1902 on Ocean Parkway in Coney Island. In the early 1920s, during the heyday of elaborate carousels, there were at least ten Illions carousels in operation. A lover and owner of horses, he studied them carefully. As an artist, he was a perfectionist who preferred to carve the heads and often also the bodies himself, instead of delegating the work to assistants at his workshop.
Illions’s flamboyant horse, above, with its highly naturalistic rendering, bold colors, and ornate quality, including an abundant use of jewels and gold and silver leaf, are all characteristic of Illions’s work and the Coney Island style. This horse was carved in Coney Island circa 1915 and last operated in Fun Forest amusement park in Seattle, Washington.
While Carmel’s and Illions’s Coney Island style carousel horses did not always stay in New York City, these two have found their way back, and to the Jewish Museum.
In addition to these two carousel horses, Coney Island also includes photographs from the late 1930s through the late 1950s of the famed amusement park by Martin Elkort, Morris Engel, Sid Grossman, Sidney Kerner, Arthur Leipzig, and Leon Levinstein. Plan your visit.
