Luna Park, Pittsburgh


Luna Park was an amusement park in the North Oakland section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, from 1905 to 1909. Constructed and owned by Frederick Ingersoll, the park occupied a 16 acre hilly site bounded by Baum Boulevard, North Craig Street, and Centre Avenue, and included roller coasters, picnic pavilions, carousels, a fun house, a Ferris wheel, a roller rink, a shoot-the-chutes ride, a concert shell, a dance hall, bumper cars, and a baby incubator exhibit. In its brief existence, the park featured regular performances of bands, acrobatic acts, animal acts, horse riders, and aerial acts.
Pittsburgh's Luna Park was the first Ingersoll park of that name , and the first amusement park to be covered with electrical lighting. The park cost $375,000 to construct; re-creating it from scratch would cost approximately $8.5 million.
The Pittsburgh and Cleveland Luna Parks were the beginnings of the world's first amusement park chain: by 1929, 44 Luna Parks were constructed around the world. Remnants of the entertainment empire remain, from Mexico City to Melbourne to Athens.
The cost of upgrading and maintaining his amusement parks proved too much for Ingersoll as he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1908. Several of the Luna Parks were sold to others; Pittsburgh's park was closed in 1909 in the face of competition of a second trolley park nearby, the older Kennywood Park. When Kennywood expanded its fairgrounds in 1995, its new Lost Kennywood section was patterned after its former competitor, centered on a shoot-the-chutes ride and having a one-third-scale replica of the Luna Park entrance as a "gateway" to the park, including an era-appropriate spelling of "Pittsburg".
Aside from the aforementioned tribute from Kennywood, no other remnants exist to the existence of Luna Park, including a lack of historical markers. The site itself is currently a mixed-use property with both residential and commercial businesses.