It's Halloween 1923 in Phoenix. The place to be is Joyland amusement park
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MARK BRODIE: Arizona’s past is full of tricks and treats of various kinds. This Halloween, we decided to take a look back and find out how Phoenicians celebrated 100 years ago. With me to do that is The Show’s Sativa Peterson, who dove into Arizona’s historic newspapers to find out what the spirit of Halloween looked like in 1923.
Good morning, Sativa.
SATIVA PETERSON: Good morning.
MB: So, what Halloween traditions did you find, like pumpkin carving? Wearing scary costumes, that kind of thing?
SP: Yes, all of that. Let me set the scene for you. Halloween night fell on a Wednesday. The forecast showed a high of 75 that day; a low of 55, so nice weather. But one thing that was quite different was the population of Phoenix. It was just over 29,000 people.
MB: Just a few, fewer people than now.
SP: That’s right. So, one thing to keep in mind also is that 100 years ago, Arizona — like the rest of the nation — was in the middle of Prohibition. So, officially at least, drinking of alcohol was prohibited.
Here’s what I discovered or some trends that I found.
I saw many references for apples and apple cider, as well as bobbing for apples. One ad read “Halloween is Apple Time,” so that was definitely a trend.
I also saw references to ghost stories, witches, bats and the wearing of costumes. Someone won an award for their costume as a matador, and another person dressed as the actor Rudolph Valentino, who was one of the major sex symbols of the 1920s.
Also, pumpkin pie is frequently mentioned as being served as dessert at parties. So in many ways, it was what you might expect.
MB: Yeah, Halloween seems pretty tasty back in 1923. Was there anything you didn’t expect to find?
SP: Yes. I found the place to be on Halloween night 1923, and it’s a place I had never heard of before called Joyland.
I guess earlier in the year, in May of 1923, this new amusement park opened on Van Buren Street. It had nightly dancing, it had airplane swings, gondola boats, it even had a high diver who would somersault 100 feet, landing in a pool of 4 feet of water.
It was advertised as costing $200,000 to build this amusement park, which had to be a tremendous sum of money in 1923.
MB: That’s a lot of money now, yeah.
SP: Live jazz bands, two elaborate soda fountains — because of course people couldn’t drink alcohol — and more than 7,000 electric lights that would “flood the park with brilliant illumination at night.”
So, it sounds really over the top on any given day, but Halloween things got even more extra. Joyland promised 1,000 free souvenirs, “wild and weird decorations,” masks free to anyone who wanted them. But my favorite thing, Mark, is Joyland promised that they were going to have the “Witch of Endor.”
MB: What’s that?
SP: She was described as a famous witch of Scotland who was going to be impersonated by a real fortune teller who would tell fortunes from her specially built cave that adjoined the dancing pavilion. It said she will invite all maidens to have their fortune told free of cost. She will tell all if their love affairs are going to work out.
So no expense, it seems, was spared to make this the greatest Halloween celebration ever given in Arizona.
MB: So, Sativa, where exactly was Joyland located?
SP: It was located right around 35th Street and Van Buren.
MB: And it seems as though this is really like a portrait of the early ’20s, right? Like, you mentioned the high diver somersaulting into a little thing of water, the fortune tellers, shooting galleries — it sounds all very much on brand for the roaring ’20s.
SP: It does. It really gives a sense of Halloween during the ’20s, when the country saw a surging economy and jazz and flappers. You know, some of these things sound like something you would think of as being in Atlantic City, maybe not Phoenix at the time. But it was really a time of dramatic social and economic change, and it was here as well. So, you can imagine young women bobbing their hair, women could vote beginning in 1920, so that was still very new.
One ad for Joyland boasted it had the most elaborate decorations ever seen in the Southwest, and It also had this really perplexing — at least to me anyway — tagline. It said, “You don’t celebrate Christmas on the 4th of July.”
MB: Huh?
SP: I don’t know. I take it to mean, live in the present. But living in the present is going to be very hard to do, because now I want to time travel back to 1923 so I can see Joyland.
MB: It does kind of sound fun. All right, that is The Show’s Sativa Peterson. Thank you, Sativa.
SP: Thank you, Mark.
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