Photograph Courtesy of the State Historical Society-St. Louis
Like the Loch Ness monster, there’s only one photo and apocryphal stories (well, and a fire-insurance map) pointing to the existence of Mannion’s Park on South Broadway. That was so long ago, they called the roller coaster a “gravity scenic railway,” its tracks throwing spinal shadows over an expanse of wild grass leading down to the river. Mannion’s closed in 1918, when the cops busted bootleggers there, but just as Catholic churches get built over Roman temples built on sunken Druidic stone circles, the intersection of Broadway and Catalan Street was a holy roller coaster site: Sauter’s Amusement Park opened on the same spot in 1940, followed by Downs’ Park in ’47. The true destination for roller-coaster pilgrims, though, was the Forest Park Highlands on Oakland Avenue. In 1941—during the era of the Thunderbolt! the Blue Streak! and the Cyclone!—the park debuted the Comet, replacing the frumpy Racer Dips, an Edwardian single-track coaster. The Comet was 85 feet tall; you could see it from the highway. It had yellow-and-blue Streamline Moderne cars and a 300-foot-long tunnel. The lap bars were slender and loose, and daredevils, including plenty of girls, stood up during the down-swooshes, floating like cosmonauts for a half second. These friends, in their plastic leis, rode in the first car on the first run. This shot is later in the day, after lime rickeys and funhouse mirrors and a stop at the Magic Heart machine in the penny arcade. They don’t care whether the artificial roller-coaster wind is blowing wrinkles into their dresses or curls out of their hair. They don’t care that they’re in the back; roller-coaster arms are called for. And you just know that when the car rolled into the station with a pneumatic hiss, they looked at each other, said nothing, then got out and walked around the building to rejoin the back of the line.
