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86 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
Park at Coney Island, New York: a demesne of amusement whose governing principle was mechanical fantasy. This gave impulse to the amusement parks which had already sprung up over the United States. These establishments, however, were a little expensive to the consumer. Ten cents for this and twenty-five for that mount up to quite a figure; especially when the spender is a working man taking his family for a day’s outing.
There was another limitation. Terry Ramsaye says wisely, “The populace loves to believe.” That was later to stand a governing principle of the moving-picture business; though few, even while applying it, understood the principle. And a voyage by roller coaster through the Caves of the Moon, with dwarfed inhabitants singing curious wailing music through the copper-red foliage, aroused the intellectual impulse of wonder but not the emotion of belief.
r All this time the formula lay wrapped up and addressed at the very feet of the showmen and managers; but they never saw it. During the years when Kohn & Company struggled with ladies’ fashions, the moving picture was coming slowly out of the little peep-boxes and on to the screen. “Store shows” began to appear in the poorer amusement quarters of our“cities, offering moving pictures, often associated with the cheapest of cheap vaudeville. The pictures ran two “subjects” to a reel. (A modern-feature moving-picture show is six or seven reels long.) Small and ignorant people held the