Another Vaudeville Venture. And a Mutoscope at Crescent Park - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli

I guess you might say it was vaudeville in some way. A friend and I were discussing the ‘peep’ machines we once frequented at Crescent Park’s penny arcade. We called them ‘peep ‘machines because peep meant naughty, and that’s what we wanted.

I loved Crescent Park. It was a bustling, old-time amusement park on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Riverside, Rhode Island and operated for 93 years from 1886 until 1979.

The park featured a large midway full of amusement rides, games, and food stands. At one end was the famous Alhambra Ballroom, where many big bands played in the 1930s and '40s. At the other end, on a bluff overlooking beautiful Narragansett Bay, was the world-famous Shore Dinner Hall which could seat two thousand people at one time. The Rhode Island shore dinner that made the hall famous included lobster, Rhode Island clam chowder, clam cakes, fish, corn, and all the trimmings.

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Many famous entertainers performed on the bandstand overlooking the water. A crescent-shaped beach was crowded with bathers in their old-fashioned bathing suits. The 4th of July meant, of course, fireworks.

The mutoscope was not really a machine but rather a coin-operated (a penny), hand-turned movie viewer. Much like today’s Rolodex, it was a flipbook in black and white. The individual image frames were photographic prints on flexible cards attached to a circular core. We viewed the electrically lit cards through a single lens enclosed by a hood. The reel was driven by a hand crank.

Each machine held a single reel of a short subject described by a poster affixed to the machine. The speed of the reel was controlled by turning the crank. Turning backward did not reverse the playing of the reel. Stopping the crank reduced the forward tension on the reel causing it to go backwards a tad and the picture to move from the viewing position; a spring in the mechanism turned off the light, bringing down a shutter which blocked out the picture. The first "movie" I tried to control was Jiggs and Maggie getting into trouble. Light off. Drat!

Mutoscopes were manufactured from 1895 to 1909 for the American Mutoscope Company by the Marvin & Casler Co., Canastota, New York.

Later, it was licensed to the International Mutoscope Reel Company, which manufactured new reels and machines from 1926 until 1949. The typical arcade installation, like ours at Crescent Park, included multiple machines offering a mixture of fare. That mixture included "girlie" reels which ran the gamut from risqué to outright soft-core pornography.

It was common for the reels to have suggestive titles that implied more than the reel delivered. One title was “What the Butler Saw.” It became the vernacular, so Mutoscopes were known in the UK as "What-the-Butler-Saw” machines. What the butler saw, presumably through a keyhole, was a woman partially disrobing. I never saw what the butler saw.

Oh well, it was fun for only a penny. And Crescent Park was another vaudeville venture.

Dr. Ed Iannuccilli is the author of three popular memoirs, “Growing up Italian; Grandfather’s Fig Tree and Other Stories”, “What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner” and “My Story Continues: From Neighborhood to Junior High.”  Learn more here. 

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