History
March 28, 2008
Memories Afloat
Remembering Carlin’s Park, Jewish Baltimore’s playground, with a swimming pool that was not ‘restricted.’
Gilbert Sandler
Special to the Jewish Times
Up until the 1950s — as Barry Levinson makes vividly clear in the film “Liberty Heights” — certain aspects of life in Baltimore (neighborhoods, swimming pools, beaches, clubs, etc.) were, if not in law then in effect, “restricted,” and one could see signs and advertisements that read “Restricted,” “No Jews Allowed” and “White Protestants Only.”
But many Jewish families living in Northwest Baltimore in those years didn’t particularly mind. They had Carlin’s Park — all of it, the “Mountain Speedway,” the “Lindy Planes,” the “Old Mille,” and, set in among the frenetic, ongoing carnival, a lovely Olympic-size, blue water swimming pool that admitted Jews.
In the Baltimore of the 1930s, this was no small thing.
Carlin’s Park was opened in the mid-1920s by John J. Carlin, who lived nearby at Cottage and Keyworth avenues, as a “family place,” sprawling across 70 acres that hugged Park Circle, where Park Heights Avenue met Reistertown Road. Incongruously, Mr. Carlin placed at the park entrance a two-story Chinese pagoda.
Year-round, Carlin’s was all things to all people. In summer, it offered a sawdust-midway with carnival-style games of chance full of the lively chattering of enterprising pitchmen. Dr. Sylvan Shane worked on the midway when he was a boy in the 1930s.
“I had a job with Phil Schoolnick. He was one of those carnival pros who, when he saw a couple come along, would leap out in front of them and snap their picture,” recalled Dr. Shane. “He would produce the picture immediately, pulling it out of a solution that smelled like ammonia gone bad. If the couple liked what they saw, Phil upped the ante and invited them into his little studio for a sit-down shot.
“I was Phil’s assistant, and for my labors I got 40 cents an hour.”
Everywhere, signs to “take the rides” beckoned — the “Bug,” “Caterpillar,” merry-go-round, “Lindy Planes” and a “Penny Arcade,” where a boy with five or six pennies could spend five or six hours — “winning” cowboy cards featuring the likes of Ken Maynard, Tom Mix and Buck Jones. In the arcade, a penny would let you go digging for treasure in a “claw” machine. By turning controls outside the glass case, you maneuvered the claws around a particular gift (watches were the most attractive) buried in jelly beans. But the gifts were slippery and the claws were weak, and all a boy got for all of his efforts was a handful of stale jelly beans.
Pushing Buttons
And then there was the Fun House.
The Fun House was one of Carlin’s most popular attractions. The building itself was large, shapeless and barn-like, but inside was the stuff of childhood and adolescent joy. Bizarre attractions included a revolving disk about 15 feet across that spun faster and faster until all of the kids holding on for dear life were thrown off; a sliding board two stories high; a rotating tunnel in which it was impossible to remain standing; mirrors that made the viewer look outrageously fat, or thin, or short or tall.
As a diversion, there was the titillating world of John Cypulski, a Rube Goldberg arrangement of air hoses underneath the floor. Mr. Cypulski had a system that worked unerringly: As the girls walked along the floor, they would unknowingly pass over tiny and strategically placed holes. Through these holes came blasts of air perfectly timed to billow a girl’s skirt up and out like an unfolding parachute.
The embarrassed victim would grab at her skirt to hold it down, but always too late. That was the genius of Mr. Cypulski. “Pressing this button is an art,” he said, explaining that for the blast to do its work well, it had to appear a few critical seconds after the button was pushed, so he had to take into account how far the approaching victim was from the air hole, the speed of the victim’s approach, and the time it would take to move the air to travel to its destination.
It was a calculus Mr. Cypulski was proud of. “I never miss,” he said. “I have perfect timing.”
In summer, too, depending on the year, you could dance in Forest Gardens under the stars to the big bands — Tommy Dorsey, Louis Prima, Glenn Miller.
But it was the swimming pool at Carlin’s that endears it to the history of Jewish Baltimore. At a time when many private recreational facilities, including “swimming clubs,” were restricted (“No Jews Allowed”), Carlin’s pool was open to all in the Jewish community who surrounded it.
In 1943, Charles “Charlie” Wagner was a lifeguard at the pool. “It was wartime, and the park itself was jumping with soldiers and sailors and single ladies looking to meet them,” he said. “Which at Carlin’s in those days, they did. But the pool area was different. The crowd there was made up mostly of Jewish teenagers from the neighborhood. Rockrose, Hillsdale, Violet and Ulman avenues, and the streets off of Park Heights and Reisterstown Road all the way to Pimlico.
“Among the lifeguard crew — just about all Jewish — were Marvin Nachlas and Benson Schwartz, both now physicians, Morty Schwartz and Mannie Kalus.”
In winter, depending on the year, the park offered boxing, wrestling and ice skating. “Iceland” was the home rink of the Baltimore’s ice hockey team, the Clippers.
Wild Descent
A memorable part of the Carlin’s experience was the A&W Hot Shoppe, just to the south of the Chinese pagoda entrance to the park. Although there was service inside, the big crowds, mostly from the high schools (City, Forest Park, Western) were out on the parking lot, inside their cars. Moments after one drove in, a uniformed, usually female “car hop” would come up to your car and attach a tray to the driver’s window.
She would take your order — grilled cheese, root beer floats or cement-thick milkshakes — and return with your food and set it all on a tray attached to your car door. The A&W opened in 1932 and closed in 1956.
Outside of the park and huddled around the entrance was a small community of its own — Lapides Deli, Little Tavern hamburger shop, Park Circle Chevrolet, and Davis’ bicycle rental, Princeton Cycle, where a couple could rent a bicycle built for two and pedal through the leafy vistas of Druid Hill Park.
There really was a circle directly in front of the Pagoda entrance, a small, grassy island that supported its own way of life, of holiday sights and sounds, a heady mixture of balloons and popcorn in summer, and in winter of hot peanuts and newsboys’ fires aglow in the gray winter twilight.
Those who visited Carlin’s in a long-ago youth can still hear the screams of the girls as the Mountain Speedway broke into a sudden wild descent, still feel the thrill of soaring out above the A&W in a “Lindy Plane,” hear the shrieks of the girls holding fast to their dresses in the Fun House, still feel the warmth of those newsboys’ fires in Park Circle aglow at the end of the day, foreshadowing the end of the era.
Many with memories linked to the park recall the signs everywhere, inside and at its entrance, advertising the park’s offerings: the “Bug,” the “Whip,” the “Caterpiller.”
One sign they do not recall would be one reading, “Restricted, No Jews Allowed.” They remember Carlin’s Park, and in particular its swimming pool, by the sign that wasn’t there.
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