Luna Park, Amusement park in St Kilda, Australia
Luna Park is an amusement park on a triangular beachfront site in St Kilda, Melbourne, entered through a giant grinning face with a sunburst above it, flanked by towers with grey onion-shaped domes. Behind the entrance, the Scenic Railway's white lattice track runs along the park boundary; it is a wooden roller coaster, not a steel one.
J.D. Williams and the Phillips brothers opened the site in December 1912 on the grounds of a former amusement park called Dreamland. Over the decades, the park closed and reopened several times, but remained a fixture of Melbourne's coastal culture.
The entrance face is known as Mr Moon, a name used for the 1912 plaster original that was rebuilt in fibreglass in 1999. The park's name probably comes from Coney Island's 1903 Luna Park or Seattle's 1906 park. The 1913 carousel, restored in 2000, keeps its original horses and painted decoration.
Visitors can buy annual passes for unlimited access to all rides, while children under three years enter at no cost. The grounds are directly accessible from the beach promenade and within walking distance of several public transport stops along the coast.
The wooden roller coaster has run continuously since 1912 and remains the oldest continuously operating coaster in the world. A brakeman manually controls the speed of the train on every ride, a practice now almost extinct elsewhere.
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