Portrait of the Past: Movie machines in Asheville's Riverside Park, 1902

Rob Neufeld | Columnist

Two mutoscopes — moving picture machines — “have been placed at Riverside Park,” the Asheville Citizen reported on Sept. 8, 1902, “and to accommodate them and the machines previously in use there, a Penny Parlor has been opened.” Riverside Park had been Asheville’s most popular playground from 1901, when the Riverside Park Amusement Company began operating it, until 1916, when the Great Flood had washed through and destroyed it.

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People operated the mutoscope by inserting a penny and turning a crank at their preferred speed. The first two features were “The Flight of the Fast Mail,” documenting the legendary train that crossed a bridge at Niagara Falls, and “Working the Typewriter.” Locals may have already seen a mutoscope at the State Fair in Raleigh in 1900, which advertised: “The mutoscope pictures of the Jeffreys-Sharkey prize fight will be on view here Friday evening. They are the real thing.”

A competing movie machine at the time was Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. Riverside promised to change mutoscope features once a week. The park’s owner, the Asheville Electric Company, had opened a casino on June 17, 1901, and then a boating lake, merry-go-round, zoo, performance arena, ballfield and horse racetrack, George Taylor, amusement park historian, documents on imaginerding.com.

—Rob Neufeld, RNeufeld@charter.net