Weekend Australia Luna Park Sydney Review

[Richard]

If anyone's interested, there's an article in this weekend's Weekend Australian by James Jeffrey in the Travel section, essentially giving yet another review of the park, though is less shallow than most we've seen. Not a bad one. It mentions a few interesting points regarding the local residents, including one I found most interesting - prominent architect Harry Seidler and the one who's considered central to the noise argument was actually involved with Friends of Luna Park in the past.

[GoGoBoy]

The Sydney Morning Herald also recently pointed out the fact that Harry Seidler had a plan in the 1960's to build a number of massive multi-storey office buildings all over the land where Luna Park currently stands. Despite this he is furious about plans for a 14 storey office block recently proposed for the Luna Park clifftop. He was recently quoted as saying that the supporters of the development are "the lowest forms of human life". Richard, I would be very interested to read the article. Is there any way that you can copy it onto this site?

[Richard]

It's a full page article, so I'm not going to retype the entire article - if you have access to Newstext, you can read it online here, else I can't be of much use. However, there is a section of bullet points, which was really the most interesting part of the article:

• Luna Park first opened in 1935. It can be safely assumed most of its neighbours mvoed in after this date.
• The most prominent of the noise critics, architect and park neighbour Harry Seidler, was once involved with the Friends of Luna Park.
• In a 1938 publicity stunt, 10,000 keys were scattered throughout the streets of Sydney giving punters the chance to win a 5p note at Luna Park.
• The Luna Park Face has morphed through the decades, looking like a seedy stoner through the 1930s and '40s, eventually turning into today's manic, pop-eyed wonder.
• The Taj Mahal is one of the biggest and most complex mechanical instruments in the world. Built in 1920 and recently restored, it contains more than 1200 pipes, drums, castanets and woodblocks.
• The park even has a conspiracy theory attached to it. Some local residents claim Luna Parka management is hoping noise complaints will force the closure of the rides, allowing them to focus on more profitable functions, events and restaurants. Managing director Peter Hearne describes this hypothesis as bizarre.

[Zamperla]

Interesting stuff Richard. Wish I had access to the article. I did get a copy mailed to me of another article written by a Geelong newspaper (Geelong is about 100km south west of Melbourne) It's a fairly shallow review like most, but did have a nice A3 picture of Luna's manic expression. (though I must say I much rather Melbourne's)

[scott]

Is it me,or are Lps park posts always slightly dreary?

[Gazza]

I remeber seeing a review in the Shepparton News of LPM, they really needed to fix up some of the pictures, one of the pictures showde a pirate ship and the caption said "one of LP's many exiting roller coasters". Another pic showed the facade of the Sydney luna park. The review was just one pulled from media releases so it wasnt that interesting. BTW Zamperla, do you live down at the cattery?