THE GREAT AMERICAN AMUSEMENT PARKS

Yesterday's glories lead to today's top attractions in a picture history for buffs. Most newsworthy still is Coney Island, home of the hot dog (were Charles Feltman's ""red hots"" made of dog meat?) and the roller coaster (""thrills plus intimacy""), site of George Tilyou's one-price, fun-for-all Steeplechase, the nation's first self-enclosed amusement park, of Luna Park, the most spectacular, and Dreamland, the most extravagant. (Around 1900 it featured a bona fide ""Infant Incubator"" and a $200,000 simulation of ""The Fall of Pompeii."") Also on view are Cincinnati's ""clean"" Coney Island, Chicago's Riverview Park, Denver's Elitch's Gardens, and other traditional amusement parks across the country, many still operating--including Rye, New York's park-beautiful, Playland. But, as Kyriazi notes, it was the advent of Walt Disney and the theme park (geographical, cultural, historical) that gave the industry a second life. A directory of ""America's Top 100"" concludes--with a few words of praise for each. Promotional maybe, but full of odd facts and old photos, and thoroughly indexed.