What could be a more appropriate subject to wax nostalgic about than Luna Park? The moon-related puns alone are enough to justify a column on the subject. (In fact, waxing nostalgic was one … pay attention, people.)

For its brief four-year history at the beginning of the 1900s, Luna Park was one of about a dozen amusement parks in and around the city known as “trolley parks.” The parks were owned, as you might expect, by the companies who owned trolley lines. It was sort of a build-it-and-they-will come concept: If there were an attraction at the end of the line, you’d have a reason to ride the trolley.

And Pittsburgh was not the only city to have a Luna Park. The original Luna complex was built on Coney Island. Under the influence of an apparently moonstruck Frederick Ingersoll -- who built Kennywood’s first roller coaster (since destroyed) -- imitations jumped up across the country and, later, around the world. Cleveland, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver and even Scranton (the city where Wilkes-Barre residents go to cut loose) all had them. Luna Park was like the Hard Rock Café of its day, only without the need for all the tax subsidies: All the real cities seemed to have one.

Many of Pittsburgh’s other trolley parks were built somewhat outside the city, where land was cheaper and where one might charge more for the ride. But Luna Park was located in what James van Trump called the “northern marches of Bellefield, at Baum Boulevard and Craig Street.” The park’s main entrance was near the intersection of Craig and Centre Avenue, and was marked by an impressive archway bedecked with a giant crescent moon. Opened in 1905, it eclipsed rival parks by being the first local amusement park to be completely furnished with electrical lighting. The neighbors must have thought the entire enterprise was pure lunacy: It’s a little harder to imagine now, given the presence of such establishments as Chief’s Café, but the area was once a somewhat stolid residential neighborhood. And as van Trump wrote in a 1975 Carnegie Magazine article, the park was a “peculiarly rococo” complex that “imparted a garish, ‘show-biz’ exoticism” to the neighborhood.

Postcards of the park show it to have included building facades of various styles, park benches, and a lot of white people in starchy outfits, which at the turn of the century signaled “good times” to everyone.

The biggest attraction, and the focus of the park, was the “Shoot the Chute,” in which two dozen riders were carried up a wooden ramp in an open car and then dumped down another ramp into a pool of water. Luna Park also featured a shooting range, a carnival-like midway and a dance pavilion.

Another popular attraction was the “Infant Incubator,” whose purpose -- if WQED filmmaker Rick Sebak’s Things That Aren’t There Anymore can be believed -- was to display advances in medical technology by displaying real, live premature babies. I swear. With entertainment like that, it’s hard to imagine how Luna Park could ever have gone out of business.

Still, despite such one-of-kind attractions, Luna proved to be ill starred. As a 1999 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story has it, though the park once drew as many as 25,000 visitors in a night, its fortunes started waning (heh, heh) when “a lion escaped and chewed a female visitor to death.” Today, of course, having a person chewed to death is a guarantee of at least a reality-based TV program on Fox, but in those more refined days attendance began to crater … even though “The cop who killed the lion received cuff links and the animal’s $1,500 diamond-studded collar.” The park burned down in 1909 and was never rebuilt.