Tillie's Family Tree

An Exploration in Old Postcards

Here's a picture of Tillie, Asbury Park's mascot, hanging out at the Wonder Bar on Ocean Avenue, just across the street from the boardwalk. There he is, somewhat absurd, smiling I think benevolently, and wearing the collar and cravat of an Edwardian gentleman. The Atlantic Ocean is the proverbial stone's throw away.

Wonder Bar Tillie is, as far as I can tell, an exact replica of the legendary Palace Tillie, minus the flaking paint. Palace Tillie graced the exterior of Palace Amusements, which was torn down in 2004. 

Palace Tillie survived the demolition and is still with us. He currently resides in a box just north of Convention Hall, in a corral next to the boardwalk that is used to store trash and certain motor vehicles out of sight. He is sitting about one block from Wonder Bar Tillie. 

Here is a picture of Palace Tillie in his beige box.

The other beige box holds some other murals salvaged from Palace Amusements just before the wrecking ball struck. Which box contains which art? I don't know.

Palace Tillie was not Asbury Park's first Tillie, but let's hold off on that for a minute. I want to have a look at Tillie's family tree.

Coney Island, the Ancestral Home

This involves going to Tillie's ancestral home in Coney Island, where we can see what I believe to be Tillie's oldest ancestor. I call him Ur Tillie.

Our research also involves learning about old postcards. The picture above comes from the postcard below.

For years I've enjoyed browsing through bins of old postcards at flea markets and antique shops, but I had no conception of their rather complicated history. And I had never seen a postcard like the one above.

It turns out that the golden age of postcards was before World War I. Two dates stand out: 1898, when postage for picture postcards dropped from two cents to one; and 1907, when the new divided back allowed senders to write a message on the left side of the back, leaving the right side for the address and the stamp. Until then messages were not allowed on the back. (For more postcard history, see this article from the Smithsonian Institution.) 

So how old is the postcard above? Note the open space on the right side of the picture, which would normally have been taken up by a very brief message (remember: no writing on the other side until 1907). This card does not appear to have been used for correspondence. The handwriting in the open space - "Coney Island" and "1906" -  appears to belong to various cataloguers.

This particular postcard resides at the Brooklyn Public Library, where the online cataloguers have properly dated it "1906?" The printed words on the postcard note that the picture shows the entrance to Steeplechase Park, which George C. Tilyou opened in 1897. It burned down in 1907. I'd say all we know, based on the history of the postal regulations and the history of the building, is that the photo dates from somewhere between 1897 and 1907. 

It might be possible to narrow that range by consulting other documentation, like publisher's catalogs. But I'm willing to be humble and accept a dating with a ten-year window.

Let's have a look at Ur Tillie himself. He probably answers more readily to the name Funny Face - at least that is the formal name borne by all the later incarnations of this personage in Coney Island.

Let's start off by conceding the obvious: This is a very odd face. The Cheshire Cat smile debuts here with a violence assisted by the fact that we're looking at a three-dimensional mask rather than a two-dimensional mural painting. The bulging eyes actually compete with the smile, again assisted by the 3-D effect. The ears are enormous, and the head floats in space - there is no collar, no cravat.

Our Tillie is a lot more lovable than Ur Tillie, but the the lines of paternity strike me as clear.

Even before the fire, it's apparent that Funny Face had progressed well beyond Ur Tillie. Here's a shot of a Steeplechase ticket to ride, which Wikimedia Commons dates to 1905.

The face here seems more definitely human. The smile, while still preposterous, seems a bit more organic. The eyes have stopped fighting and accepted that they are not the main attraction. The ears are still very large. And the ensemble is now anchored on a collar and a necktie. You'll note there's also just a sliver of the shoulders of a high-button jacket. Our modern Tillie normally goes with just the collar and tie.

After the Steeplechase burned in 1907 the proprietor, George C. Tilyou, rebuilt on a new plan, producing the result immortalized in the color postcard below.  

You can see the enormous Funny Face in the center of the glass facade. I call him Tillie's Dad. 

Renditions of Funny Face on such things as admissions tickets varied over time, but all the variations shared an angularity that contrasts with the roundness of Palace Tillie's features.

Steeplechase II opened in 1908 and lasted until 1966, when Fred Trump, Donald's father, knocked it down. Fred died in 1999; he was, and is, widely hated in Coney Island. People have simply failed to see the humor in his evil clown act. 

For more on the Steeplechase demolition, see Jim Crow Was a Failed State.  As occasionally happens with my articles, the Jim Crow story covers a sizable list of topics that may at first seem unrelated; the Coney Island stuff is at the beginning.

I'm taking the Steeplechase dates from Charles Denson, Coney Island: Lost and Found (2002) pp. 32-35, 136-140. Denson writes for a general audience and does not include footnotes, but he is deeply knowledgeable and a careful writer. 

Tillie the First

Okay, let's move on to Tillie the First. The Asbury Park Museum recently had a show in the lobby of the Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel. I knew that George Tilyou had opened a branch of his Steeplechase - call it a cadet line - in Asbury Park, but I didn't know when, and the museum kindly informed me in the show that the date was 1914 (coincidentally, the same year that Tilyou died). 

Here's a postcard showing the Asbury Park Steeplechase, and you can see what I call Tillie the First smiling down from the facade.

Tillie the First seems downright friendly to me. His head is rounder, his ears are smaller, and his smile is not quite so spectacularly wide. I think we're well on our way to Palace Tillie here.

Atlantic City

It turns out that Tillie has a cousin in Atlantic City. Here he is.

I know very little about AC's Steeplechase Pier. The UPI news service tells us that Tilyou set it up in 1899, and I am inclined to think that this Funny Face is an older cousin for Asbury Park's Steeplechase Tillie. He certainly looks older - the large ears and the extraordinarily large mouth strike me as less evolved than the Asbury rendition. And the collar is distinctly overdone. However, he does seem much friendlier than anything in Coney Island. 

Tentacles from Mickey Mouse to Batman

Tillie seems to have quite a few linkages or parallel developments in the wider culture that might deserve further exploration. In addition to Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse comes promptly to mind. Tillie's evolution to roundness is paralleled by Mickey, who in Steamboat Willie (1928) looks decidedly like a rodent, at least from the neck up. By the time of the Sorcerer's Apprentice (a part of the 1940 Fantasia) Mickey's head had become rounder and his nose shorter.

I also think Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman seems to bear some resemblance to Tillie. Talk about a round head. Of course, Mr. Neuman is famous for his missing front tooth, something that you will never see with Tillie.

And then there's this: What happens if you take Funny Face and, instead of making him rounder, you accent the existing angularity? I think you might wind up with Batman's Joker. 

The immediate inspiration for the Joker was apparently a character played by Conrad Veidt in the 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs. The publicity still looks remarkably like an angular follow-on to Funny Face. Veidt, who played Major Strasser in Casablanca, definitely had the necessary angular features. 

The movie is based on Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit. 

Brooklyn's current Luna Park, which opened in 2010, has adopted Funny Face from Steeplechase Park and moved the image in an angular direction. I think the new image is well done and kinda scary. (The current park is not to be confused with the original Luna Park, 1903-1946. See Denson, Coney Island, pp. 36-37.) 

Finally, the name Funny Face. There's a 1957 movie of that name, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. It's based loosely on a 1927 musical from George and Ira Gershwin, and from the plot summaries I fail to see any connection whatsoever with the Coney Island Funny Face. 

Palace Amusements

I thought I'd end with a 1978 shot of Palace Amusements in Asbury Park, which was Tillie's home for many years. The water in the foreground is Wesley Lake, which separates Asbury from Ocean Grove.

Just one more. The clown below is on the north side of the Wonder Bar. I think he may also be a refugee from the Palace.  If you look carefully at the right side of the picture above, I think you can see him. Wonder Bar Clown is facing left, and Palace Clown is facing right, but I think he's the same guy.

See also City of Lights, Tillie Goes Biking.