Stuff: Hell for sale.

Last week, the operators of Astroland closed down the park several weeks prior to the regular October close of the season. The reason for this unexpected shutdown has something to do with their tangled relationship with Thor Realities, the development group that basically wants to convert Coney into an Atlantic City strip mall sans gambling.

For lovers of Coney Island, it’s a sad thing. As a type this, one-third of the park is now being dismembered and its parts sold off.

This would include Dante's Inferno, the third of the three rides I featured in my recent series on the fabulous haunted house rides of Coney.

Dante's Inferno is currently listed at Rides4U, an online site that specializes in selling new and used amusements to the carnival biz. The ticket price: $225,000.

If you do buy it, please give the old girl a good home. She's not the looker she used to be, but she is still very much loved.

Goodbye, DI. I'll miss you.

Stuff: The haunted houses of Coney Island: Part 3 – Dante's Inferno

The third and final stop on our tour of haunted house rides is Dante's Inferno.

As the middle child, stuck between its raucous and Rabelaisian younger brother (the Ghost Hole) and its legendary older sister (the Spook-A-Rama), Dante's Inferno has struggled to establish an identity of its own.

Located in Astroland Park, just a shout away from the famed Cyclone rollercoaster, Dants's Inferno opened in 1964 under the name Flight to Mars. The same year NASA failed to send Mariner 3 to Mars, riders at Coney Island could take the same trip for less than a buck. Flight to Mars rolled passengers past various "space age" scenes, including human contact with a vibrant Martian civilization. America's come-from-behind dominance in the space race and the sad realization that neither the moon nor Mars contained any societies more complex than anything you might find in vast stretches of the Midwest dealt a fatal blow to the crowd-drawing powers of Flight to Mars. After six years of economically-priced, family-friendly space exploration, Flight to Mars closed its doors.

In 1970s, along with most of the rest of the city, Flight to Mars went to Hell. The dark ride was replaced with a high-concept dark ride that actually took riders on a tour of Hell and the poet Dante imagined it. This proved a bit hoity-toity for the Coney crowd and, over time, the ride's theme was downgraded to a more generic, non-unified series of scares. The modern ride was the creation of famed attraction designer Anton Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf's responsible for several classic rollercoasters, including the King Cobra at King's Dominion in Virginia and the Shockwave at Six Flags Over Texas. Fans of 1970s disaster flicks may remember the Revolution from the schlocky 1977 thriller Rollercoaster. The Revolution, playing itself in the film, was designed by Anton Schwarzkopf. The Revolution was also the coaster the Griswolds ride in National Lampoon's Vacation.

Like all Coney Island dark rides, Dante's Inferno features an outsized mascot: A yellow, winged demon character holding a ghostly puppet in his left hand (Brutus, Cassius, or Judas about to be devoured? Your guess is as good as mine.).

The exterior of Dante's Inferno resembles some ren-fair castle and is studded with several bits of animatronic tomfoolery. Sadly, none of the pieces appear to work. This a real shame as the single most awesome bit monster in all of Coney can be found on the far left of the ride's façade, often hidden behind the ticket booth. Here's a photo I took on previous trip.

This bad boy is sometimes referred to as "the werewolf." In his more functional days, his carriage-support slid in and out of the castle façade, allowing the beast to lunge at passersby. I don't include a modern photo of this wonderful beastie as time and vandals have not been kind to him. Earlier this year, teens busted off his lower jaw.

Earlier I mentioned that overall balance of scare pieces on most rides falls somewhere in between Platonic poles: jump-out and tableaux scares. Well, Dante's makes a big freakin' liar out of me. Dante's is interesting in that it contains nothing but tableaux scare pieces. Some of them are quite modern; there's a dismemberment by circular saw scene that would fit right at home in Hostel film. Others, like a gorilla beating his chest in a cage, seem quaint.

Last but not least, here's the ride through video. If you've got your ears open, you'll hear the filmmaker (or his companion) ask if the other rider has ever been on a "pretzel" dark ride. That term refers to a specific sort of dark ride design in which riders move on flat surface over very twisty tracks. The car's orientation, and therefore the riders' point of view, twists back and forth as needed by the ride designer. Since the ride is mostly conducted in the dark, riders quickly loose their sense of orientation and get the feeling that they're covering enormous amounts of ground. The Spook-A-Rama is a classic pretzel ride. Dante's Inferno and the Ghost Hole are not pretzel rides because they follow a fairly linear track and contain multiple levels. Dante's Inferno even includes a slight "coaster dip," as you'll see.

Thanks for following me on this little tour. Enjoy the ride.

Stuff: Goodbye, Dante's Inferno

The last of the three original parks of Coney Island, Astroland - home of the famed Wonder Wheel and Warriors - will be torn down soon.

For those who do not live in NYC and will not get a chance to get out to Coney Island before October, when the season officially ends, then this may well be you're last chance to see Dante's Inferno: the oldest of the two haunted house rides in the soon to be demolished Astroland theme park. Enjoy these photos, and my apologies for the blur – I'm not much of a photographer.

Here's a photo of the large yellow demon and Dante's Inferno sign that dominate the exterior of the ride. If you look closely, to the left of the demon, you can see one off two three-headed dragons that appear in the upper corners of the ride's exterior. The dragons used to flail their heads about, but I haven't seen them operational in a dog's age.

Here's a close-up of that yellow demon.

Here's a bit of the facade. This is to your right as you sit in the cars, before the ride begins.

More of the outside decoration. With ride employee.

This odd character is actually hidden away behind the ticket booth. He's actually a really nice monster, so I'm not sure why they've hidden him away. He used to actually "pop" out of the facade of the ride - an effect accomplished by the harness frame you can see under the beast's chest - but, like the three-headed dragons, he hasn't been fully operational for some time.

The second haunted house ride in Astroland is the more recent Spook-A-Rama. Here's a pic of the signage. Again, sorry for the crappy photo.

Since he's not that visible in my crappy wide-shot, here's a close-up of the monster on top of the Spook-A-Rama.

(Bonus: Eagle-eyed readers might be able to pick out the back of my newly-minted wife's head in the Wonder Wheel shot. She's the one wearing the brown baseball cap, a gift from the fine folks at Jack's Coffee in Greenwich Village.)