11/01/2026
There is a ride in Ontario that inflation has never touched. At Lakeside Park in Port Dalhousie, on the Lake Ontario shore of St. Catharines, a magnificent antique carousel still spins for five cents a ride — the same nickel it cost generations ago — and by the terms of a promise made in 1970, it can never cost a cent more.
The carousel itself is a work of art that happens to move. It was hand-carved between 1898 and 1905 in Brooklyn, New York, in the workshop of Charles I. D. Looff, the German-born master who built Coney Island's first carousel and the Santa Monica Pier. His carvers — including Marcus Illions, who became a legend of the craft himself — produced sixty-eight wooden animals: prancing horses that still wear real horsehair tails, lions, camels, goats and giraffes, plus four chariots, all turning to the music of an antique Frati band organ.
It came to Port Dalhousie in 1921 from an amusement park in Scarborough, joining a lakeside park with fifty-eight attractions that drew weekend crowds off the steamships by the tens of thousands. The rest of that park is long gone. The carousel survived — and then came its most Canadian chapter. In 1970, a local woman named Dorothy Crabtree, who had bought the carousel, transferred it to the City of St. Catharines with two conditions written into the deal: the price of a ride would remain five cents forever, and the carousel would stay in Port Dalhousie.
A promise is a promise. Today the Friends of the Carousel — volunteers who carve, paint and restore the animals in a city workshop — keep the old machine gleaming. It is one of only nine antique hand-carved carousels still operating in Canada, out of roughly three hundred and fifty left in all of North America.
Only in Canada would a city sign a contract to keep the price of joy at one nickel, forever. When did you last ride a carousel — and would you pick the horse, the lion, or the camel?
