Broad Ripple Park Carousel
carousel
Broad Ripple Park Carousel is an antique carousel in The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. It was installed in 1917 at an amusement park near the White River in Indianapolis, Indiana, where it remained until the building housing it collapsed in 1956. The ride's mechanism was destroyed, but the animals were relatively unscathed and put into storage by the park's owners, the Indianapolis Department of Parks and Recreation. The animals were carved by the Dentzel Carousel Company sometime before 1900, but were assembled by the William F. Mangels carousel company, which also supplied the engine powering the ride.
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis acquired its first two carved animals from the ride in 1965 and the last few wooden animals in 1973. The museum planned to sell some to finance the restoration of others until the director of the museum, Mildred Compton, was convinced by carousel enthusiasts that the museum should instead restore all the animals and recreate the working carousel. Restoration of the carved animals began in 1966 and was only finished with the restoration of the entire carousel in 1977. No space had been allocated for the display of such a large exhibit in the museum's planned new building, which meant some re-designing was necessary to allow its installation on the fifth floor. A 1919 Wurlitzer band organ model No. 146, a type manufactured only for carousels, was also installed.
“Broad Ripple Park Carousel” enters the record as carousel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Broad, Ripple and Park can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q930998. Authority coordinates are 39.811, -86.157. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1956, 1900 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Broad Ripple Park Carousel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.