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One hundred years ago, the fringes of Portland were dotted with “trolley parks”—small amusement parks constructed at the last stops of streetcar lines to draw weekend riders. Jantzen Beach had a carousel. Council Crest Park had a log flume. But none of these bygone destinations can match the sinister allure of Lotus Isle (288 N Tomahawk Island Drive), a short-lived Coney Island-style amusement park on an actual island in the Columbia River. The “Million-Dollar Pleasure Paradise” was open just three summers, from 1930 to 1932, but it managed to fill each season with a fresh catastrophe: a drowned child, a decapitated vaudevillian, the dance hall going up in flames. “The musicians playing at the resort had left their instruments, having planned to practice this morning,” The Oregon Journal noted in its Aug. 24, 1931, report on the Peacock Ballroom fire. “All the instruments were destroyed.” Another story goes that a stunt plane buzzing too close to the park maddened the resident elephant, Tusko the Magnificent, who proceeded to knock down several buildings. That tale might be exaggerated; it doesn’t appear in any contemporary newspaper reports. No matter: Lotus Isle Park, now a city-owned pocket of verdant knolls and blackberry brambles, remains an ideal place to gaze out at the rotted wooden pilings of the trolley line and contemplate the folly of all human endeavor.
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