Old Summer Carnivals in Sag Harbor

Man, when I was a kid in the 1960’s, the carnival used to come twice in the summer to Sag Harbor. Once every July was the firemen’s carnival and once every August was the American Legion carnival. The carnival was usually held in the empty lot on lower Main Street where the Laundromat/Bookhampton building is located now. At that time up till 1965 there was a little brick building occupying that spot in which Louie the Shoemaker was located. After he vacated the building, it was last used in the summer of 1964 as a Goldwater campaign headquarters. I visited the headquarters and paid the rip-off fee of 25 cents for a can of Goldwater, which was actually ginger ale. Soda was a dime in those days in cans. The can itself, had I kept it and not opened it, would have been worth a lot more than 25 cents today. When the Laundromat was built, the carnivals moved to the lot now occupied by the Post Office, where they stayed until 1969 when the American Legion carnival was raided by state police for illegal gambling and that ended the carnivals in Sag Harbor for the next several decades, until being resurrected in the 1990’s by the fire department and held annually at Haven’s Beach until 2005. One exception to the lower main street location, they held one carnival in the summer of 1965 in Mashashimuet Park where the cement building housing the restrooms are today, for some reason. In those days the carnivals would open at 7pm on Monday nights and run to 11pm. They would be open 6 nights and closed Sundays when they moved to another town. There was a ticket booth at each ride where you paid 25 cents for a ride. Very inefficient as today one ticket booth can sell tickets to all rides and need only a couple of people to staff it. The rides consisted of the Ferris wheel; the merry go round, the octopus, among others. There were wheels with 36 numbers where you bet a dime and if it came up, you won a prize. These were the ones considered illegal in the 1969 raid. As kids, we use to watch the carnival being assembled on Sundays by a bunch of dirt bags as you would call them today. They had no port-a-potties at the carnival in those days, and if you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to walk over to the Danny McClain’s Shell station. Danny ran a tackle shop out of his gas station until he moved to Bay St and opened the Bayview Tackle Shop at the end of the decade. The Shell station itself stayed around until the early eighties and then became a restaurant. One nice thing, living on Garden Street, I could walk downtown in 5 minutes. The only other place to hold a carnival each summer was St. Andrew’s church, in their parking lot. It was not really a carnival, but more like a fair, as there were no rides, but they did have cotton candy, which every kid liked. The popularity of carnivals has seemed to dwindle somewhat today, but parents still bring their kids to them mainly for the rides. I attend the North Sea carnival once a year on July 4th weekends, but it’s only to let my kids experience the fun. I’m no longer suckered in, by carnies anymore.


The carnival hasn't changed much over the years