I recently went to see the Luna Luna exhibit here in New York City, at The Shed. I was so excited—I’d been wanting to see this “art carnival” ever since I learned about it.

The brainchild of artist André Heller, Luna Luna first opened in 1987 in Hamburg, Germany, as an actual outdoor fairground, with rides, games and attractions that had been transformed by contemporary artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Sonia Delaunay, Keith Haring, André Heller, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Kenny Scharf.

The name “Luna Luna” comes from the term “luna,” a term for a small local carnival. The term comes from the original Luna park that stood in Coney Island in New York City in 1903.

After the Luna Luna fairground closed, the park’s treasures were packed up, and because of a variety of complications, were forgotten in storage for thirty-six years, in forty-four giant shipping containers in the Texas dessert. Very few people remembered that this art carnival had ever existed.

Eventually, however, entrepreneur Michael Goldberg tracked down the containers, and they were purchased sight unseen by famed rapper Drake. The new Luna Luna team spent two years rebuilding the pieces for display. The showing opened in L.A. in December 2023, and that’s when I read about it. Eventually, it came to New York City.

Because I was so interested in the history of this fairground, I read many articles about it. I was very struck by an observation made by André Heller, its founder. He’s quoted in an article in the New York Times saying,

Every person you meet—all your friends—have a memory of a luna park…Everybody had a childhood and I wanted to address the childhood of these geniuses.

I was very intrigued by this observation by Heller—that we all have our own childhood memory of a luna park.

It reminded of a passage written by the brilliant author M.F.K. Fisher, in her essay “Palaces, Etcetera”:

She writes:

Every life has at least one fairy palace in its span. Usually these miracles happen when a person is young, but still wide-eyed enough to catch the magic that older people have forgotten or pushed away. For countless children, Disneyland has it, like Tivoli in Copenhagen. For both tourists and natives, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace does well…prancing horses, flashing sabers, plumes and capes and trumpets in the fog…the Palace is in safe hands, a solid dream.

Sometimes people can know two palaces before Lady Luck calls it quits, but of course they are never of equal enchantment. This happened to me, and all of it before I was about ten. It was an early proof of my good fortune.

The lesser of the two palaces was the Pig’n’Whistle, a stylish ice-cream parlor in Los Angeles.

For Andre Heller, the place of enchantment was a small carnival, for M.F.K. Fisher, it was an ice-cream parlor, and for Stephen King, it was a very different kind of place. In his excellent book On Writing (Amazon, Bookshop), the author describes a place from his childhood:

A block down the hill, not far from Teddy’s Market and across from Burrets Building Materials, was a huge tangled wilderness area with a junkyard on the far side and a train track running through the middle. This is one of the places I keep returning to in my imagination; it turns up in my books and stories again and again, under a variety of names.

These three distinct childhood memories—from an art-carnival creator, a food writer, and a horror master—illuminate how the “luna parks” of our childhoods can live in our imaginations for our entire lives.