World in Wax

Between my research for this summer's post on the Henderson's building at Coney Island, and my interest in Zoe Beloff's "Dreamland" exhibit, I became fascinated by the long-vanished World in Wax Musee, which stood from 1926 until the mid 1980s, run by a woman named Lillie Santangelo.

Tomorrow night, Coney Island USA will be screening the film "Lilly's World of Wax" by Tom Palazzo. In the film, Lillie herself "leads the camera on a tour of the museum," delivering "her absurd and touching stories about the figures" made of wax.


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

Other than Palazzo's film, very few images of the wax museum's interior exist. Luckily, photographer, filmmaker, and Coney Island USA co-founder Costa Mantis was on hand back in the 1980s to preserve Lillie's wonders. He gave me permission to reprint his rarely seen photos here. Zoe Beloff, who will also be speaking at the film tomorrow night, provided the scans.


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

Many of the wax figures at the museum were of murderers. Posing in their gruesome moments of homicide, there was Julio Ramirez Perez, the screwdriver killer, plunging his tool into the neck of Vera Lotito in 1948; and Richard Speck, holding a nurse bound and gagged in her white uniform (she was one of eight nurses Speck murdered in 1966).


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

One of the bloodiest scenes in the museum was played out by Hickman the Fox, who kidnapped and murdered 12-year-old Marion Parker in 1927. In this ancient wax tableau, itself dating back to the 1920s, Hickman dismembers Marion in a bathtub, removing her internal organs and wiring her eyes open.


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

And perhaps the most infamous of Lillie's killers was Ruth Snyder, the "Double Indemnity" murderer, later played by Barbra Stanwyck in the Billy Wilder movie. Here, Snyder stands by her lover, Henry Judd Gray, the corset salesman she seduced into killing her husband.


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

The museum did not focus only on murders. It also showcased presidents of the United States, celebrities, and strange births. The two-headed baby had a starring role.


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

As did little Lina Medina, "the youngest confirmed mother in medical history, giving birth at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days." Here she is in 1939, lying in her hospital bed under the headline, "Baby Boy's Mother Is Baby Too."


photograph: Costa Mantis, 1981

"No exhibition devoted itself more fully to the celebration of domestic trauma than Lillie Beatrice Santangelo's World in Wax Musee," writes Amy Herzog in an essay in The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society & Its Circle.

She shares with us Santangelo's own words, from an unpublished interview, about what the World in Wax meant to her: "a wax show teaches the good things in life and also teaches that crime doesn't pay. What makes a person bad? What makes a clock tick, good or bad?"

In the old Coney, with its bizarre juxtapositions and otherwordly representations, such odd and unsettling questions could arise. What makes a bad clock tick? In the clean and easy new Coney, we may never find the answers.