Qualla: Luna Park Historic District

Luna Park Historic District: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the houses, there was an amusement park. From 1912 to 1923, a portion of Charleston's West Side was occupied by Luna Park - one of the dozens of small American amusement parks built in the early twentieth century to give working families a place to spend a Saturday afternoon. There was a wooden roller coaster, a carousel, a bandstand, a swimming pool, and a fenced lot full of the lights and noise that the name 'Luna' was meant to evoke. The park closed in 1923. Within a few years, developers had platted the land into residential lots, and through the second half of the 1920s and into the early 1930s the West Side was built up with the kind of houses American families wanted in the boom years before the Depression: foursquares, bungalows, Tudor Revivals, and Colonial Revivals. The neighborhood today bears the park's name. The Luna Park Historic District encompasses 444 contributing buildings, and most of them stand on land that was once a Ferris wheel away from the Kanawha.

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Luna Park Historic District: Lights, Music, and a Roller Coaster

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Luna Park in Charleston was one of the many amusement parks built across America in the 1900s and 1910s that took their names and inspiration from the original Luna Park at Coney Island. The Charleston park opened in 1912 on land along the north bank of the Kanawha River, on the ...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Luna Park Historic District: From Amusement to Subdivision

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Land that has been an amusement park is generally cleared, graded, and served by utilities by the time it changes hands - which makes it convenient for residential development. After Luna Park closed, the property was platted and sold off in standard-size suburban lots. The timin...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Luna Park Historic District: The Architectural Catalogue

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The houses of the Luna Park district are a textbook of late-1920s American domestic architecture. The American Foursquare - that big square box of a house with a hipped roof, central dormer, and full-width front porch - is well represented; it was the default upper-middle-class A...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Luna Park Historic District: What the Park Left Behind

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D., CC BY-SA 4.0. The Luna Park Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The nomination form documented 444 contributing buildings - meaning structures that were built during the period of significance and that retained enough of their original character to ...

Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ M.D. | CC BY-SA 4.0