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When Georg Carstensen was asked when his pleasure garden outside Copenhagen would be completed, he gave an unexpected response: “Never.”
His answer was more than a quip. Carstensen imagined Tivoli Gardens as always evolving, with new attractions appearing alongside the old. This philosophy is why today, more than 180 years after it opened, Tivoli is the fifth most visited amusement park in Europe.
The land that King Christian VIII gave Carstensen for his park was just outside Copenhagen’s city walls. Carstensen wanted visitors to step outside the city, not into another part of Denmark, but into another part of the world.
This idea was built into the park’s architecture. Two of Tivoli’s most recognizable buildings, the Pantomime Theatre and the Pagoda, use Chinese-inspired architecture to make guests feel like they’re somewhere far from Copenhagen. This transportive feel made an impression on Hans Christian Andersen, one of the park’s first visitors in 1843. That same year Andersen wrote “The Nightingale,” a story set not in his native Denmark, but in China.
When the Rutschebanen (Danish for “roller coaster”) opened in 1914, Tivoli Gardens began its transformation from Victorian-era “pleasure garden” to modern amusement park. The Rutschebanen has been whisking riders through Tivoli for more than a century and is one of just seven roller coasters in the world where a brakeman still rides along to control its speed.
Walt Disney became one of the many international visitors to the park in 1951, and he went home with more than memories. Disneyland opened in California just four years later, with Walt himself crediting Tivoli’s time-tested blueprint of spectacle and adventure as inspiration for his park.
Today, the century-old Rutschebanen sits next to state-of-the-art roller coasters, while the Pantomime Theatre and Pagoda host entertainment alongside newer additions, like an aquarium, a modern food hall, and winter festivals.
Carstensen named Tivoli Gardens after the Jardins de Tivoli in Paris, but the word Tivoli has come to mean something quite different. In Scandinavian languages, Tivoli means any amusement park or fairground, not a bad legacy for a park that has never been finished.
