Riverview Park was an amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1915 to 1978. What began in pre-1915 as a zoological garden and trolley destination in an area of Des Moines known as Highland Park would become Riverview Amusement Park, a popular family entertainment oasis in early Iowa history. It was built upon an island, accessed via a wooden bridge, by a group of nine local businessmen that were headed up by a Des Moines movie-theater mogul named Abe Frankle. In the early years various entertaining events and attractions that made Riverview Park a fondly remembered family get-away included free acts featuring death-defying daredevils and musical band concerts. The early amusement rides included in 1923 a new carousel (PTC#65) from the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, whose carousels represented some of the finest examples of hand carved carousel horses in America, and a large Carousel Pavilion building to house it. In 1928 a Herschell-Spillman menagerie carousel with intricate hand-carved animals replaced the PTC carousel. In 1920 John Miller–designed a figure-eight roller coaster featuring eight full dips that all went to the ground level for the park. In 1940, the Riviera Ballroom was added and provided big band dances throughout the 1940s and 1950s and teen dances in the 1960s and 1970s.