That's an odd story about the dangling benches.
I'm reminded that the "amusement parks and carnivals past and present" category is
huge on the internet, in particular these abandoned places... for example there's one in Germany that is huge, and in the U.S. there's one that was apparently based on "Lil' Abner".
I was surprised to discover recently (via a streamed documentary on Kanopy) that parts of the New York World's Fair still exist and that some of it has been refurbished to some extent... in particular the ICBM's (Atlas and Titan etc.) are apparently still there. Chilling!
Some places like Disneyland have lots of fan pages as well as print books like "Mouse Tales"
www.amazon.com/Mouse-Tales-Behind-Ears-Disneyland/dp/0964060566 Mouse Tales which hails from 1994 and has been reprinted.
Some people say Walt Disney was strongly influenced by mechanical toys. I liked the way RB described some of these sorts of things in "Usher II". (Wikipedia link -
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Chronicles)
As a kid I was extremely interested in Victorian era tinplate and other mechanical toys (like coin banks) but I have never been able to get a good handle on the category.