Charles I.D. Looff was born Carl Jürgen Detlef Looff on May 24, 1852, in Bad Bramstedt, Holstein. His father was a master blacksmith and wagon builder. To avoid involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York on August 14, 1870, where he found work as a carver at a furniture factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. After working at the factory all day, he took scraps of wood home and carved them into carousel animals, eventually assembling them onto a circular platform. In 1876, he installed this first machine at Lucy Vandeveer's Bathing Pavilion on Coney Island — the first carousel and first amusement ride on the island. The operation grew rapidly. He opened a factory at 30 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and began hiring expert carvers — including Marcus Illions, Charles Carmel, and John Zalar — to support his expanding output. Wikipedia + 2

Looff's carving style passed through three distinct phases: gentle expressions in the early period (1876–1888), elegant heads with intricately carved manes in the middle period (1889–1900), and increasingly ornate decoration in his final California years. His figures are known for highly decorated carving and ornamentation, distinct personalities, realistic features, glass eyes, and real horsehair tails. In 1886 he relocated to Crescent Park in Rhode Island, and in 1910 moved again to California, where he designed and built the Santa Monica Pier in 1916. He manufactured more than 50 carousels in total, along with amusement parks, roller coasters, and Ferris wheels, before his death in Long Beach in 1918. The 1895 Crescent Park carousel survives in East Providence, Rhode Island, as a National Historic Landmark. Heroes, Heroines, and History + 2