COEUR d’ALENE — Monica Hayes watched her kids’ faces beam on Tuesday as the Coeur d’Alene Carousel spun them back to Playland Pier, where children of Coeur d’Alene first experienced the magic of the merry-go-round in 1942.

The 95-year-old carousel’s reopening at Memorial Field seven weeks ago is allowing new and experienced riders a taste of Coeur d’Alene’s history, but custodians of the vintage ride want to see more people taking the time to take a spin.

“For being newly opened, we’re very happy, but we want to increase it in the future,” said Coeur d’Alene Carousel Foundation board secretary Rita Snyder.

The foundation, a nonprofit created to accept the carousel as a gift to the people of Coeur d’Alene, committed to covering all expenses for maintenance and operation after Bud Ford donated $200,000 toward construction of the building that now houses it.

Full operation started June 16, and since then the foundation has tracked ridership — taking ride counts four times a day. Ride tokens cost $2 each, and it costs one token for a ride.

“A slow day for us is like 100 riders, which, when there’s a big event down there, like Ironman or things like that, we don’t hardly have any riders,” Snyder said Tuesday.

Snyder reported ridership improved during Art on the Green, with 276 people showing up to ride on Saturday. She said the average day draws 250 to 350 visitors, and the highest number of attendees since opening is 390.

Snyder said they did not anticipate how different downtown events might affect ridership in different ways.

“Will it make our ride count higher? Will it make it lower? We don’t know,” she said.

Originally, the foundation planned to operate the carousel seasonally, open weekends in May and September, all weekdays in the summer months, and occasionally for special events throughout the year. But this recent development has them questioning if it’s going to be worth it.

“As we’ve discovered this summer, the events we expected to increase the ridership actually decreased it,” Snyder said. “Will people come over to our area to take advantage of the carousel if we were to open? Those are the kinds of things that we have to determine going forward.”

Hayes, a local business owner and four-year Post Falls resident, thinks the carousel can draw people during holidays by joining in the festivities, instead of being a side-note on the outskirts of downtown events.

“Put little reindeer costumes on the horses and have Santa on there and let the kids ride with Santa. Even Halloween, have costume riders on there with the kids; it would be so much fun,” Hayes said.

A more central location for the carousel might have helped, but at the cost of visibility, and sentiment. Snyder said there wasn’t a spot that checked all the boxes and had the visibility Memorial Field provided.

For Hayes, the location isn’t a problem.

“I don’t come downtown very often, and I was kind of like, ugh, where is it going to be? And we just drive by and it’s right there,” Hayes said.

“We’re in a really special, historic portion of our city, which is important because we had trains coming in and out of there (Human Rights Education Institute’s building), we had the pier down there and the Memorial Field grandstand in pictures on our carousel,” Snyder said.

Hayes brought multiple generations of her family to enjoy the carousel Tuesday. All five of her kids, between the ages of 6 and 17, grinned ear-to-ear when they heard Mom was bringing them to the new carousel. Clarane Sundin, Hayes’ mother, visited from Oregon and enjoyed the new attraction alongside her daughter, reminiscing on past visits to the Lake City.

“We adore Coeur d’Alene,” Sundin said. “We went crazy for the moose.”

Immediately after the ride was over, Hayes’ 9-year-old rushed to ask her mom, “Can we go again?”