Palisades Amusement Park

Infobox Amusement park
name = Palisades Amusement Park
location = Cliffside Park-Fort Lee
location2 = New Jersey
location3 = United States flagicon|USA
opening_date = 1898
closing_date = September 12, 1971
previous_names = Park on the Palisades, Schenck Brothers Palisade Park
season = Weekend before Easter to Sunday after Labor Day
area = New York metropolitan area
rides = 45-50 (rides varied from season to season)
coasters = 5
owner = Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, Jack and Irving Rosenthal
slogan = Come on over!
homepage = www.palisadespark.com

Palisades Amusement Park was an amusement park located in Bergen County, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. It was atop the New Jersey Palisades and was partially in Cliffside Park and partly in Fort Lee. It was in operation from 1898 until 1971, and near the end of its life was still one of the most-visited amusement parks in the United States. Essentially, it became a victim of its own success and inadequate facilities to deal with the generations of families and children who flocked to its gates. After the park closed, a high-rise luxury apartment complex was built on its site.

The Trolley Park Era

Palisades Park began as a trolley park called "The Park on the Palisades", which first opened in 1898. The park was designed and built by the Bergen County Traction Company, a trolley operator, to encourage use of its service between the Edgewater ferry landing and the top of the Palisades. Although at this time it was more of a traditional walking park with very few features of an amusement park, riders still took the trolley line to reach the sylvan recreation site atop the hill.

The Schenck Brothers: 1908-1934

By 1908, the park had come under new ownership and been renamed "Palisades Amusement Park", and the new owners began adding amusement rides and attractions. In 1910, the park was purchased by Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, brothers who were prominent in the nascent motion picture industry then burgeoning in nearby Fort Lee. They renamed the park once again, calling it "Schenck Bros. Palisade Park". In 1913, the park added a salt-water swimming pool filled by pumping water from the saline Hudson River, 200 feet (60 m) below. This pool, 400 by 600 feet (120 meters by 180 meters) in surface area, was billed as the largest salt-water wave pool in the nation. Behind the water falls were huge pontoons that rose up and down as they rotated, creating a one-foot wave in the pool. They were Irving Rosenthal's pride and joy and broke down during the last two weeks of operation in August of 1971. Rosenthal spent thousands of dollars to keep them in operation even though the park was about to close forever.

As the park added more and more attractions, it became so famous by the 1920s that the Borough of Palisades Park, located just west of the amusement park, actually considered changing its name to avoid visitors' confusion.

In 1928 the park introduced the third of Harry Traver's infamous Cyclone roller coasters, regarded as some of the most extreme and vicious coasters ever made. Unfortunately, due to the high maintenance costs, the ride only lasted six years before being removed. [http://www.coasterglobe.com/features/lostlegends-crystalbeachcyclone/index.cfm www.coasterglobe.com - Lost Legends: Crystal Beach Cyclone]

The Rosenthal Brothers: 1934-1971

In 1934, the Schencks sold the park to Jack and Irving Rosenthal, Brooklyn brothers and entrepreneurs who had built a fortune as concessionaires at Coney Island. They also owned some concessions and a carousel at Savin Rock Park in Connecticut. The Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster was built by the Rosenthals in 1927, and is still running today (not to be confused with any of the Traver Cyclones). There was another Rosenthal brother, Sam, who ran the parking lot at Palisades and was considered the black sheep of the family. He died in the mid-1960s.

The Rosenthals restored the park's previous and most recognizable name, "Palisades Amusement Park." At the start of World War II, the Rosenthals and sold the Cyclone coaster at Coney Island to Silvio Pinto who operated until it was sold to the city of New York in 1969. The city put it up for a bid for someone to operate it in 1974 and Jerry Alberts from Astoland won the bid, and is still operating it today.

In 1944 a fire that reportedly began underneath the Virginia Reel ride destroyed much of the facility. The Rosenthals repaired the damage in short order, and the park was reopened in time for the 1945 season and continued to open each spring through 1971. One attraction at the rebuilt park by construction superintendent Joe McKee (who went on to build the Wild Mouse roller coaster in 1958) was a redesign of the damaged Skyrocket roller coaster. The Rosenthals named the newly repaired coaster the Cyclone after their beloved Coney Island coaster.

The park's reputation and attendance continued to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to saturation advertising and the continued success of the park's music pavilion, Caisson bar erected during the Schencks' ownership era. In the mid-1950s the park started featuring rock and roll shows hosted by local disc jockeys Clay Cole and Bruce Morrow, also known as "Cousin Brucie," and starting in the 1960s, Motown musical acts performed. The park's renown extended far beyond the New York City metropolitan area, as advertisements for it were frequently run in the back pages of 1950s and 1960s comic books. The Rosenthals realized that NYC-area youths represented the largest single market for comic books in the nation, and thus comic book advertising was a cheap way to reach thousands of potential customers. In 1962, Chuck Barris wrote and Freddy Cannon recorded a song about the park, "Palisades Park," which got nationwide airplay and boosted the park's fame even further. Radio and TV commercials in the New York metropolitan area encouraged the public to, "Come on over!".

Behind the music stage lay the park's worst-kept secret: a hole in the fence used by local children to sneak into the park without paying admission. Despite the fact that the Rosenthal brothers knew all about this breach, it was purposely left unrepaired. Unlike more modern amusement parks that sell unlimited ride passes, Palisades Amusement Park charged individual fees for each ride and attraction inside the park in addition to the entrance fee. Feeling that children, who had little money to start with, would be more willing to spend it once inside if they had more left after entering, Irving Rosenthal, a man who loved children even though he had none of his own, allowed this "secret" entrance to remain and instructed security personnel to look the other way if they saw anyone sneaking through it. The same thinking led Rosenthal to saturate the market with free-admission offers printed on matchbooks and in other places. He owned an advertising company that put up billboards known as "three sheeters" all over New York City. In addition, parking was free for the same reasons, but as the park began attracting bigger and bigger crowds in later years, the onsite parking lot became less and less adequate, often rapidly filling to capacity. An overflow parking lot was opened at the bottom of the cliff in Edgewater, NJ with shuttle buses carrying visitors back up to the park. Once the lots were full on weekends, traffic coming from the George Washington Bridge would be sent down the road towards the Lincoln Tunnel and the traffic coming from the tunnel would be sent towards the bridge, with no real place to go. Consequently many visitors were forced to park their vehicles wherever they could find a spot on nearby side streets (in some cases, up to several miles away) and local business establishments, clogging traffic and taking up street parking spaces, much to the great frustration of many area residents.

The Park's Demise

Two key factors contributed to the eventual closing of Palisades Amusement Park: near-gridlock traffic conditions in its vicinity due to inadequate parking facilities along with growing uncertainty over its future. By 1967, Jack Rosenthal had died of Parkinson's disease [http://www.rcdb.com/pd807.htm ¹] , leaving his brother Irving as sole owner. Irving, in his 70s by then, was not expected to run the park for much longer and with no family heirs, it was unclear as to who would eventually assume ownership. Meanwhile the park had become so popular that the towns of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee were being overwhelmed by the hordes of people who were "coming on over" in response to the park's ads, and the traffic situation had become intolerable. Local residents, tired of the traffic jams, litter and other problems caused by the park's immense popularity, demanded action from local elected officials. Developers saw an opportunity to cash in on the Palisades' spectacular view of Manhattan, and they successfully pressured the local government to re-zone the amusement park site for high-rise apartment housing and condemn it under eminent domain. Thus the fate of Palisades Amusement Park was sealed.

Over the next few years, the land was surveyed by a number of builders who made lucrative offers, but Rosenthal tried to postpone the park's inevitable closing and refused to sell. The right offer finally came in January 1971. A Texas developer, Winston-Centex Corporation, acquired the property for $12 million and agreed to lease it back to Irving Rosenthal so that Palisades Amusement Park could operate for one final season. The park closed its gates for the last time on Sunday, September 12, 1971. After it closed, Morgan "Mickey" Hughes and Fletch Crammer, Jr. tried to reopen the park for one more season and obtained a lease from Winston-Centex. However, the town of Fort Lee would not issue a business license until the following spring and even then they could not ensure it would be forthcoming. During the heyday of Palisades in the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Irving, as he was called at work, would refer to Fort Lee as his town. Its buildings were subsequently demolished and rides sold, dismantled and transported to other amusement operators in the United States and Canada. The towns of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee considered using the park's famous salt-water swimming pool for municipal recreation, only to find that its filtration system had been damaged beyond repair by vandals.

Three high-rise luxury apartment buildings stand on the old park site today. The first to be built was Winston Towers; it and Carlyle Towers now stand in Cliffside Park, while a third building, the Buckingham, is in Fort Lee. In 1998, on the centennial of the opening of the original Park on the Palisades, Winston Towers management dedicated a monument to Palisades Amusement Park on its property.

References

See also

* Palisades Park (song)
* List of abandoned amusement parks

External links

* [http://www.palisadespark.com/index.htm Palisades Amusement Park Historical Society]