There’s a marvelous photo-filled article featuring eight abandoned amusement parks which will make your inner urban explorer jump with glee, and possibly your outer one as well. It features the remains of Six Flags New Orleans, trashed by Katrina and unlikely to ever open again, and even some pictures of good old Rocky Point in Rhode Island, a park I did not have the chance to get to before it closed. (A lot of my eastern Massachusetts friends did, and said the corkscrew coaster was wicked awesome. I’ll take their word for it.)

But the pictures and write-up of Lincoln Park, a beautiful trolley park outside of North Dartmouth in southeastern Mass, were the most compelling to me. Never got to go to Lincoln Park, but was owned by the Collins family, who also owned Mountain Park in Holyoke, so I feel a slight kinship to it. Both parks featured the architectural designs of Dominic Spadola, whose brilliant visions of neon art deco brightened up both joints. Jay Ducharme, a historian who worked at Mountain Park in the 1980s, has written a great article on Mountain Park’s dark rides over at Laff In The Dark. (I can’t recommend this site enough. It’s not only filled with pictures of great old dark rides, but the design itself is a work of art.) The article includes the Dinosaur Den ride and a shot of the Flower Power tableaux, plus the history of its two-story walk-through super space-age funhouse. Neat stuff.

Spadola designed this pizza shack for Lincoln Park. Someone else redecorated it.

I’ve visited the ruins of Lincoln Park at least four times, and I’ve seen examples of Dominic Spadola’s work which, while rotting away, gave me immediate impressions of Mountain Park. The pictures from the excellent book Lincoln Park Remembered also show the definite style of Spadola throughout, so the two were sister parks through and through.

The two parks suffered from similar financial and insurance woes, and both closed in 1987, leaving Massachusetts with Riverside Park in Agawam, later known as Six Flags New England and one final trolley park, Whalom Park in Lunenburg. Whalom also featured designs by Dominic Spadola, so it’s fair to say that my Golden Age amusement park memories are directly inspired by him.

Lincoln Park was built as a trolley park, but not in the traditional sense: it wasn’t built by a railway company to draw passengers out to the end of a trolley line. Rather, it was built in the middle of the Fall River-New Bedford line, and drew passengers out to the boondocks that was North Dartmouth. And it worked, first as a picnic grove in 1894 and then, as the American leisure time grew and evolved, into an amusement park by the 1920s. There was a dance hall and the first inklings of amusement rides.

The Lincoln Park billboard was a Route 6 landmark. Photo from www.lpcomet.com.

As the automobile began its takeover and train service declined, Lincoln Park got along great with the new car-bound leisure seekers. Route 6 ran right by the park and was the main route to get to Cape Cod. I-195 now bypasses Route 6 between Fall River and New Bedford but back in the day, Route 6 was all there was. Lincoln Park was perfectly situated to draw in the tourists. What kid could resist the lure of the colorful billboards, bright lights and whirling, spinning rides? What parent could heartlessly refuse to stop as they rounded the curve and an amusement park, a wonderful amusement park, suddenly loomed before them? It was a summer tradition for Cape Cod-bound families and locals alike.

The Comet stood on the far end of the midway, its colorful vertical beams drawing in the riders. Photo by Joe Maino.

By the 1950s the park had grown thanks to John Collins and his partners, who expanded the park and started putting in real attractions, including 1940′s Comet roller coaster (also known as “Coaster” from time to time.) Designed by Vernon Keenan, who was responsible for the Coney Island Cyclone, the Comet started out as an elongated version of the Cyclone, but featured more turns and a unique dip under the brake run. But more on the coaster itself later. The park enjoyed its greatest success in the 40s, 50s and 60s, its famous Clambake pavilion serving clam dinners by the thousands. Dominic Spadola re-designed the park’s “Laff In The Dark” ride into “Monster Ride”, a double-decker masterpiece much like its Dinosaur Den counterpart at Mountain Park. There was a miniature golf course and even a miniature version of the Comet for the kids.

I see a dark ride and I want to paint it grey. Photo from http://ctacke.tripod.com.

The highway went in around the 60s, siphoning off the park’s traffic, and in the 1980s was finally sold by the Collins group to Jay Hoffman, an entrepreneur who didn’t quite know how amusement parks worked. His first move was to paint all the buildings, all the brightly-colored and festive buildings, a flat and desolate gray. If a ride’s maintenance proved to be too much, it was replaced with a cheaper ride more at home at a parking lot carnival. Finally in 1987, faced with back taxes and a bleak economic outlook, Hoffman closed the park. The rides were removed except for the Comet, and the buildings were left to the elements and arsonists.

My first visit to the Lincoln Park ruins was in 1999 but I didn’t see them up close. I merely drove around them. I was travelling alone and merely wanted to scout the place out. (One of the most important rules of urban exploration is that you never go in alone. Always have a buddy who’ll be there for you if you do something stupid like crack your head on a crossbeam and fall over. Not that I’ve ever experienced anything like this and the goose egg healed quite nicely, thank you.) The giant skeleton of the Comet roller coaster was mostly intact and the white paint was still bright. You could see it from Route 6, standing sentinel in a giant vacant lot, keeping watch over a couple of other rotting buildings. The surviving buildings were clustered back towards the Comet coaster, with almost nothing left on the Route 6 side.

I’d driven out in 1999 because I’d heard that Stop & Shop was going to finally build a supermarket on the derelict site. I’d also heard that the Comet might be worth saving. I wanted to see for myself, and the next time I returned, I vowed to bring an exploration partner with me.

To be continued in Part 2: Walk Where The Nails Are

The Big Bad Wolf howls no more. Busch Gardens Williamsburg, the Virginia amusement park with a friendly Western European theme, announced on July 24, 2009 that it was officially retiring The Big Bad Wolf, its iconic suspended roller coaster. The Wolf, which opened in 1984, was primarily built by Arrow Dynamics, the firm which also designed the world’s first corkscrew inversion and the first coaster to top 200 feet in height. While not the world’s first suspended roller coaster, the Big Bad Wolf could proudly lay claim to the fact that it was the first successful suspended coaster. Charmed though it is, the circumstances around its sudden September 7th closure date may make the ride the newest entry in the Williamsburg park’s strange history.

Busch Gardens opened its Williamsburg park in 1975 and colorfully themed it to some of the more iconic aspects of European countries. Named The Old Country, the park featured historical aspects of England and France (with Quebec included as well for a "frontier" feel) and Germany across the river. It was the Busch brewery’s fourth park historically: along with its African-themed Busch Gardens Tampa park, which opened in 1959 as The Dark Continent, the brewery also at one time had smaller, more sedate parks in Houston and Van Nuys.

In 1978, the park opened the Loch Ness Monster, a thrilling ride by Arrow Dynamics whose centerpiece was its pair of interlocking loops, situated in such a way that it couldn’t help but make for great postcard shots. The coaster’s popularity prompted Busch to add another thrill ride in the early 80s, and they approached legendary German designer Anton Schwarzkopf to provide them with a new kind of coaster thrill. Schwarzkopf obliged and designed the Flugbahn, the "Flying Coaster" with cars suspended below the track. The cars would freely swing out as the train rounded the curves. Schwarzkopf’s team started work on the ride but declared bankruptcy after they’d poured the concrete footers and started work on the supports. Busch then turned to Arrow, who stepped in and completed the work.

Busch opened The Big Bad Wolf in 1984 and it was an immediate hit. The freely-swinging cars could fly out up to 110 degrees (as this Arrow promotional video will breathlessly tell you) and charged around a twisty, turny course, narrowly dodging barrels and Barvarian houses and other scenic hazards. The ride ended in a quick 80-foot drop over the park’s river, and zig-zagged over the water before finally reaching the station brakes. This fine POV video here shows off the entire ride from the front seat. (It may induce queasiness among some of you, so do watch with caution.)

Busch next tapped the Swiss firm Bolliger & Mabillard to design a coaster for both the Williamsburg and Tampa parks. This time the ride would feature more of a looping style like the Loch Ness Monster, but with more loops. A lot more loops. B&M came up with concept layouts for both rides but decided it had too much on its plate, and announced it had to back out of one of its projects. They stayed on the Tampa project and left the Williamsburg plans to the park. (One of the other projects that B&M was finishing at the time was Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Great America, the world’s first inverted looping coaster.)

Once again Busch turned to Arrow, who came in to finish the job like they had before. They took B&M’s concept and tried their best to adapt it to their standards. The result was Drachen Fire, which opened in 1992. The ride quickly earned a reputation for being way too rough (as seen in this potentially quease-inducing promotional footage) and started racking up the guest complaints. Among the many design problems was the fact that B&M designed their inversions with the rider’s heart as the center of gravity; Arrow’s track was designed with the center of the cars as the center of gravity and not all the modification they could do to the design would help.

To help combat the complaints of roughness Busch removed a corkscrew right after the midcourse brakes, replacing it instead with a flat slope of track. It didn’t help, and the park mysteriously closed Drachen Fire without warning in late July 1998. I had a chance to ride Drachen Fire that July, about a week or two before it closed. It was intense and rough as hell. I got thrown all about, but felt indestructible. The ride got better once I learned how to ride defensively, bracing myself at the right spots before an inversion or quick turn. The next day I noticed I had a ring of bruises all around my collarbone from that over-the-shoulder harness. I’d officially ridden Too Much.

After its closure, the coaster sat dormant on the site for four years until it was demolished in 2002. Until then, the park embarked on an odd bit of revisionism, removing the clearly visible coaster from park maps, literature, and even the recorded spiel of the park’s miniature train which went right past the structure. (You were encouraged to look at the big red coaster in the distance that was the Big Bad Wolf, and not the giant blue coaster in front of it that now officially Didn’t Exist.)

At this point B&M signed a multi-coaster contract with Busch, and came back in 1997 with an inverted roller coaster called Alpengeist and then a 200-foot hypercoaster called Apollo’s Chariot. It made its grand debut in 1999 with a train full of beautiful ladies in togas and romance novel model Fabio up in the front seat dressed up like a Roman god. On the first drop, a 210-foot plunge that goes past the park’s river, the train hit a goose which had flown up directly over the track.

Fabio was struck at high speed, suffering only a small cut on his nose (the immediate results, as seen in this bloody picture, looked a bit more gruesome.) While the park had already put up netting and protection along the track to keep the birds away, they added more and the ride has run along goose-free since.

Ten years and another coaster later, the park closed the Big Bad Wolf after operation on September 7th, 2009. (Unlike Drachen Fire, the Wolf didn’t stay around too long; it is now completely demolished and removed from the park.) In an official FAQ, Busch explained that the decision to remove the ride was simply one of maintenance: it has "reached the end of its service life." When asked about the ride’s replacement, Busch’s only response is that it’s not unusual for a park to remove a ride without a replacement planned. But when the ride is a park favorite and they want it out of there quickly, you have to wonder what they’re planning on putting up on what was formerly those Schwarzkopf footers. A year later, we’re a little closer to finding what’ll be going up next.

Busch has since announced some plans for new thrill rides, including a large tower drop ride. Lance over at Screamscape has some interesting tidbits up, including a local piece that the park has applied for a height waiver to build an attraction “not exceeding 260 feet in height”. This could mean an enclosed drop ride like the Mystery Castle at Phantasialand in Germany. Whatever goes in there, however, will hopefully continue the weird legacy of the Williamsburg park.

The moment can occur on your very first ride. Or there may be a while between the first time you zoom down a hill and the time when you realize that you love it. That’s the way it was for me. To the best of my recollection, my first ever roller coaster was the little kiddie coaster at Mountain Park in Holyoke, Mass. It must’ve been some time in the early 1980s; I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at that point. The kiddie coaster was a small affair, no more than 20 feet high. The little train marched up a small hill, curved around a drop, and then bumped over two or three bunny hops before turning back into the station. You’d go around three or four times.

I hated it.

I was a wuss as a young child. I was scared of loud noises and dogs and dogs making loud noises and the dark and I was deathly afraid of the Unknown. And, as I learned to my queasy dismay, I was afraid of roller coasters. I don’t remember leaving the ride in tears, but I definitely remember making a point never to ride the damn thing again.

The kiddie coaster wasn’t my nemesis, though. As unpleasant as it was, it didn’t strike me with real terror or fear. The ride that truly scared me was the Mountain Flyer.

The ride was built in 1929 when Mountain Park, a trolley park on the outskirts of Holyoke, expanded its midway. It was a classic out-and-back design by Herb Schmeck, one of the greatest designers of the Golden Age of roller coasters. (Oh yes, there was a Golden Age and it was the 1920s. So many legendary rides, from Harry Traver’s diabolical Triplets to the Coney Island Cyclone herself, were built during America’s wild economic boom. Most of these creations are now gone, but those that remain have done so on some incredible merits.)

I didn’t refer to the ride by name. Nobody I knew did. There were no park maps at that time and I only ever remember hearing it called “the big roller coaster” during its operation. The only official sign I ever saw was on the awning at the edge of the station. There, on multicolored zebra stripes, were big wooden block letters spelling out MOUNTAIN FLYER. It was only visible from the mini-golf course adjacent to the ride. You could also see it from the little kiddie train, which weaved its way around the mini-golf holes. I saw the station a lot from that kiddie train, as I’d ride it just to get a closer look at the station and its shiny silver Art Deco coaster train. It was a National Amusement Devices “Century Flyer” train, with a single-position lap bar, cushioned upholstered benches, and a headlight up front. The headlight may have still worked, I don’t quite remember.

I watched the ride a lot. I was obsessed with it from the ground. It was still incredibly frightening, but at least it couldn’t get me if I didn’t ride it. All the grown-ups I knew had ridden it, and they would tell me how fast and scary it was, often embellishing the story to get a better reaction. So I started telling tall tales, too. I remember happily telling some kids on the kiddie Ferris Wheel all about how once the coaster crashed, and I even got as far as describing how it had burst into flames and then jumped the track, with a streak of fire and a big explosion. They didn’t doubt my word. I was a fourth grader and older than them. I don’t think I ever believed the stories I told, but I got the same reactions as the grown-ups did.

The Dinosaur Den. The scariest thing in the ride was a "Flower Power!" scene featuring day-glo grinning hippies. No, seriously.

The Flyer station. You must be as tall as that plywood boy to ride.

I distinctly remember going up the lift hill for the first time. I looked to my left and watched the midway buildings shrink on down. It was a new view for me and the roofs looked sadly mundane. I remember thinking this must be one of those times where you’re supposed to say to yourself “What have I done?” Too bad there wasn’t time for recollection, though. We had clacked up to the top of the hill and passed under the sign that said DON’T STAND UP. Hell no, I thought. I ain’t standing up on this thi–

The first drop.

The coaster went over three tall hills, each one sending me into the air, and then popped up into a left-hand spiral curve. I slid on the bench seat and slammed up into the side of the car. My little brother was hollering like mad in the seat behind me and I started to holler too. We must’ve made the ride go faster. The curve had a little right-hand jog at the end of it, which quickly slammed me into the other side. This was great! We flew over a few small bunny hops and I felt each one. The ride was graceful even at its most chaotic. The sensation was exhilirating.

The view from the first drop. I saw it a lot that day.

There was no next season for Mountain Park, however. They’d suffered a fatal accident that last year, when a drunken patron had rocked the kiddie train back and forth as it chugged through a tunnel. He ended up overturning the train and was crushed to death. The park couldn’t afford the rise in insurance after that, and in the winter of 1987 announced its closure. It was around December or so. I remember reading the newspaper article in disbelief. There wasn’t going to be a next time for me and that marvelous roller coaster. It was patently unfair. How could something so awesome disappear so soon after I discovered it? I wanted more, dammit! Over time I would realize how fortunate I was to have overcome my fears just in time, but back then the loss stung hard. It still pangs a bit almost twenty-three years later, misted over as it is with childhood nostalgia and other memories.

The abandoned Flyer entrance as it looked in 1997.

Even though the Mountain Flyer was not the first ever roller coaster I rode, it was the coaster where I had that Moment. The moment when I realized I loved the things. That milestone makes it my true First.

All pictures but the last were taken by Bret Malone. See more at http://www.defunctparks.com/parks/MA/mountain/mountainpark.htm.

spatchCoaster is my roller coaster writin’ thingo. I have a lot of fun at amusement parks and I hope to share that fun with you whether you like to ride or you prefer to stay on the ground making worried noises about those on board. There’s also more to the amusement park experience than just hurtling down steep inclines. There’s the parks themselves and their unique styles, from the bright flashy lights of a midway to expensive, immersive theming. There’s flat rides that spin and flip and twirl and get you queasy. There’s dark rides and haunted houses, where often the thrill is in what you don’t see. There’s food, glorious junk food and road food and sometimes even decent food if you luck out. And there’s the little details that sometimes you take for granted. I like seeing those. Maybe you will too.

There are also long-gone amusement parks, closed but not forgotten. I love history. I’ve done my share of exploring abandoned parks and sometimes I even took pictures. I’ll be happy to take you on tours of sites once alive and bright and moving. Sometimes the visits are bittersweet, especially if you explore a park you remember fondly, but the memories you dredge up are always worth it. There’s always something fascinating in those ruins. Always a story.

Travelling as a roller coaster enthusiast can be odd. Much like avid golfers going out of their way to play a legendary course, coaster enthusiasts will plan trips to discover new rides, even if it’s just one rickety old coaster in the middle of nowhere. There’s stories in that, too. When I travel I’ll bring back some.

I’ll also share old stuff I’ve done in years past: Old trip reports, historical write-ups, and maybe some custom tracks designed using the NoLimits coaster program. I design wooden coasters and often give them background and stories. I bet you’ve got some weird hobbies, too, but I ain’t judging.

Hope you enjoy. And if you like to ride, let me know and maybe we’ll meet up in a park sometime.