ATTRACTIONS AND DISTRACTIONS
Mention the words “amusement park” these days, and you’re likely to conjure up images of mega-roller coasters and other wild rides in worlds populated by fictional figures brought to life: Mickey Mouse, the Seven Dwarfs, Bugs Bunny, and now, more recently, the boy wizard Harry Potter.
But there was a time when the amusements were simpler—if sometimes stranger and even more dangerous: a time when zoos and circuses set the standard with bizarre “freaks of nature,” feats of derring-do, and of course those amazing animals. Instead of riding down gleaming rails at the speed of a car on the Hollywood Freeway (probably a lot faster, when rush hour traffic is considered), you sat in wooden stands and watched swordswallowers, knifethrowers, acrobats, and, of course, lion tamers.
During the first half of the twentieth century and for a couple of decades after that, animals were the star attractions at circuses and zoos, both public and private, across the country. In Lincoln Park just off U.S. Highway 99 in southern California, filmmaker William Selig opened an amusement park in the second decade of the 20th century whose carousel attracted 150,000 riders a year, who paid a nickel a head for the privilege of riding. The park also featured an ice-skating rink and dance pavilion, and Selig had grand plans for an expansion that would include even more marvelous rides and attractions.
The entrance to Jungleland in Thousand Oaks welcomes visitors in 1959. Collection of David Eppen.
But the main attraction, as with other amusement parks of the era, was the animals. The Selig Zoo had the largest wild animal collection in the United States, including elephants, lions, monkeys, and a chimpanzee named Mary who was insured for $100,000. Many of the animals were used in Selig’s movies or rented out to other movie studios in the burgeoning Hollywood film scene. But when they weren’t “acting,” they were performing for visitors to the zoo, which was a major—if brief—southern California sensation (Selig, who opened the zoo in 1911, ran into financial difficulties that forced him to sell the place more than a decade later).
Selig wasn’t alone in seeing dollar signs dancing on four paws in gilded cages. Other southern California attractions included a couple of ostrich farms, an alligator farm, and not one but two lion farms.
When I was researching my previous work on U.S. Highway 99, I learned of a place in El Monte called Gay’s Lion Farm. It flourished from the 1920s through the early ’40s as a home for movie-star felines of epic proportion, while doubling as a roadside attraction that served up an eyeful of Africa’s kings of the jungle. What I didn’t know is that a similar and more enduring lion farm existed along U.S. Highway 101 in Thousand Oaks.
Louis Goebel created Goebel’s Lion Farm there in 1926, just a year after Charles and Muriel Gay founded their similarly named big-cat showcase in El Monte. Although the Gays’ facility closed for good in 1942, Goebel’s remained open until 1969—by which time it had expanded and changed its name to Jungleland USA.
The two “farms,” however, had an uncanny number of things in common. Both opened around the same time and fronted highways that ran east and west, even though, for most of their length, they ran north and south. Both at one time housed Slats, the original MGM lion. Each served as the inspiration for a high school mascot. And both experienced tragedies that damaged their respective reputations.
Goebel actually got his start in the business with the Gays, who started working with lions in Hollywood before moving to El Monte. Despite its original location, Goebel’s job there wasn’t glamorous: He was responsible for cutting up animal carcasses that would serve as food for the lions. Being the son of a New York butcher, he knew the work, but when the Gays moved their operations eastward, he stayed behind, working as a meat cutter and groundskeeper at Universal Studios—which had its own zoo—until 1926.
The first fire truck in the Conejo Valley area, which Louis Goebel purchased after a fire at the lion farm, which later became Jungleland. Public domain.
That year, the studio decided it didn’t need its own zoo any longer, and Goebel suddenly found himself without a job—but with a new opportunity. When the owner of Universal started selling off the animals, he bought six of them: all lions, named Andy, Bill, Little Caesar, Min, Momma, and Poppa. Caesar was a highway cat of the first order: The young lion enjoyed car rides so much he ran to Goebel’s Chevrolet the moment it was driven to his enclosure for a trip to some location shoot. Then, once he had arrived, he refused to get out of the car again.
Another lion, named Humpy, was added shortly afterward and served as an able sentinel. The 25-year-old veteran of numerous comedy films built a reputation for his genial disposition, but that didn’t stop him from being an intimidating presence: According to one newspaper account, Goebel never needed to lock his car “as long as Humpy is napping in the neighborhood.”
Goebel originally wanted to open his business closer to L.A., in Agoura, but he couldn’t get a permit, so he trekked farther down Ventura Boulevard (old U.S. 101) to Thousand Oaks, a community some 32 miles from Los Angeles that wasn’t much more than a bunch of fields and a few scattered homes at that point. Apparently, even the Ventura County sheriff wasn’t quite sure where it was. He finally recognized it as a “godforsaken place” after Goebel said you could get there by “driving up a crooked road to the top of the hill.”
He got his permit when officials decided Thousand Oaks was so far out in the boondocks the animals weren’t likely to be a nuisance to much of anyone.
Goebel purchased five lots there for $10 each.
By 1928, the park’s leonine population had grown to ten, and a year later, it was up to fifteen. Before long, Goebel was adding other animals to rent out to the studios. By the 1930s, he had 101 other wild animals at the park in addition to the lions, and a census in 1935 found the farm now home to six camels, four leopards and a tiger in addition to forty-three lions. A souvenir guide from the 1950s described the attraction—by then renamed the World Jungle Compound—as the “home of the motion picture animal actors—birds, beasts and reptiles from the jungles of the world.”
You could ride in a chariot pulled not by horses, but zebras. You could visit water buffalo, llamas, kangaroos, bison, and deer, and as many as six kids at once could ride an elephant (no solo rides, please). Cheetah—not a big cat, but a chimpanzee who played Tarzan’s simian sidekick on the big screen—could be found there. Camels from the farm were used in a variety of movies like King Richard and the Crusaders, a 1954 film featuring Rex Harrison and Virginia Mayo.
Scenes from several movies were filmed on the property itself, as well, including Tarzan and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
As years went by, the park expanded, adding such attractions as a safari tram bus and a monorail. Water fountains shaped like lions and hippos opened their mouths to young guests. There were ostrich rides and camel rides, a reindeer corral and a snake pit, a seal bowl and a petting zoo, as well as intriguingly named attractions such as the Garden of the Gods, Temple Ruins, and Thieves Market.
A pre-1940 brochure advertises Goebel’s Wild Animal Farm and locates it on the map for prospective visitors. Public domain.
Lefty Hymes, outdoor writer for the Winona (Minnesota) Daily News, described Jungleland in January 1969, just months before it closed: “The grounds are green with thick vegetation that has been allowed to flourish for decades. Centuries-old oaks shade the grounds, and stands of bamboo and other tropic growth provide natural borders for various areas. Ivy entwines bridge railings and crawls up the sides of bamboo buildings.”
When the new freeway bypass for U.S. 101 was built, Jungleland found itself on the old and new alignments of the highway, giving it maximum visibility from both sides. But that didn’t guarantee its success.
For starters, things didn’t always go smoothly at the park.
In 1940, a fire started in a hay barn and spread through the elephant barn, camel barn, hay shed, and machine shop. Among the victims were Sally and Queenie, a pair of elephants who were just getting ready to work with actress Dorothy Lamour in Paramount’s production of Moon Over Burma. Sally burned to death, and Queenie was so badly hurt she had to be put down. Seven tigers and three camels also perished as a result of the blaze.
“The camels were killed when the roof caved in on them,” Goebel said.
Five lions, including MGM’s reigning mascot, were more fortunate: They were locked in rolling cages that could be quickly removed from the burning buildings.
A panther escaped from the compound in 1963 but was found a couple of days later hiding under a warehouse. The incident reportedly inspired Newbury Park High School to choose the panther as its mascot.
No harm was done on that occasion, but the story was sadly different in another incident a few years earlier. In December 1949, May Kovar Schafer’s three children watched as a four-year-old lion named Sultan mauled their mother in a cage. Her 18-year-old son, Michael Kovar, ran into the enclosure and tried to drive the lion away with a chair and stick, and the children’s cries for help reached the ears of an elephant trainer named Rudy Muller.
“I grabbed up a pitchfork and an eight-foot length of pipe,” Muller said, recalling that he stabbed Sultan with the pitchfork and used his other hand to bring the pipe down on the animal’s head. “That made the lion drop her and back up—must have stunned him for a second, because he sagged back on his haunches. But I didn’t have much time—just enough time to pick up Mrs. Schaefer. Then the lion started for me and the children.”
He backed up slowly, inching his way out of the cage as Schaefer’s 14-year-old daughter, May, held the door.
Unfortunately, they got Schaefer out of the cage too late. Muller said he saw her move her arm as he picked her up but she was apparently dead by the time he got her out of the cage. The lion had clamped down on her neck with his jaws, severing her spine.
One of the park’s biggest attractions was another female animal trainer named Mabel Stark, who once described herself as “the only woman in the world crazy enough to fool around with tigers.”
A 1966 newspaper ad touts the 40th anniversary year of Jungleland.
Stark’s fascination with animals began when she was studying nursing in Louisville, Kentucky: “On my afternoons off, I always went to the zoo while the other girls had dates,” she would later recall. “I loved to watch the lions and tigers pace up and down the cage.”
After completing a nursing degree, she traveled to Los Angeles and ran into a fellow named Al Sands who managed the Al G. Barnes Circus.
“He asked me how I liked Los Angeles. I told him I hadn’t seen the city but the zoo was great. He was surprised to learn that I liked animals. One of my friends spoke up and told Al my ambition was to become an animal trainer. He was interested and asked me if I’d like a job in the circus.”
Stark gave him her answer the next morning, after taking a look at herself in the mirror wearing her nurse’s uniform.
“Then I took it off and wrapped it up carefully,” she said. “I knew I would never wear it again.”
Her gig at the Barnes Circus turned out to be a letdown: Instead of putting her in with the big cats, Sands assigned her to ride around on a horse. When the circus folded its tent for the season in Venice, Stark found herself with nowhere to go and nothing better to do than watch the trainers work with the animals. The man who ran the circus, Al Barnes, asked her if she wanted to sign up for another year, and she told him she would on one condition: if he would give her an animal act. He agreed and assigned trainer Louis Roth (to whom she was later briefly married) to work with her.
There happened to be an opening for a tiger trainer at the time: Stark’s predecessor, Marguerite Haupt, had been killed by one of the animals.
That didn’t faze Stark, who worked with big cats for the next half century, earning a reputation as the most accomplished female animal trainer of her day. At one point, she performed with as many as 16 tigers in one cage.
“A tiger is strictly an individual,” she explained. “He fights his own fights—and usually with other tigers. They are all like children, with all of them having different personalities.”
“Usually” was the operative word. There were times when some of her “children” chose to pick a fight with Stark. During a 1935 show in Phoenix, some 20,000 people watched as she tripped over a stool and one of the animals sprang at her. She managed to fend it off with a flash gun, but the incident still earned her a trip to the hospital. By that time, she’d already been scratched by 18 other tigers.
The most serious incident occurred in 1928. The circus train was running late as it headed for Bangor, Maine, in a rainstorm, and there was no time to feed the big cats before the show. Two of them, Zoo and Sheik, hungry and wet from the rain, took their frustrations out on Stark.
“Sheik was right behind me and caught me in the left thigh, tearing a two-inch gash that cut through to the bone and almost severed my left leg just above the knee,” she later recalled. “I could feel blood pouring into both my boots, but I was determined to go through with the act.”
Then Zoo “jumped from his pedestal and seized my right leg, jerking me to the ground. As I fell, Sheik struck out with one paw, catching the side of my head, almost scalping me.”
Sheik continued, “I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn,” but added that her biggest concern was for the audience: “I knew it would be a horrible sight if my body was torn apart before their eyes. And all my tigers would be branded as murderers and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in narrow cages instead of being allowed the freedom of the big arena and the pleasure of working. That thought gave me strength to fight.”
Stark got out of the cage alive, but barely. She took 378 stitches after the mauling, and the doctors who worked to repair her torn muscles doubted she’d pull through. But not only did she survive, she returned to work within a few weeks—although further trips to the hospital were necessary over the next two years for additional muscle repair.
By the time of her mauling, Stark had left the Barnes circus for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, and had moved on to the John Robinson Circus. Although she preferred to work with tigers, she also served as Mae West’s stunt double for the lion-taming scenes in the 1933 film I’m No Angel.
It was five years later, in 1938, that she came to Goebel’s lion farm, and she worked there for the next three decades, starting full-time in 1957—by which time the attraction had been renamed the Jungle Compound. Four years later, she appeared as a mystery guest on the game show What’s My Line?—in which a panel of four celebrities (including Jerry Lewis) tried to guess her occupation. They were unable to do so.
Stark was 79 years old in 1968, when the property came under new management, and the new owner fired her. Not long afterward, one of the tigers she’d been working with escaped and was shot. In despair over the loss of her career and the death of one of her animals, she took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates. The following year, Jungleland itself closed.
The interior of the brochure pictured earlier proclaims that “Leo, the famous lion, known to screen patrons everywhere as ‘The World’s Most Famous Motion-Picture Trade-Mark,’
lives on the Farm and is on view to visitors.”
The attraction fell victim to increased competition from ride- and character-based theme parks such as Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, as well as its own bad publicity.
The most widely reported incident occurred in November 1966, when actress Jayne Mansfield took three of her children—Miklos, eight; Zoltan, six; and Mariska, two (who would grow up to star in TV’s Law and Order: SVU)—to Jungleland for a photo shoot with one of the lions there. According to press accounts, the lion was allowed to roam freely around the compound during the session. A friend, May Mann, described what happened next:
Jayne was adjusting Miklos’ tie when Zoltan was grabbed by a big lion. I grabbed Jayne and held her. She screamed and screamed and screamed. The owners rushed over and pried open the lion’s mouth and took the child out.
But not before severe damage had been done. Zoltan was unconscious by the time Jungleland manager Roy Kabat and an animal trainer managed to extricate him from the animal’s maw. The boy’s skull was fractured and his spleen punctured in the attack, requiring two operations—the first a six-hour procedure to sew up a gash on his cheek and relieve pressure caused by a fracture on the back of his skull. A third operation was performed later to ease pressure on his spinal cord.
Zoltan’s condition was initially described as guarded, but he ultimately survived and was released from the hospital on Christmas day, just under a month after the incident occurred. Mansfield stayed at his bedside throughout the ordeal and ultimately had to be hospitalized herself with a case of pneumonia.
In January 1967, Mansfield filed a $1.6 million lawsuit against the park, seeking $500,000 in general damages and $1 million in punitive damages for Zoltan and an additional $100,000 in damages for herself resulting from “severe shock to her nervous system.” The lawsuit wasn’t settled until more than five years later, by which time Jungleland was out of business and Jayne Mansfield was dead, having been killed in a car crash six months after the lawsuit was filed.
Two Jungleland elephants engage in a friendly
tug-of-war with their trunks in this 1959 photo.
Collection of David Eppen.
A young girl rides an elephant statue at Jungleland in 1958. Collection of David Eppen.
The value of the eventual settlement to Zoltan Hargitay was $10,000.
As for the Jungleland site, its 1,800 animals were sold at auction as nearly 25,000 people arrived at the park for the bidding. Among them was a 1,700-pound hippo named Sam, who went to a 24-year-old unemployed construction worker for just $480. Ronnie Hochleutner had visions of exhibiting Sam for a profit but found the amount of money needed to feed and house the animal was three times what he’d paid for it.
At one point, Hochleutner convinced an Orange County horse rancher to house Sam until he could find a permanent home: “A hippos is known in Africa as a river horse,” he said. “He waddles and the horses gallop, but they get along wonderfully.”
That beautiful relationship ended abruptly, however, when Sam spooked the horses and broke out of his corral. It took four hours for catch Sam and load him into Hochleutner’s truck and—after a zoo turned him down—off to a nearby dog pound of all places. Hochleutner eventually wound up selling Sam to an auto dealer, who in turn donated the hippo to the Kern County Zoo Society.
Other animals brought various prices at the Jungleland auction. The Brownsville Zoo paid $20,000 for a couple of orangutans, but a female lion went for $150, an untrained gibbon for $137.50, and a red fox who’d appeared in the movie Doctor Dolittle just $75.
“Thus the animals went their ways—separately and together,” Frank Anderson reported for the Long Beach Independent, “and the Ark that was Jungleland lay foundering on the reefs in a sea of red ink.”
The elephants at Jungleland were impressive, but the biggest living tourist attractions along Highway 101 lie to the north, in the region known as the Redwood Empire, home to the tallest trees on Earth.
A section of old U.S. 101 runs directly through the heart of it, where it’s known as the Avenue of the Giants. The 31-mile stretch of road was bypassed in 1964, but it’s still there; running parallel to the new highway starting just north of Garberville, it’s now signed as State Route 254. Redwoods hundreds of years old tower above the ribbon of asphalt that runs through Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Among them is a 950-year-old redwood called the Immortal Tree that stands 250 feet tall. It’s not the oldest tree in the forest, but it’s perhaps the most tenacious, having survived a direct lightning strike that shaved 45 feet off its crown, an attempt by loggers to cut it down in 1908, and a major flood in 1964.
Then there’s the Founders Tree, which was dedicated to those who formed the Save the Redwoods League in 1919 with the intent of preserving thousands of acres of redwood forest in Humboldt County from the threat of timber concerns. Nine years later, they had succeeded in placing 3,500 acres of the county’s forested land in the hands of the state, shielding more than 15 miles along the Avenue of the Giants from being cut down by lumber companies. By 1952, the state park’s acreage had grown to 22,000.
One of the trees saved in the endeavor was the massive Dyerville Giant, which at nearly 370 feet was more than twice the height of Niagara Falls. Perhaps dating from the time of Christ, it measured 52 feet around and weighed more than a million pounds when it came crashing to earth in 1991. Though fallen, it lies in state for visitors to see along the Dyerville Loop Road, just off the Avenue of the Giants.
As if the grandeur of the redwoods alone weren’t enough to attract the attention of motorists navigating Old 101, enterprising men and women found ways to “enhance” the experience during the early and middle years of the 20th century.
The trees are so wide that, if there’s a hole in the trunk, you can actually drive through them.
And people do.
The Shrine Drive-thru Tree in Myers Flat on the Avenue of the Giants is one of three such trees in the region. Unlike the other two tree tunnels, which were created artificially, its opening is natural, with a gabled peak, and just wide enough to let average-sized cars go through. Early travelers delighted in traveling through it on wagons before the automobile became the dominant form of transport.
The Chandelier Tree in Leggett, the southernmost of the three tunnel trees, lies along a different section of Old 101, which was bypassed in the early 1970s and redesignated as State Route 271. At 315 feet tall and 21 feet across, it’s been dated to 500 BCE. It’s called the Chandelier Tree in honor of the large branches that rise on either side of the trunk, creating an image similar to a three-armed candelabra. It’s on private land that’s been in the Underwood family since 1922, and you can drive through it today for a $5 fee.
The tree tunnel was cut in 1934.
Then there’s the Klamath Tour-thru Tree far to the north, beyond Eureka and heading toward the Oregon border. It’s the most recent of the bunch, with its tunnel dating to 1976.
If you don’t want to merely look at or drive through the trees, you can go one better and live inside them.
Well not quite.
But a few hollowed-out trees were so big they were converted into pseudo-houses to serve as tourist attractions.
Way back in 1933, Ripley’s Believe It or Not declared the World Famous Tree House in Piercy to be “the tallest one-room tree abode on earth.” The tree itself is 250 feet high, and a fire centuries ago hollowed out a cavity 50 feet tall.
“It was a cozy place, the inside of that tree, finished, of course, in very natural redwood,” one visitor remarked. “It would make the perfect home for a Hobbit. Or for Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Drive about 20 miles north on the Avenue of the Giants, and you’ll see a similar attraction: the Eternal Tree House in Redcrest, which likewise was carved out by fire long ago. A wood splitter named Harry McLeod used an ax and adze to improve on nature in the early 20th century, and in 1950, the hollowed-out but stillliving stump became home to a gift shop—one of many that line this section of highway.
The One-Log House in Garberville is a little different. It was hollowed out in 1946 from a section of redwood tree weighing 42 tons. Two men worked eight months to hollow out a 32-foot-long room with a ceiling high enough to accommodate Shaquille O’Neal or Wilt Chamberlain.
“Enough chips came out of here to build about five houses,” the owner, Bill Butrica, estimated, adding that the house toured the country for three years after it was built “just to show how big redwoods are.” It eventually wound up in Leggett, where it spent 25 years before moving to Phillipsville for 23 and, from there, to Garberville.
One of the most extensive attractions on the highway lies to the north: the Trees of Mystery, less than 40 miles from the Oregon state line. The trees themselves are massive and, in some cases, bizarre. Take the Cathedral Tree for instance: It’s actually nine trees growing together in a semicircle that resemble (naturally) a cathedral. You can walk the trails or take a sky tram that allows you to look the giant trees in the eye, so to speak.
But perhaps even more eye-catching are the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox, in the attraction’s parking lot. Paul measures just over 49 feet tall and weighs in at a hefty 30,000 pounds—the same weight as Babe, who stands 35 feet tall and has actually been there even longer, since 1952.
The present Bunyan statue was installed in 1961, but he isn’t the original. The first of the Bunyan lineage was built in 1946 but didn’t prove as durable as his legend—not by a long shot. Heavy rains destroyed the statue within a year when his papier-mâché head buckled and caved in beneath the winter rains. A second Bunyan, half as tall as the current statue at just 24 feet, was apparently in place during the 1950s.
Babe, for his part, was once even more fearsome than he now appears: His head nodded, he rolled his eyes, and his nostrils expelled smoke. But the head had to be fixed in place when the statue was moved to the other side of the parking lot, and the smoke was extinguished because it frightened small children.
And for all the natural wonders in the Redwood Empire, some folks couldn’t resist the temptation to add a little unnatural fun to the mix.
That’s where Confusion Hill comes in, a manmade tourist attraction that has nothing to do with supernatural phenomena and everything to do with sleight-of-hand on a scale befitting the redwoods. In its Gravity House, one ad boasts, water runs uphill, people grow (and shrink), and you can lean at a sharp angle without falling down. Other attractions on the site 18 miles south of Garberville include a redwood “shoehouse” used as a float in a 1947 parade and brought to Confusion Hill when it opened two years later, and a 40-foot-tall totem pole advertised as the worlds’s largest freestanding redwood chain saw carving. Other wood carvings include a giant panda and make-believe horned chipmunks dubbed “chipalopes.” A mountain train ride completes the list of attractions.
A sign points the way to the Avenue of the Giants.
Repeated mud slides in the area spurred work on a highway bypass around Confusion Hill that was completed in 2009, so the attraction itself is no longer directly on the highway.
SANTA CLAUS LANE
Sometimes, street names outlast their inspiration. Take, for instance, Pea Soup Andersen Boulevard off Highway 99 in Selma, which was named for a restaurant in the Buellton-based chain that later changed hands. The distinctive windmill is still there, but the eatery changed its name to the Spike N Rail.
Even stranger is Santa Claus Lane, a short segment of Old 101 in Carpinteria. If you need a little Christmas, right this very minute, you’ll be disappointed when you exit the freeway to find nothing in the nature of decorated evergreens and multicolored lights. But this wasn’t always the case. There was a time, back in the day, when Santa Claus Lane was about as close as you could get to the North Pole in California.
Santa Claus Lane got its start in 1948, when Patrick McKean built a five-stool juice stand in what used to be a lima bean field. The featured attraction was McKean’s date shakes—a beverage popular with travelers down in Indio County, but not typically found in Santa’s Arctic Circle abode (at least, not as far as I know). Still, the shakes were cold, and that may have helped spawn the idea of connecting the place to Saint Nick.
Or maybe not.
According to one account, McKean chose the name because it matched all the other “Santas” in the area: Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, Santa Paula. …
But two years later, the story goes, a traveler hard up for cash pulled into the juice stand and offered to build a Santa statue for $500. McKean agreed, and the result was an 18-foot-tall Santa made of concrete and chicken wire, which was hoisted onto the roof of the juice shop. A loudspeaker was hooked up and blared a greeting across the highway: “Welcome to Santa Claus!” Travelers took note, and the Christmas theme was born.
As time passed, the concept grew into a block-long Christmas extravaganza. There was Candy Kitchen and a Toyland store, where you could have your cards postmarked “Santa Claus, CA.” And kids could hop on the merry-go-round or bug their parents for the 50 cents needed to ride the miniature train. They could toss coins into a wishing well, and their parents could wet their whistles at a bar called the Reindeer Room.
The highway moved inland, bypassing Santa Claus Lane in 1954, threatening to kill the attraction. But a businessman from New York named Hap Shargas took over in 1956 and launched a campaign to “save Santa Claus.” He succeeded—at least in the short term.
A 1950s-era postcard shows Santa popping out of a chimney atop a gabled roof in a row of roadside buildings that epitomized the Christmas spirit. Santa raised a black-gloved hand and appeared to be waving at (or saluting) travelers as they passed the area. He presided over the highway stop’s original business, McKean’s juice shop, which stood just a few doors down from St. Nick’s Bar-B-Q. Between the two stood a giant, pipe-smoking Frosty the Snowman statue atop (naturally) an ice cream eatery. At one time, Frosty’s eyes lit up and smoke wafted up out of his pipe.
Toward the end of the century, however, Santa Claus Lane’s popularity started to wane. Shargas sold the lane and retired in 1976, moving to Acapulco. After that, businesses came and went. One diner adopted the name Santa Claus Chinese Deli, which is about as bizarre an example of crossing the streams as you’re likely to find.
The miniature train stopped running around ’84, Frosty was taken down in the 1980s, and by 1999, more than two-thirds of the retail space along the Santa Claus Strip was vacant. Santa himself left for good shortly after the dawn of the new millennium.
The buildings from the old Santa Claus strip are still there, but these days the place has a seafood theme.
AND … THEY’RE OFF!
Bing Crosby was famous for a number of very good reasons, his singing voice foremost among them. A close second were his movies, including a series of satirical “road pictures” filmed with Bob Hope: Road to Zanzibar, Road to Morocco, Road to Rio. … The duo made seven of them in all. But if you found yourself taking a road trip with Crosby in real life, there was a good chance you’d end up in Del Mar. That’s where the Del Mar Racetrack was located, at the new fairgrounds built to house the county fair.
The fairgrounds cost $1 million to build, and the racetrack was built under the Works Progress Administration. It was the Depression, after all. But the irony would still have been hard to miss: Here was a facility built with public money at which more public money would be wagered—and one that would be run by Hollywood stars, no less.
First, a little background.
The fair had come a long way from its humble beginnings.
There’d been a fair in San Diego County since the 1880s, and it had moved around several times. The Los Angeles Herald referred to a San Diego fair in 1880 and plans for a “citrus fair” to be staged by the National Ranch Grange in 1881. Formally known as the San Diego County Horticultural and Agricultural Display, it took place under a canvas tent just east of modern Interstate 5. (A modern park on the site is named for Frank Kimball, first board chairman of the county’s agricultural society, which was formed at the citrus fair.)
No fair was held for the next few years, but what some regard as the first true fair enjoyed a three-day run at the Armory Hall in 1885, with exhibitors traveling from as far away as Julian. The event returned to the same site the following year for what the San Francisco Chronicle referred to as a “second San Diego County Fair.” Like the citrus fair, it was still largely focused on fruit exhibits, featuring no fewer than 49 displays of apples and 32 more of peaches.
From there, the nomadic fair hopscotched across the county, moving to Oceanside in 1888 and Escondido the following year and later back to San Diego. The 1912 fair in Escondido featured horse racing—the attraction that would help give the fair its permanent home a quarter century later. But the fair wouldn’t stay in Escondido. Instead, it returned to San Diego after World War I, this time in buildings constructed for a 1915 expo that celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal (the buildings, in San Diego’s Balboa Park, are still there today).
Meanwhile, south of the border, the Agua Caliente racetrack in Tijuana was pulling in large crowds from Southern California to play the ponies and consume vast quantities of alcohol—which was illegal in the U.S. under Prohibition. It was a gold mine for Mexico, even after Prohibition ended in 1933, and California wanted to get in on the act.
The state, which was in the throes of the Depression, realized it could raise a lot of money by making it legal to play the ponies. Legislation passed in 1933 allowed parimutuel betting at both private and fairground racetracks, and the state would, of course, tax those bets, with the funds going to support county fairs.
Demand spiked even further when Mexico went in the opposite direction: In 1935, the incoming Mexican president launched a series of reforms that ended gambling, evicted foreign companies, and, most notably, closed the Agua Caliente track. With business suddenly booming at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, there was plenty of room on the scene for a third major track in southern California, and what better place for it than a new fairground in Del Mar?
That’s where Crosby and the Hollywood crowd came into the picture. The crooner, a shareholder in Santa Anita since it opened in 1933, was approached by stockbroker William Quigley about the prospect of opening a track in Del Mar. Not long afterward, the pair founded the Del Mar Turf Club and assembled a collection of Hollywood stars to help run it. Crosby would serve as president, with actor Pat O’Brien and comedian Oliver Hardy as officers; the executive committee would include such luminaries as Gary Cooper and Joe E. Brown.
Under a 10-year lease negotiated with the state, the turf club would be responsible for building a grandstand, offices, and facilities to house both the horses and jockeys. They lost no time in constructing a lavish facility in Spanish Colonial Revival style and marketing it in the media as “the playground of the stars.” It lived up to that name, with stars such as Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, Dorothy Lamour, Edward G. Robinson, and Ava Gardner visiting the track.
Crosby courted the press by putting reporters up at the Del Mar Hotel and arranging for them to share trains from Los Angeles with celebrities who provided entertainment during the trip. Crosby even persuaded NBC to run a half-hour radio program on Saturday mornings that originated in Del Mar, featuring horse racing trivia and (of course) a few tunes sung by Bing himself.
The Crosby tune most closely linked to Del Mar was—as anyone who’s visited the track will know—“Where the Turf Meets the Surf,” which is still played before the first and last races at the track every day of the racing season. Crosby came up with the catchphrase and wrote the tune with Midge Polesie.
In terms of horse racing, the track’s breakthrough event was a 1938 match race between Seabiscuit and Crosby’s horse Ligaroti in front of 20,000 fans. The $25,000 winner-take-all race took place in August, two months before Seabiscuit’s legendary upset of War Admiral at Pimlico, but the 6-year-old Ligaroti—who had won 13 of his 21 starts—gave as good as he got. He had an advantage, as he was carrying 15 pounds less than his rival, and he stayed with Seabiscuit the entire way. As the race heated up, the horses started crowding one another, with Seabiscuit on the rail, and the jockeys stopped using their riding crops on the horses—and turned them on each other. According to Ligaroti’s jockey, Spec Richardson, rival George “Iceman” Woolf whipped Ligaroti five or six times before Richardson reached out and tried to grab Woolf’s wrist. Then, he said, Woolf grabbed Ligaroti’s bridle near the bit just before the finish line.
A protest was lodged, but Seabiscuit’s victory was upheld. The Del Mar stewards wanted to suspend both jockeys but were powerless to do so because the race was an exhibition. Regardless, Del Mar was now on the horse racing map, destined to attract not only celebrities but top horses and jockeys such as Johnny Longden, Laffit Pincay, and Bill Shoemaker.
Crosby sold his share of the turf club in 1946, but the track continues to host horse racing each year. It’s impossible to miss it: The fairgrounds are visible from both old U.S. 101 and Interstate 5.
PIER WARS
No survey of roadside attractions would be complete without at least a brief look at the Santa Monica Pier, which stands at the westernmost end of old Route 66 (current Interstate 10), where it meets the Pacific Coast Highway—the former 101 Alternate.
Santa Monica actually has two piers next to each other. The municipal pier was built in 1909 to carry sewer pipes out beyond the breakers; the fun was to be had just to the south on the Newcomb Pier, as you can tell by its other name: the Pleasure Pier. It was built in 1916 by Charles Looff, who had built the first carousel at Coney Island four decades earlier. Now he sought to duplicate that success out west.
And so, he did.
Looff had started off as a wood-carver, and he’d parlayed his fascination with carving carousel animals into a thriving business. Having established amusement resorts over the years in New York, Dallas, Providence, Seattle, and San Francisco, he moved from Rhode Island to California in 1910. There he took up residence in Long Beach, where he set up a factory and built a carousel for the Pike—a waterfront amusement area that he founded in 1902 (it finally closed in 1979).
But Looff had bigger plans. He considered Santa Monica, north on the coast route, the perfect place for his latest venture, a mammoth undertaking described in a Los Angeles Times report published in March 1916: “Persistent rumors of a gigantic amusement pier to be constructed on the old North Beach of Santa Monica ceased to be rumors the past few days, when carloads of creosoted piling and heavy lumber began to appear on the ocean front just south of the Santa Monica municipal pier.”
The pier was to be 700 feet long and 247 feet wide, and the cost of the enterprise was put in the neighborhood of $400,000.
Once the pier itself was built, Looff created a carousel building using a hodgepodge of architectural styles, ranging from Byzantine arches to Spanish Colonial turrets. The carousel itself—which featured goats, camels, and giraffes as well as horses—was on the ground floor of the two-story structure. Upstairs were apartments that, at various times, housed such notables as William Saroyan and Joan Baez. Spectators could take their leisure in rocking chairs surrounding the carousel as they waited their turn in line. That original carousel was removed long ago, but the building still houses a merry-go-round, built in 1954 and moved to Santa Monica from the Venice Pier.
There were other attractions at the Looff pier, as well: Looff brought in a racing roller coaster called the Blue Streak from San Diego, employing 50 men to dismantle it and then reassemble it on the pier, out over the water. Other attractions included the Whip and Aeroscope, a circular swing that featured “flying boats.” Looff also built a bowling and billiards building and set up picnic grounds.
Unfortunately, Looff died in the summer of 1918, putting any further plans on hold. A new owner took over five years later and installed a new 80-foot-tall Whirlwind Dipper roller coaster in 1924, opening the massive La Monica Ballroom a few months later. The indoor hall, with its 10 majestic towers looking like something you might find in India or the Middle East, had enough room for 5,000 dancers to share its maple wood floor.
Why such a huge dance floor?
To say dancing was a popular pastime would be an understatement. These were the Roaring Twenties, after all, and young adults were ready to roar. Dance contests sprang up, and within a decade would morph into the marathon dances that served as a sort of spectator sport during the Great Depression. One major obstacle to the dance craze was the city of Los Angeles, where elected officials considered dances a corrupting influence and virtually banned them within their jurisdiction.
That didn’t stop piers outside the city limits from building giant monuments to the trend, and the Santa Monica Pier was no exception.
Unfortunately, a storm nearly destroyed the pier in 1926, washing away two-thirds of the pilings that were supporting the La Monica. Money that had been earmarked for further improvements on the pier was used instead for the repairs that were needed to save it. Then the Depression ended its golden age, with many of the rides being sold off during the 1930s, and the pier found a new purpose: as a launching pad for boats ferrying high rollers to offshore gambling ships. The biggest of these, the S.S. Rex, was a 24-hour-a-day operation that could accommodate as many as 3,000 gamblers at once. The ships continued to operate until California attorney general Earl Warren (later a Supreme Court justice) shut them down.
The iconic neon sign at the entrance to the pier was added in 1940, celebrating a “yacht harbor” that no longer exists there.
The ballroom, meanwhile, survived and served as a staging ground for radio and TV broadcasts. Western swing music star Space Cooley’s television show, the first ever to be broadcast live, originated at the ballroom in 1948, and it was converted into a roller-skating rink ten years later. It was eventually demolished in 1962.
By then, there was a new pier in town: Pacific Ocean Park (or P.O.P.), just about a mile down the road in Venice.
The park was “new,” but the pier itself wasn’t. Ocean Park Pier had been a longtime rival of Santa Monica Pier as a seaside destination.
Tobacco tycoon Abbot Kinney had gotten the ball rolling with his Pacific Ocean Casino in the last decade of the 19th century. Kinney persuaded the Santa Fe Railroad to extend one of its lines north to his nascent resort, and it quickly grew into a full-fledged country club featuring a golf course, tennis courts, horse racing track, and swimming pool.
It might be argued that Kinney was the father of the southern California amusement park, and he was determined to do things on a grand scale. His Venice of America development, which opened on Independence Day 1905, was built on marshland he’d won from four former business partners in the flip of a coin. (One of those partners, a man named A. F. Fraser, will re-enter our story shortly.)
Kinney had drained the marshes and diverted the water into several miles of canals he’d dug out of the earth, then invited tourists to see the sites by climbing aboard one of his Italian-style gondolas—each piloted by one of more than twenty gondoliers he’d hired from the original Venice. If they preferred, they could take in some sun on the beach, dine in a floating restaurant, or have some fun at the pier.
Yes, there was a pier. And there were amusements, ranging from the “finest ballroom on the Pacific Coast” to the Crystal Tangle fun house to speed boats that went up to (gasp) 15 mph! Kinney also enlisted Frederick Ingersoll to build one of his roller coasters extending out over the water. Ingersoll was to the roller coaster what Looff was to the carousel. He built 277 of them, including his $30,000 Toboggan Railroad at the Ocean Park Pier, a maple-and-pine structure that ran in a figure 8, with one of its loops rising 75 feet over the surf. Completed in 1904, it lasted until 1910 and was the first of several such attractions on the site.
The problem with building amusements on a wooden pier, as Kinney and others would learn and relearn time and again, is that they’re exposed to the elements. A storm can wreck a pier, and a fire can burn it.
An electrical fire at the Abbot Kinney Pier in 1908 was contained before it could do more than $6,000 worth of damage, but his old partner would not be so lucky four years later.
In the interim, Kinney’s former partner, A. F. Fraser, had constructed what the Arizona Daily Star proclaimed it to be the best “pleasure pier” in the world: “No feature of pleasurable seaside life is overlooked at Ocean Park,” the publication crowed. “Money has been expended with a lavish hand in securing the cream of attractions,” such as the Grand Canyon Electric Railway, which cost $100,000 to build and appears in old photographs and postcards to be a precursor of Disney’s Matterhorn.
Fraser had built his pier to last—or so he thought—by using reinforced concrete piles meant to weather winter storms. They would support a 300-foot-wide pier featuring a dance pavilion, vaudeville theater, restaurant, carousel, and other attractions. Perhaps the weirdest of the bunch was an infant incubator, where premature babies were put on display while they were nursed (hopefully) to health. The whole place lit up at night to provide a dazzling display of electrical energy over the water, and related attractions sprang up next door: Looff built his own carousel on the beach, where another roller coaster called the Dragon Gorge Scenic Railroad also appeared.
Built for a staggering $250,000, the 1.25-mile Dragon Gorge reportedly carried more than 10 million passengers without accident in its first year.
As with any elaborate enterprise, however, there were problems: The Grand Canyon roller coaster shut down after just a month for renovations that included a new, scenic tunnel and 2,000 more feet of track that made the ride nearly a mile long. But that hiccup paled in comparison with what was to come: a fire on September 3, 1912, just 15 months after the “Million Dollar Pier” opened, that destroyed the Grand Canyon Railroad and everything else atop the pilings.
The fire started in the servants’ quarters below the casino restaurant, ignited by a cigarette.
Afternoon breezes fanned the flames, and hundreds of people in the dance hall and other venues scrambled for the exits. Some, finding their route of escape blocked, jumped off the pier and into the water. Almost everyone made it out alive, but H. S. Locke didn’t. Kellogg Van Winkle, who stayed behind in an effort to save one of the pier’s attractions, told Locke to follow him down a rope into the ocean below the pier, where the water was only knee-deep. But Locke refused, declaring, “I was never in the water in my life, and I will not go in it now until I have to.”
Eventually, however, that moment came. Locke was the last man to jump from the pier, and he drowned almost immediately, one of two people who lost their lives in the fire.
The flames also spread to the beach attractions, destroying the uninsured Dragon Gorge ride as well as the Looff carousel. Initial damage estimates ranged from $1.8 million to $3 million, but Fraser vowed to rebuild his pier, making it bigger and better than ever. “I am broke,” he admitted, “but Los Angeles capitalists have placed $1 million at my disposal for rebuilding a better Ocean Park.”
Abbot Kinney Pier in 1907. Kinney, a tobacco tycoon, had opened his Venice of America development—which featured several miles of canals on the Southern California coast—on Independence Day two years earlier. Public domain.
Despite a court fight with the city of Santa Monica over the rights to ocean frontage at the entrance to the pier, Fraser managed to pull it off, albeit on a slightly smaller scale than before. By 1914, however, he’d added a new roller coaster (the Ben Hur Racer), a 7,000-seat bandstand, and a carousel. The roller coaster didn’t last long, though. It and several other attractions were consumed in a Christmas night fire.
Ernest Pickering bought the pier in 1919, added new rides, and did a brisk business when they opened the following summer. Meanwhile, a group of investors led by Charles Lick built an adjacent pier to the south.
At this point, there were no fewer than four piers within shouting distance of one another in the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area, and Lick’s pier was a worthy rival for the others. It boasted a distinctive domed dance pavilion, an 85-foot-high roller coaster called the Giant Dipper that featured a 55-degree drop, and various other rides. The Giant Dipper opened on Memorial Day 1923, but the pier lasted only a few months after that—the victim of (you guessed it) yet another fire.
This time, the loss was pegged at more than $3 million. Lick did manage to rebuild his pier and even reconstructed the Giant Dipper, a small section of which had survived the fire. Frank Prior and Fred Church created the Giant Dipper and sold the design to other amusement parks, as well. Two of their coasters—both called the Giant Dipper—are still in existence, one at Mission Beach’s Belmont Park in San Diego and the other on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The builder of the Santa Cruz coaster, which opened in 1924, was none other than Arthur Looff, son of carousel builder Charles Looff. The San Diego coaster is a little more than a mile off the old U.S. 101 alignment along the coast south of La Jolla.
Other attractions on the new Lick Pier included a couple of wax museums, one of which had a Chinatown theme and featured graphic scenes from an opium den, torture exercises, and a wedding of slave girls and tong hatchet men—paid enforcers for Chinese gangs. Not exactly family-friendly fare. One of the most popular features was the new Bon Ton Ballroom, with its 22,000-square-foot dance floor.
Park attendance declined after World War II, despite continued renovations and, mercifully, a lack of major fires. The exception was the ballroom, which having been rechristened the Aragon Ballroom, brought in bandleader Lawrence Welk for televised broadcasts on KTLA. The show became so popular that ABC picked it up for its national network, where it ran from 1955 to 1971, followed by more than a decade in first-run syndication.
DUELING WITH DISNEY
This brings us to 1957, when it was announced that the pier would be closed, completely overhauled, and reopened the following year as a major amusement park: Pacific Ocean Park. (You knew I’d get back around to that sooner or later, right?)
The park was the brainchild of Charles “Doc” Strub, a former dentist who had made a fortune as the driving force behind Santa Anita Park, which had opened in 1934. Strub had found further success at Lake Arrowhead Village in the San Bernardino Mountains, which he purchased after World War II and turned into a topflight resort that attracted celebrities as well as tourists looking for a fun weekend getaway within driving distance of L.A.
Strub’s next project was supposed to be Disneyland. He offered $10 million to become a partner in Walt Disney’s grand vision for a new kind of theme park, but the deal went south because Strub wanted to build the park beside the ocean. Disney and his brother Roy were firmly opposed to the idea, and with neither side willing to give in, they parted company. Strub took his $10 million and went home.
But that money was still burning a hole in his pocket, and Strub wasn’t willing to give up on the idea of a seaside amusement park.
If he couldn’t join Disney, he’d try to beat him.
That’s how Pacific Ocean Park was born. Strub put the full weight of his Los Angeles Turf Club (the entity behind Santa Anita Park) behind the project, then brought CBS television on board, as well.
Strub’s group signed a contract to lease the pier for 25 years and set about remaking it as an “oceanic wonderland,” L.A. County’s answer to Disney’s Orange County Magic Kingdom. They even hired a 30-year-old wunderkind named Fred Harpman, who had helped create Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. attraction, to design the park. It would be a rival to Disneyland and, with the added attraction of an ocean view, P.O.P. made the most of its location and billed itself as a nautical theme park. If you crossed Disneyland with Sea World and threw in a healthy dose of the Googie-style architecture that looked “futuristic” in the 1950s, you’d have a fair idea of what the 28-acre park looked like.
The midway at Pacific Ocean Park during its brief heyday. The pier amusement park, conceived as a rival to Disneyland, only remained
open about a decade in the late 1950s and ’60s. Public domain.
A water fountain and statue of Neptune, along with a gateway arch shaped like a stylized “starfish” (with six legs) topped with seahorses welcomed visitors. Truth be told, it had more in common with the elevated restaurant at nearby Los Angeles International Airport, designed a year later, than it did with any real starfish. You’d enter the park via the arch, then make your way immediately to an attraction called Neptune’s Kingdom. There, you’d descend in an elevator to a faux “ocean bottom” featuring windows to real aquatic creatures and, as the coup de grâce, an elaborately designed scene made to resemble an underwater kingdom.
A larger-than-life sculpture of King Neptune, holding a golden trident, presided over a room full of ocean creatures, including a suspended shark and sawfish. Dick Wallen, an All-American receiver at UCLA the previous year who had been called a “model collegian” by the Los Angeles Times, became a real model for the Neptune sculpture, which even had some moving parts.
If all this sounds elaborate, it was. The Turf Club and CBS threw gobs of money into the project and signed on corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Westinghouse. Then they took out a loan with Bank of America to bankroll the rest of the $10 million project, which kept going over budget anyway.
But despite the huge capital outlay and a concerted effort to make the attraction seem more like a theme park and less like the carnival that had preceded it, some of it was still window dressing. Many of the attractions from the old Ocean Park pier carnival—such as a funhouse, the 1926 High Boy Roller Coaster (renamed the Sea Serpent), and the merry-goround—were retooled and incorporated into the new design. Perhaps the most transparent example of a post-carnival makeover was the giant façade built over the front of the Enchanted Forest, which was housed in the former Ocean Park Municipal Auditorium.
Some attractions, however, were built from scratch, among them the Sea Circus and Mystery Island Banana Train Ride, two of the park’s showpieces.
Though it all had to be packed onto a limited pier space, the park offered plenty to see and do. Up to 2,000 people could watch performing sea lions and dolphins at the Sea Circus, or you could immerse yourself in the ocean itself courtesy of two “diving bells”—another carnival-era holdover.
Other rides, however, had little or nothing to do with the ocean. As with many other amusement parks, there was a sky gondola ride (to the end of the pier and back). The old Dome Theater housed a flying carpet monorail with an Arabian Nights theme. There was a Flight to Mars spaceship ride meant to outdo Disney’s Rocket to the Moon concept, and a Safari Ride in which children used electronic rifles to hunt big game in a pseudo-African jungle.
The best ride, many agreed, was the Mystery Island Banana Train Ride, a trip through a tropical plantation that featured an artificial volcano, waterfall, and simulated earthquakes. At one point, the tracks passed over a gap in the pier.
Top that, Disney.
The park had some other advantages over its slightly older competitor, too. One press report noted that it was “more compact than Disneyland, has improved on some of the Disney rides, is closer to Los Angeles (and) has a dramatic ocean setting.” On the other hand, it stated, “Disneyland offers more variety and imagination, is more accessible to freeways (and) has better parking.”
Admission to the two venues was comparable, and P.O.P. booked some big-name acts to play at the Aragon, including Welk, Frank Sinatra, and later the Byrds, Janis Joplin, and even the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd. Over the years, it would serve as a backdrop for such shows as The Twilight Zone, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Route 66, and scenes from a couple of movies were filmed there, as well.
The timeline they’d set to open the park turned out to be too ambitious, and the owners lost a month of the crucial summer season when the park opened late, but to much fanfare, on July 28, 1958.
P.O.P. drew 20,000 people on opening day, a Saturday, and nearly doubled that to more than 37,000 the following day. Things looked promising: During its first six days, more people visited P.O.P. than Disneyland. But the novelty soon wore off. Visitors found it harder to reach the pier, and the neighborhood surrounding it wasn’t the best. The salt-heavy sea air posed a challenge when it came to maintaining the attractions.
Nearly 2 million people visited the park in its first year, but despite the addition of some new rides, attendance fell in 1959. With the park bleeding red ink, CBS and the Turf Club bailed on the concept, selling the park to 37-year-old Paso Robles landowner and developer John M. Morehart for $10 million.
Morehart changed the admission to a flat fee of $1.50, marketing the concept as “Pay One Price,” and stopped trying to compare it to Disneyland. Instead, it would be a family-friendly destination for a fun weekend at the beach. He brought in local deejay Wink Martindale (later more widely known as a game show host) to emcee an American Bandstand-style program on the pier that was broadcast in the Los Angeles area. It was a big hit, drawing teens to the pier along with big names such as Sam Cooke, Chubby Checker, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, and the Everly Brothers, to name a few. The Beach Boys even paid homage to the park in a lyric to “Amusement Parks USA,” declaring that “Disneyland and P.O.P. is worth a trip to L.A.”
Mystery Island was widely considered the most impressive attraction at Pacific Ocean Park. Public domain.
The teen angle was so successful that Morehart approved a Teen Age Fair there in 1962 that also drew the younger set in droves.
But in catering to the teen crowd, the park lost its original focus as a family theme park. Attendance kept falling despite the changes, and Morehart eventually sold the park himself—to San Francisco developer Irving Kay—in 1963. But by the time the new year rolled around, Kay had relinquished control to a group headed by Jack Roberts.
Roberts’ takeover was the final step in the park’s gradual return to its carnival roots. Roberts was a traditional carny who emphasized midway booths and “step right up” games at the expense of the elaborate Disneystyle attractions the original owners had installed. Only a few new rides were added during his tenure, and they were old carnival mainstays that had little or nothing to do with the park’s nautical theme. Meanwhile, many of the original exhibits started to break down as a result of lax maintenance.
Despite all this, however, the picture began to look a little brighter after Morehart’s departure. Attendance rose nearly 37 percent from 1963 to 1964, when 1.66 million customers passed through the gates to enjoy a few new rides that had opened at the park.
But the following year marked the beginning of the end for P.O.P., as the city of Santa Monica launched a massive urban renewal project that closed streets and created obstacle after obstacle with construction zones throughout the Ocean Park neighborhood. Many of the old residents who had frequented the eating establishments just outside the park were relocated, and business inside the park suffered, too.
In 1966, attendance plummeted to barely a third of what it had been the previous year, and it fell further to less than 400,000 in ’67. In a lastgasp effort to draw people to the pier, the Aragon Ballroom was rechristened the Cheetah Club, part of a chain with other locations in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. It opened at Easter time, and was designed as “a psychedelic’s vision-come-true,” catering “strictly to America’s restless and dizzying youthquake,” according to an article in the Los Angeles Times WEST Magazine.
The interior, shaped like a triangle, featured 3,000 rainbow-colored lightbulbs cued to various sound frequencies and flashing to the music of two live bands. The house band was an act called Nazz, which soon had to rename itself to avoid confusion with Todd Rundgren’s band of the same name. The name they chose was Alice Cooper. The club also booked big-name rock acts like the Doors, Pink Floyd, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Steppenwolf, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, charging $2 admission during the week and $3 on weekends. The club opened at Easter and proved popular, but it didn’t translate into better business for the park itself.
Roberts wasn’t able to pay his bills to the city of Santa Monica on time—in fact, he hadn’t paid his rent on land leased from the city since 1965 and had racked up a debt of more than $17,000. But the problem was, at least in part, the city’s own doing: Its renovation project was making it impossible for the park to turn a profit. First, the city accused Roberts of not being properly insured, but he arrived in court at the eleventh hour and produced the required insurance papers, so the city backed off.
But then, he said, “They closed the streets.”
“People would actually telephone me, there at the park, and say that they could see the rides moving but couldn’t find any way to get there. How could they possibly expect us to survive that way?”
The sky ride at Pacific Ocean Park took visitors to the end
of the pier and back again. Public domain.
Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier is a modern amusement area featuring free admission. Panoramio photo, public domain.
It couldn’t. The park closed “until further notice” in October 1967 and never reopened. In the year after it closed, the park was still used in episodes of TV’s Get Smart (“The Wax Max”), The Fugitive (its climactic episode), and The Mod Squad, but it wasn’t long until many of the rides were dismantled and its assets used to pay off creditors. The massive $16 million auction in the summer of 1968 sold off 36 rides along with 16 games and amusements, restaurant and bar equipment, office furniture, electrical and plumbing fixtures … you name it. Most of what remained burned down in a series of arson fires from 1970 to 1973. The second of these, in 1970, destroyed the Cheetah Club and the entire Lick Pier.
These days, all that’s left are a few underwater remnants of the pier, along with accompanying signs warning swimmers in the area to watch out for them.
But the Pacific Ocean Park name lived on, in a manner of speaking, and minus the “Ocean.”
A new Pacific Park opened in 1996 where we started this account, on the Santa Monica Pier. It’s the last of its kind: the only amusement park on the West Coast to be located on a pier. It’s not nearly as ambitious as P.O.P. was: There are a dozen rides, including the world’s only solarpowered Ferris wheel and a steel roller coaster dubbed the West Coaster. You have to pay to use the rides, but admission to the park itself is free, the only L.A.-area amusement park that can make that claim.
When the park opened, an article in the Los Angeles Times described it as “reminiscent of Pacific Ocean Park” and a throwback to the carnival days of yore.
The more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same—except that, so far at least, there haven’t been any more fires.
