Credits: Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. Image of Santa billboard from Santa Claus, AZ is public domain. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental music includes “Jingle Bells (Calm)”, “Deck the Halls (A)”, “Deck the Halls (B)” by Kevin Macleod / incompetech.com; and “We Three Kings” by Alexander Nakarada (filmmusic.io). Effects all via freesound.org: “Jingle Bells” by JarredGibb (CC0); “Jingle Bells” by nfrae (CC0); “Arizona Walking” by kvgarlic (CC0); “Howling Wind in Chimney” by Maurice JK (CC by SA); “Merry Christmas” by metaepitome (CC0); and “Merry Christmas” by maestroalf (CC0).

The First Theme Park?

When you’re researching anything, an easy question to ask is, what was the first? What was the first fast food restaurant? (White Castle, 1921) What was the first interstate highway in the US? (A complicated answer, but either a portion of what is now I-70 in Missouri, which had the first contract signed in 1956; a portion of I-70 in Kansas for being the first to actually start paving in 1956; or part of I-70 in Pennsylvania, as it was opened as a highway in 1940 and later incorporated into the interstate system.) 

To bring it around to The Abandoned Carousel, what was the first theme park? 

Not the first amusement park, to be clear. Let’s draw some lines with terminology. Amusement parks in the US go back a century and a half, at the least, with trolley parks in the middle of the 19th century considered to be some of the first true amusement parks in the US. Lake Compounce in Connecticut is said to be the oldest continuously operating park in the US, opened in 1846. The earliest amusement park in the world still in operation is called Bakken, located near Copenhagen, Denmark, and said to have opened in 1583. But these are “just” amusement parks – places where visitors are amused, with rides and leisure activities and so on.

A theme park is a horse of a slightly different color – an amusement park, but with a theme or themed area to organize it. Society in general popularly likes to point to Disneyland and the enormous influence Walt Disney’s first park had on the theme park concept, but as I mentioned in the last episode – theme parks existed before Disneyland. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today – the first theme park in the US. Coincidentally, several of the first theme parks had Santa Claus as a theme. So seasons greetings to everyone here in the end of 2019 – let’s talk about the history of Santa Claus and a few of his homes in the US.

Christmas and Santa Claus

What’s the deal with Santa Claus, after all, if we’re going to talk about him a lot today?

Santa as we know him today is an amalgamation of the 4th century saint, Saint Nicholas; the British Father Christmas; the Dutch Sinterklaas; and the Germanic god Woden, associated with Yule. He is associated with the holiday of Christmas.

Christmas as a holiday has meant a lot of different things throughout the years. I’ll only touch on this briefly here. We have the obvious association of December 25, considered the birthday of Jesus Christ in Christian religions. In the Roman calendar, December 25th was also the date of the winter solstice. The medieval calendar was dominated by Christmas-related holidays, early versions of Advent and the Twelve Days of Christmas known today. The Middle Ages saw an association of Christmas with lewdness, debauchery, and parties. The Puritans and the Pilgrims actually banned Christmas in the mid-1600s for being too strongly associated with drunkenness. In response, the churches called for the holiday to be celebrated in a more devout and religious fashion. 

From the 1800s onward, public perception of Christmas began to be re-shaped as a time for family and gift-giving. This was popularized by Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, which created or combined much of what we now consider a Christmas celebration. It’s been referred to as the “carol philosophy”, promoting goodwill towards all men, values that could be espoused by both religious and secular alike. By 1870, the Puritan attitudes had shifted, and Christmas was declared an official US holiday.

Santa Claus’s Origins

Today, of course, it can be argued that Christmas, and particularly Santa Claus, are largely commercial juggernauts more than anything.

As the North American colonies developed throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s, his familiar accoutrements were established. Rivington’s Gazette was the first American paper to establish the name Santa Claus, back in 1773. Santa was immortalized in print, with poems and story books, and of course, The Night Before Christmas, published in 1823. 

Washington Irving’s 1809 parody of New York culture was the first to take the traditional bishop dress (derived from St. Nicholas) away and give Santa a pipe and a winter coat. 

Thomas Nast and Santa Claus

But it was a political cartoonist during the Civil War that gave us the modern image of Santa Claus, the man we think of today. 

Thomas Nast was a Bavarian-born immigrant who came to America as a child. He did poorly at most school subjects, but showed an early passion for drawing. By the age of 18, with several years of artistic study under his belt, his drawings first appeared in the magazine Harper’s Weekly. 

He had a long history with that magazine, and has come to be known as the “father of the American cartoon”. He advocated for the abolition of slavery and opposed racial segregation. He also created the modern political symbol for the Republican party (the elephant). His cartoons were instrumental in public sentiment for the 1860s elections of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, and are said to be responsible for the election of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected after almost thirty years of Republicans. “In the words of the artist’s grandson, Thomas Nast St Hill, “it was generally conceded that Nast’s support won Cleveland the small margin by which he was elected. In this his last national political campaign, Nast had, in fact, ‘made a president’.””

And amongst his list of credentials, he created the modern image of Santa Claus, originally used for political commentary.

The Christmas issue of Harper’s Weekly for the 1862-1863 season was published in January of 1863. It was the middle of the Civil War, the year of the battles of Shiloh, Manassas, and Antietam; it was a year with the Union experiencing both extreme trial and intense hope. The nation was divided by Civil War, and the celebration of Christmas brought conflicting emotions. 

Nast drew several images, including the cover image. It was titled “Santa Claus at Camp”. His drawing depicted a Santa Claus figure, arriving by sleigh in a Union army camp to distribute gifts and good cheer. His Santa is shown in an American flag inspired outfit – stars on top, stripes on the bottom, everything fur trimmed, with a pointy hat. It was originally political commentary or even pro-Union propaganda. Lincoln reportedly once said that NAst’s images, politicizing Santa, were “”the best recruiting sergeant the North ever had””. Despite the political roots, Nast’s images set the seeds for today’s Santa. 

Nast was reportedly also responsible for fixing Santa’s home address as the “North Pole”. This was done after the Civil War, and was reportedly done “so no nation can claim him as their own”, for propaganda, as Nast himself had done.

He continued drawing Santa, publishing at least 33 Santa images for Harper’s Weekly over his time there. His 1881 image “Merry Old Santa Claus” is probably his most famous, showing a twinkly-eyed bearded man, dressed all in red, clutching bundles of toys. But like the Santa Claus at Camp image, this is more political commentary, actually relating to the government’s indecisiveness over raising the wages of the military. It’s odd and fascinating that political cartoons could shape our cultural images so strongly.

20th Century Santa

In the 20th century, literature and promotional images continued to shape and refine our images of the jolly old man. L. Frank Baum, the very same author who penned The Wizard of Oz series, actually wrote a book about Santa in 1902, called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. This book established much of the Santa mythology. And as an interesting sidebar, Santa has a small cameo – he appears in The Road to Oz, one of the sequels to Wizard of Oz.

Even more influential were yet more promotional images. 

As we’ve already discussed, Santa was shaped by political commentary, so it’s not surprising he moved on to the world of commercial promotion through the late 1800s and early 1900s. His image, however, was not consistent from artist to artist. Much relied on the famous poem, the line “a little old driver, so lively and quick”, with many interpretations. Images were tweaked and edited, still not the consistent idea of Santa from our modern times. Sometimes Santa was tall and thin, sometimes he was elven, and so on. 

This time, they were the promotional campaigns of that beverage giant, Coca-Cola.  In the 1930s, they were looking for a new way to increase soda sales during the winter, with the slogan, “Thirst Knows No Season.” Enter stage left: Haddon H. Sundblom. 

Sundblom worked for Coke, and was assigned to draw a new Santa for the Coca-Cola company, then. He came up with a modern image of Santa – friendly, warm, pleasant, plump. He was a cheerful, rotund man with white hair and a red suit, red cheeks, and a jolly affect. Sundblom’s first ads with new Santa debuted in 1931.

They were a hit, to say the least. Coke still sometimes uses Sundblom’s original art in their ads to this day. And not only is it Coke. After the 1931 ads, this was the image of Santa that was codified in cultural imagination. No longer were there interpretations of Santa, tall and thin, elven, etc. No, Sundblom’s characterization of Santa became the ideal image of the legend that still carries on today. 

Charles Howard’s Santa Claus

People, of course, had dressed up as Santa as far back as the legend goes. Early costumed Santas were often used around the holiday season to ring bells and solicit monetary donations for the poor. It’s said that the first department store Santa appeared in 1890, when a man in Brockton, Massachusetts named James Edgar dressed as Thomas Nast’s jolly Santa for the delight of children in the store. 

Said a man who saw Edgar as a child: “You just can’t imagine what it was like. I remember walking down an aisle and, all of a sudden, I saw Santa Claus. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then Santa came up and started talking to me. It was a dream come true.”

By the turn of the century, the idea had caught on and the department store Santa was a common figure, so much so that some papers of the time issued cries for “only one Santa Claus per town”.

Charles Howard

The big name in the Santa Claus field, as I’ve learned, was a guy named Charles Howard, apparently quite well known in the Albion area, some 60 miles north of Buffalo.

Charles Howard was born in Albion, NY around the turn of the century, in 1896. He was a farmer and a toymaker and a secretary for the county fair association. Some describe him as having a flair for the dramatic. As a child, his mother sewed him a suit, a Santa Claus suit, so that Howard could play the role of Santa as “a short fat boy”. He continued with the role as he got older, making new suits as he grew. 

Somewhere in the early 1930s, he suggested that a local furniture store hire him to play the role of Santa while making toys in the front window during the holiday season. Eventually, he moved to the big city, 35 miles from Albion in Rochester, NY, where the owner reportedly took one look at Howard dressed in his suit and asked him “when can you start?” 

The popular story of Howard realizing the importance of Santa, immortalized by Howard himself, goes as follows. “One morning a little girl came in and watched him work. She stood there for some time before she ventured closer. Then a step at a time she walked up to him and very timidly asked, ‘Santa, will you promise me something?’ Santa looked at the child and said, ‘What is it you want me to promise?’ He had already learned that promises sometimes meant heartaches. He did not want to make any mistakes. However this child seemed so sincere, so earnest, he took her little hand in his. The child drew closer, looked up into his face with all the love and trust that a five year old could and whispered, ‘Will you promise me you will never shave?’”  

This triggered a curiosity for Howard – if Santa meant so much to one, he must mean so much to many. “Who was this old fellow who meant so much to the children? Where did he come from? What did he stand for? Why did he wear that red suit? Why was it trimmed with white fur? Why this? And why that?”

At the same time, in his regular life, Howard was a traveling toy salesman. He saw many Santas throughout his travels, and reportedly “frowned on the unkempt costumes and lack of child psychology displayed by many department store Santas”. So in 1937, Howard established the Santa Claus School.

Santa Claus School

Charles Howard’s first class was a single student, but as he raised tuition, attendance grew at his Santa Claus school. He held classes on his farm, offering lessons on “psychology, costuming, make-up, whisker grooming, voice modulation, the history and legend of St. Nicholas and learning the correct way to “ho-ho-ho.””. It was Howard’s opinion that being Santa was about what was in your heart and head, not about the girth of your belly. 

He also developed a line of Santa Claus suits. They were fancier than the standard costume at the time, but as Howard said, “worthy of the character as we knew him”. Students at his school flocked to the suits, and took in the lessons. The details of being Santa were important, and Howard was reportedly a stickler for them. “How the suit should lay on you. How your beard should be; it had to be the right shape and the right length. And how your glasses should look … everything had to be perfect. He wanted every [Santa] to be as close as possible to each other.”

Santa Claus, Indiana

We’ll get back to Charles Howard and Albion in a little while. 

For now, let’s turn our attention away from New York and look down south some, to a small town in Indiana. We’ve got to turn our clocks back, too.

The year, as it goes, was 1855. 

A small town in Indiana was working on establishing a post office. They were already known as Santa Fe (pronounced ‘fee’, apparently). The trouble was, there was already another town in Indiana by that name. A meeting was held to pick a new name. Legend has many versions of the story after that point. Some say the wind blew the door open and with it a Santa Claus, barging into the meeting. Some say a child heard a passing sound of jingle bells and exclaimed “Santa Claus!”. Some say it was the fact that the meeting was held on Christmas Eve.

Whichever story you believe, all are certain to be fanciful versions of the true story, which we’ll never know. What we can know is that in 1856, the post office granted the town the official name of Santa Claus, Indiana. 

Well, this was the first time that there was a town by this name in the US. So the post office started sending some of the children’s letters there, the ones addressed to Santa Claus. It became this huge barrage of mail in the holiday season. Since at least 1914, various groups of people began answering the children’s letters that were sent to Santa, both nationally and locally. 

The town began to attract national attention in 1929, when the post office in Santa Claus was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon strip. And then we enter the 1930s.

1930s: A Big Decade in Santa Claus Operations

The 1930s were a big decade in Santa Claus operations here in the US, away from the North Pole, with a lot of Santa-related things happening simultaneously. On a socio-political front, the recovery from the Great Depression was beginning, with FDR’s First New Deal alphabet soup agencies being put into place. And big changes were happening all over – Route 66 was being built, among many other events not relevant to the show. Perhaps the attitude was one looking for hope and light. 

Santa Claus, IN in the 1930s

The 30s were a big time for the small town of Santa Claus, IN. 

Santa’s Candy Castle

We start with an entrepreneur by the name of Milt Harris. The tale goes that he looked around the town of Santa Claus and saw no Santa. The big guy wasn’t anywhere to be found. So Harris began creating the first true tourist attraction in Santa Claus, apparently in conjunction with the town postmaster James Martin. First, though, he leased nearly all of the land in and around the town – something like 1000 acres. And he began securing sponsorships from various business entities.

His attraction, Santa’s Candy Castle, was dedicated in December of 1935. It was sponsored by Curtiss Candy Company, the inventor of the Butterfinger and the Baby Ruth candy bars. Today,  they’re unsurprisingly a Nestle subsidiary. Sandy’s Candy Castle was the first tourist attraction in the town of Santa Claus, and by some accounts, the first themed attraction in the US, although that seems an unlikely claim, hard to prove.

Santa’s Candy Castle was a red brick building shaped like an actual castle, with a crenellated tower, turret, and rotunda. The next year, new attractions were added, and collectively, they were called Santa Claus Town. The Toy Village was incredibly popular, with multiple fairytale-themed buildings, each sponsored by a national toy manufacturer. This was reportedly quite popular, with children able to play with all of the hot new toys they’d heard about, for free. As the years rolled on, Harris reportedly managed to negotiate a sweet deal. For a period of time, retailers (including Marshall Fields) would arrange for toys purchased in Chicago to be shipped from the Santa Claus post office in Indiana, with that official Santa Claus postmark. 

Santa’s Workshop was also added, where children could watch a Santa Claus making wooden toys. (Though our friend Charles Howard was a Santa who could actually make wooden toys, it doesn’t appear that he performed the role at the Candy Castle, though that parallel would’ve been delightful.)

The Candy Castle was a success, in no small part because it was a free or cheap attraction to provide entertainment for kids during and after the Great Depression. 

Martin and Yellig: Making Dreams Come True

Now, as I mentioned earlier, the town postmaster, James Martin, was pretty heavily involved in all of this, because as town postmaster, he had his finger in the pie, so to speak. He noted the increased volume of letters being sent by children to “Santa Claus” around the holidays, and he took it upon himself to begin answering the letters. (This was a not insignificant amount of mail. In the 1940s, the post office reportedly handled 1.5 million pieces of mail, and in the 1950s, a newspaper article noted that the park handled over 4 million pieces of mail during the Christmas season each year. A 2014 article, though, has revised this number down to half a million pieces per year, and a 2017 article indicates the number is down around 200,000.)

Martin had a friend, a guy named Jim Yellig. Born Raymond Joseph, but known to his friends as Jim, Yellig was another guy with a Santa association from early on. While he was serving in the Navy during the first World War, his ship was docked in Brooklyn, NY, and the crew was throwing a Christmas party for underprivileged children. Yellig was chosen to play Santa Claus. The story goes that he was apparently so touched by the children’s happiness at seeing “Santa” that he prayed “If you get me through this war, Lord, I will forever be Santa Claus.”

Yellig opened a restaurant called The Chateau in Mariah Hill, Indiana, a few miles north of Santa Claus, Indiana. He began driving to Santa Claus to visit his friend Martin, the postmaster, and soon after, Martin enlisted Yellig’s help in responding to the children’s Christmas letters. By 1935, Yellig formed the Santa Claus American Legion Post in order to assist with the letters as Santa’s helpers, and he began dressing up as Santa and making appearances around the town of Santa Claus, including at Santa’s Candy Castle. He actually took a class from Charles Howard’s Santa Claus School. Held at Santa’s Candy Castle in 1938, this was the only time these two incredibly famous Santas were known to have met. (A picture of this meeting can be found here.) From this point, Yellig began being known as “The Real Santa from Santa Claus”.

A Tale of the Santa Claus Statue

At the same time that Yellig was coming onto the scene, Harris’ plans for the Candy Castle caught the attention of another entrepreneur, reportedly Harris’ arch-rival, a guy named Carl Barrett. Now, Barrett decided that he didn’t like Harris’ “materialism”, and so Barrett began planning his own attraction, called “Santa Claus Park”, in direct competition with Harris, just down the road, less than half a mile away.

On Christmas Day 1935, just days after Harris’ Candy Castle opened, Barrett dedicated a 22-ft tall statue of Santa, erected on the highest hill in the town. He claimed it was paid for by the people, that it was built on the spot where a meteor had landed and therefore was divinely inspired, and that the statue was made out of granite. At least one of those claims later was revealed to be false.

Barrett’s plans were just as big as Harris’. Barrett wanted to make his Santa Claus Park a world shrine, a children’s dream paradise with log cabins, a giant doll house, and an ice village. It never moved forward, however, as in January, Harris sued Barrett, essentially derailing both their grand plans. 

Lawsuits went back and forth, mostly regarding land ownership, and even made it as high up as the Indiana Supreme Court. They were battling over the right to Santa. Harris and Martin were able to continue expanding Santa Claus Town due to their sponsor partnerships, but Barrett’s more principled “of the people” stance relied solely on personal donations due to his spectacular Santa.

But the thing was, people began to notice the statue didn’t look so great. In fact, it had started cracking and crumbling. And obviously, granite sculptures don’t do that. As it turns out, the statue was made out of concrete, and Barrett had lied. This obviously didn’t sit well with the townsfolk. Unfortunately, war broke out, World War II, more than just a petty squabble between business rivals. Things grew quiet in Santa Claus, IN, and the attractions there, especially Barrett’s Santa Claus Park, fell into disrepair and neglect.   

Santa Claus, AZ and Santa Claus, GA

Let’s step back in time a bit, and interrogate something I mentioned earlier. 

Now, apparently, by 1928, the US post office supposedly decided that there would be no other post office with the name of “Santa Claus” due to the influx of holiday mail and the staffing problems it caused over in Indiana. This is an unsubstantiated fact from Wikipedia, but it does appear to be technically accurate. There is only one post office in a town named Santa Claus, and that’s Santa Claus, IN. But there are two other towns by this name: one in AZ, and one in GA. 

Santa Claus, GA

I’ll discuss the latter first. Established in 1941, Santa Claus, GA is one of those cute little small American towns. Located a few miles from Vidalia (home of the onion by the same name), the town of Santa Claus, GA is tiny, with only a couple hundred people. It’s quaint, with holiday-themed street names, a Santa Claus mailbox (but not a post office!), and an oversized Santa statue that people can pose for pictures by. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the place for the purposes of our podcast – the town was reportedly named in an effort to drive traffic to local pecan farms. It’s too small for any fancy restaurants or attractions beyond the name, but it’s still there.

Santa Claus, AZ

Now, let’s get to Santa Claus, AZ. Santa Claus, in Arizona? Yup.

I grew up in the Arizona desert myself, and the notion of a Santa Claus town there has tickled my funny bone since I first heard about it. There’s just something so absurd about trying to focus on Santa and icicles and snow when you’re surrounded by creosote and tiny lizards and endless brown desert dirt, and don’t even own a winter coat. 

Santa Claus, AZ was the brainchild of a realtor named Ninon (sometimes spelled Nina) Talbot who was born in 1888. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to focus on a woman for part of this podcast, finally. 

The famous sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein had nothing but praise for Talbot, describing her thusly: “In her own field, she was an artist equal to Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.” No, this was not the kind of caliber of person I was expecting when I set out to shape a holiday episode of a podcast about abandoned theme parks and attractions.

Talbot promoted herself as the biggest real estate agent in California, a fun play on words since she also was apparently over 300 pounds at the time. “The Biggest in the Business!” was her slogan, and thank goodness, we’ve got a person who has a sense of humor. Talbot and her husband moved from Los Angeles to Kingman (AZ) in the late 1920s or early 1930s, with the goal of selling land or setting up a resort or otherwise making some money. Kingman was a hub of sorts, functioning as the big city to service all the small mining towns that littered the hills. Too, it attracted folks stopping off old Route 66, the Mother Road.

Talbot established herself with a hotel first, called the Kit Carson Guest House, located right in the heart of Kingman at the intersection of what is now I-40 and US 93. Here she honed her skills in charisma and cooking, enticing guests. Said a person who knew her at the time “She knew how to treat people. She could sell you anything you didn’t even want.”

After a few years, Talbot sold the Kit Carson Guest House, with a new profitable venture in mind. She purchased 80 acres of land, some 14 miles north of the town of Kingman. (That’s probably meaningless to non-locals – the town in question is in the northwest section of the state, about an hour and a half south from Las Vegas, three and a half hours north of Phoenix.) 

The town of Santa Claus, with the obvious theming implied by the name, was officially incorporated in 1937.

She called it Santa Claus as a promotion, as a way to attract folks to the town to buy the 1-acre plots of land she was selling surrounding it, called Santa Claus Acres. Spoiler alert: it never really worked, and it’s generally accepted that the only people who actually lived in the town were the workers at the various town attractions.

Hoover Dam (Boulder Dam)

You might be asking yourself, though, why someone would think it was a good or profitable idea to try and sell land up in this remote area of the state, and to have it make sense, I need to tell you about what else was going on in AZ at the time. 

In the early 1900s through the 1920s, it was settled that a dam on the Colorado River would provide flood control, irrigation water, and hydroelectric power generation for a growing number of people occupying these desert towns. Additionally, it would allow US 93 to connect Arizona and Las Vegas, instead of the ferry boat in use prior. President Coolidge authorized the Boulder Canyon Project Act in December of 1928, and construction began in 1931 on one of America’s “Seven Modern Engineering Wonders”. 

Suddenly, tens of thousands of workers were moving into the area to begin building the massive dam, many living in the model city of Boulder City, Nevada. Not only that, but the construction of the dam was on such a huge scale that it became a tourist attraction before it was completed in 1936, and after. Suddenly there was this huge new audience driving past to see the Hoover Dam (originally called the Boulder Dam). 

Talbot was on to something.

Santa Claus AZ as an Attraction

At the time, drivers still expected to be surprised around every bend of the road. They wanted to have a great time, and not make great time, as the saying goes. Or perhaps didn’t have a choice – this was the age before the implementation of the interstate highway system (remember the beginning of the episode? It always ties in somehow!).  Thus, the proliferation and success of roadside attractions, corridors with wild theming and over the top names to entice drivers to stop. (Remember Prehistoric Forest in Irish Hills, MI, back in episode 4 of TAC?) It didn’t matter if the attraction itself was makeshift, a bit garish, and something of a let-down. It was the idea that mattered.

Santa Claus, AZ was one of these, enticing visitors as they drove to and from Vegas, Hoover Dam, Kingman, Phoenix, and so on.

See, while people didn’t actually want to live there, Talbot managed to create a fun roadside attraction nonetheless. Everything had a Santa theme or a North Pole theme, with candy-cane striped buildings and green roofs. It kind of had a Swiss chalet feeling, which was certainly startling in the desert (especially back in the day, it was a lot of adobe and cheap wood, not Swiss chalets with gingerbread trim). 

Talbot called her town “The Pride of the Desert”, and it was said that in its heyday, Santa Claus could rival anything else along old Route 66. (Only back then, it was new: Route 66 began paving in 1931.) Talbot’s charisma and excellent home cooking were perfect bedfellows for the incongruous theming at this otherwise lonely desert gas stop.

As famed writer Robert Heinlein, known for Starship Troopers among others, wrote of the town in his 1950 story “Cliff and the Calories”, as it arose from the “grimmest desert in the world”. “You know what most desert gas stations look like — put together out of odds and ends. Here was a beautiful fairytale cottage with wavy candy stripes in the shingles. It had a broad brick chimney — and Santa Claus was about to climb down the chimney! Between the station and the cottage were two incredible little dolls’ houses. One was marked Cinderella’s House, and Mistress Mary Quite Contrary was making the garden grow. The other one needed no sign: the Three Little Pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf was stuck in its’ chimney.”

The centerpiece building was named the Santa Claus Inn. Though some retellings of the town’s story indicate this was solely a renamed Kit Carson Guest House, this was a brand new building, designed by Talbot’s husband and built by local Kingsman contractor W. J. Zinck. In addition to the holiday decoration and prominent Santa Claus, a Christmas tree too stood outside (the building was later renamed the Christmas Tree Inn). 

Inside, the restaurant was decorated with nursery rhyme paintings from a former Disney animator, Walter Winsett. Breakfast was $0.75, about $13 in today’s money; lunch $1; and dinner $1.50. The restaurant was famed for its Chicken a la North Pole and Rum Pie a la Kris Kringle. Talbot dressed as Mrs. Claus, and brought her vivacious energy to the task at hand. “Any known or asked-for dish or delicacy asked for will be served. The everyday routine provision of ordinary food is not the policy of this cage,” she once said. Year round, she served five course meals every day. A historical postcard shows a sample menu: olives, celery, iceberg; fruit or shrimp cocktail; tomato or chicken soup; chicken, lamb chops, or filet mignon; sherbet; salad; multiple desserts like ice cream, pie, or cake; and coffee and mints. All, of course, with appropriately holiday-themed names. 

Talbot’s cooking brought some modicum of fame to the attraction. Famed food critic Duncan Hines (now best known for the cake mixes bearing his name) made early Zagat-type guides of good restaurants across the country for his friends – an essential at a time prior to GPS, cell phone data, or the internet. One of his recommendations was the Santa Claus Inn, which in addition to good food offered a moderately air-conditioned space through the use of swamp coolers, a relatively new technology at the time. Hines considered the Santa Claus Inn to be one of the best places to eat in Arizona, and even included her rum pie recipe in one of his cookbooks. “Perhaps the best rum pie you ever ate, chicken a la North Pole and lots of other unusual things.”

Other “attractions” included the tram shaped into a train, called “Santa Claus Arizona Express” with the “locomotive” called Old 12-25. A donkey wandered the grounds. Inside the two small cottages, nursery rhyme dioramas amused the children.

And of course, the special postbox. Although there was never an actual post office, a mailbox was available, with a special postmark – “Santa Claus, Arizona, via Kingman”. Talbot responded to every child’s Christmas letter. They also sent postcards to every visitor who stopped, whether for gas or food, reminding them to come back. 

The 30s through 50s in Santa Claus, AZ were a magical time.

Christmas Park, NY

We return to Albion, NY after the war, where our friend, Santa legend Charles Howard, had established his Santa Claus School. It ran for two months, in October and November, of each year. Howard continued to busy himself in the Santa Claus field. He served as Macy’s Santa-in-chief and reported was Santa in the first nationally televised Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He continued this appearance for the next 17 years, and even served as a Santa consultant for 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street”.

Locally to Albion, Howard decided to expand his Santa Claus School with an attraction for the children, as well. It was called “Christmas Park”, and it was located right on his farm, where the school itself was located. 

In comparison with any true theme park, this is honestly closer to a playground with a theme, as honestly most summer festivals in my town have more rides and attractions today. Nonetheless, it was a draw for people of the time, when America was still recovering from the war and traveling locally. 

“Christmas Park” had a themed playground, a petting farm with goats and real reindeer, a wishing well, something called “Santa’s Gold Mine” (perhaps a pan for gold type attraction), a toy and gift shop, and a diesel-operated miniature train called “The Railmaster” that was memorable for going through a tunnel. Here’s a link to photos of the park in operation. Howard reportedly had a collection of antique sleighs placed throughout the park for theming purposes, as well. There was also a “Christmas Tree” ride, a specially made version of the classic Allan Herschell helicopter ride; instead of helicopters, the ride buggies were themed as Christmas ornaments. Inside the various barns and outbuildings, there were Christmas-themed displays, fake snow, and a constant stream of Christmas music.

The park opened in 1953, with a short 13-week summer season.

In later years, the park was open year round. According to accounts online from people who visited the park as children, there was no trouble believing in Santa Claus, because they lived in the same town and could see him anytime! 

Santa Claus Land: America’s First Theme Park

Back in Santa Claus, IN, the post-war landscape saw a lot of run-down attractions. A local businessman named Louis Koch entered the scene, looking for a retirement project. He and his wife had nine children, and loved the holidays. He thought the town of Santa Claus, with that wonderful name, needed more attractions that appealed to children, especially ones that featured Santa himself. In the early 40s, then, he purchased some lots of land in Santa Claus. The war postponed development on his attraction, and the family was able to break ground in 1945. 

The attraction was christened as “Santa Claus Land”, and it opened in August of 1946. And without much fanfare at all, I present to you the recognized first theme park in the US. That’s right, Koch’s little retirement project,“Santa Claus Land”, is considered America’s first theme park. 

It started out small, a sort of family business that Koch ran with his son Bill. Originally, the park had no entrance cost. It featured toy displays, Santa’s toy shop, a restaurant with a Bavarian village theme, and a few children’s rides, including the “Santa Claus Land Railroad”, a miniature train ride that went through Mother Goose-themed displays. And of course, there was Santa, portrayed by the legendary Jim Yellig who we talked about a little while ago, the so-called Real Santa Claus from Santa Claus.

Not only that, but the Santa Claus post office moved that same year, to a new building on the property of the Santa Claus Land park, when the former building was reported in bad condition. The original building itself was also moved and restored, renamed as House of Dolls, a doll exhibit.

Bill Koch, though initially pessimistic about the park’s chances for success, was buoyed by the first few years of operation, and he took over from his father. He expanded the park, adding a ride area (“Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch”), the first Jeep-go-round ever manufactured (in 1947), and in 1948, a deer farm with a few of Santa’s reindeer. There were “educated animals” like the Fire Chief Rabbit and the Piano Playing Duck. There was a wax museum, called Hall of Famous Americans. 

The 1946 Christmas Room Restaurant was an incredibly popular “attraction” in the early years, like the Knotts’ serving chicken dinners that attracted long lines. Bill Koch was quoted as saying that their business in the early years was built on those chicken dinners.

In 1952, the Koch family put the park up for sale, with quite a few strings attached. The family was worried about the effect of managing the park on the Sr. Koch’s health. However, at the same time, they did not want to see the park commercialized. Reportedly, many of the townsfolk and park workers were opposed to the sale. Jim Yellig, said to have been Santa to more children than anyone else in the world, was quoted as saying “I hope it’s never sold. I’d be lost without this job. I love it so much.”

After a year on the market, the Koch family decided to retain ownership of the park. There had been several interested buyers, but none were willing to abide with the requirements on non-commercialization, so the decision was made to keep it within the family. 

By 1955, the park began charging admission: $0.50 for adults, kids free. A 1960 video is available on Youtube, showing a delightful scene of the park as it was.

In 1960, Bill Koch married Santa’s daughter, Patricia Yellig, daughter of Jim Yellig, a poetic reminder of the importance of the two families to the city of Santa Claus, IN. 

The Decline of Santa Claus, AZ

Back in Arizona, Talbot’s time at Santa Claus was coming to an end. World War II hadn’t necessarily been kind, closing US 93 road access across Hoover Dam for several years in the 1940s and slowing tourist traffic. Talbot’s husband Ed passed away in 1942, and she remarried two years later, still operating the restaurant and promoting her Santa Claus Acres lots. Several of the lots sold, but none were ever built upon, despite the proximity to the booming tourist attraction of the Hoover Dam and the location along the route to Las Vegas. Why?

Water, as always is the story in the desert. 

Santa Claus, AZ had unexpectedly been built atop land where the water table was very deep, due to a nearby geologic fault. No successful wells were dug, so water had to be hauled by tanker the 14 miles from Kingman, an expensive task. Notes on each dining table reminded guests not to waste water, signed “Mrs. Claus”. 

Talbot also began losing interest in running her tourist attraction due to her increasing gambling habit, reportedly gambling away entire days’ profits at a time. Her second husband died in 1947, and she was getting older, becoming less interested in water conservation and constant food service, especially with the lure of the gambling tables nearby. In 1950, she sold Santa Claus and moved back to Los Angeles near her children. 

The new owners, Doc and Erma Bromaghim, carried on where Ninon Talbot had left off, and for a decade, it was still a holiday at Santa Claus. However, business began to slow, and the Bromaghims began closing the attraction December through February starting in the mid-50s, in order to save money. Water again was a big issue. They were exhausted with trucking water, and reportedly drilled down a staggering 2,000 feet deep, still not finding water. This was the last straw, and they sold Santa Claus in 1965.

And from here, it was nothing but downhill for Santa Claus, with the common end-of-life tale for roadside attractions like this. At least eight different owners spun through the place, which clearly drew in those who didn’t give thought to the practicalities of water and customer service. But of course, no owner lasted long, and no one invested any money in improvements or even upkeep. Maintenance slipped, and things got shabby. The new owners stopped answering the children’s Christmas letters each year.

The holiday aesthetic of the neat and charming Santa village was lost. 

Where once there was Mrs. Santa Claus and her Rum Pie, there now was microwave sandwiches. The gas station closed, becoming a very slow moving antique and curio shop specializing in music boxes. One owner reportedly favored using mannequins in parked cars in an attempt to give the attraction an air of business. 

Author Mark Winegardner described the latter days of Santa Claus in his 1987 book “Elvis Presley Boulevard: From Sea to Shining Sea, Almost”: “Styrofoam silver bells, strands of burned-out Christmas lights and faded plastic likenesses of Old Saint Nick garnished this little village. A lopsided, artificial twenty-foot tree whistled in the wind beside a broken Coke machine and an empty ice freezer. Two of the three buildings were padlocked; through their windows, encrusted with layers of sand and decade-old aerosol snow.”

Drivers in the second half of the century weren’t looking for roadside attractions and surprises like their parents and grandparents had, either. People wanted to get where they were going, be it to the glimmers of Phoenix in one direction or Vegas in the other. 

A variety of new uses for Santa Claus were proposed throughout the years, but nothing went beyond the dreaming stage: a foster home, a trailer park, a cocktail lounge, a shopping center. Ultimately, the town was wiped from the official maps, and officially closed services in 1993 (some sources say 1995).

The entire “town” has been for sale off and on since. As of this recording, you can buy Santa Claus, Arizona for the princely sum of $440,000. The real estate listing (which you can view here) dully lists a brief history of the place, ending with the following in a scream, sans punctuation and with several typographical and grammatical errors: “4 ACRE ON MAJOR HWY BRING BACK THE ORGINAL TOWN OF SANTA CLAUSE ONCE HAD ITS ON POST OFFICE NUMBER THINK OF A GREAT SHOW CAR AND BIKE STOP MAKE A STATEMENT, REBUILD AND DRAW IN THE TOURIST AND LOCALS”. 

Route 93, where Santa Claus is located, is still the sole route between Vegas and the major Arizona cities, yet Santa Claus sits abandoned, covered in graffiti and dilapidated on the side of the road, in the middle of the harsh and unyielding Mojave Desert. 

It’s a cautionary note for the future of many desert cities, as water in the area becomes more scarce. What happens when a place is no longer habitable? Here lies Santa Claus, Arizona. 

Images of the abandoned interiors: http://www.placesthatwere.com/2015/07/christmas-tree-inn-in-abandoned-santa.html

The End of Santa Claus Land and Christmas Park and Santa Claus School? No.

It was reportedly one of Charles Howard’s great dreams, that modest little theme park called “Christmas Park”, sitting next to the school for Santa Clauses in Albion, NY. It was ultimately not a long-lived park, however. Howard became distressed with the direction the park was heading in 1964, quoted in an article at the time as saying, “They put in merry-go-rounds and ferris wheels. I have nothing against these things, but in Christmas Park a ferris wheel should be in the form of a Christmas wreath, and a merry-go-round should have reindeer to ride on.” His complaints came along with reports of financial troubles, and the next year in 1965, Christmas Park filed for bankruptcy, about ¾ of a million dollars in debt in today’s money. 

The entire operation was sold at auction; a man named Vincent Cardone purchased the school and theme park, and a woman named Elizabeth Babcock purchased the Santa suit business she’d been managing for several years. Other items and tracts of land were sold to other buyers. 

Howard died in 1966. Said by a journalist at the time, he “guided his sleigh into the limitless great beyond.”

http://nyhistoric.com/2012/12/santa-claus/ The remnants of Christmas Park were left alone, untouched by all accounts over the last 50 or so years, and still remain to this day, including the old train tunnel and the barns, some still with signs attached and Christmas wreaths decorating the insides. Today, a historical marker stands on the site. It reads: “Santa Claus. Charles W. Howard, 1896-1966. In 1937 he established here a world famous Santa Claus School, the first of its kind, and 1953 Christmas Park. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Santa Claus”. 

What about Santa Claus Land? 

The park continued to add new rides through the 60s, 70s and 80s, delightfully detailed on the park’s official timeline page: https://www.holidayworld.com/holiblog/2019/05/15/timeline-santa-claus-land-holiday-world-splashin-safari/  In the 1970s, the park moved its entrance, signalling a major focus change from kid-focused to whole-family entertainment. They added nine major rides over the next decade. By 1984, the park changed its name to Holiday World, expanding with two new holiday-themed areas, Halloween and 4th of July. Jim Yellig served as Santa at the park from its opening in 1946 until a few months before his death in 1984. There’s also been a couple of community housing developments from the Koch family, called Christmas Lake Village and Holiday Village.

1993 saw the addition of a major waterpark called Splashin’ Safari, and 2006 saw the addition of a Thanksgiving themed area to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the park. The park is of course, still open today, a major, award-winning theme park and waterpark, and at least four generations of the Koch family have owned the park. In 2004, it won the international Applause award, honoring “foresight, originality, and creativity, plus sound business development and profitability,” the smallest theme park at the time to ever win said award. 

Ironically, the park is once again no longer open during the Christmas season, closed mid-November through mid-May. Visitors to Santa Claus, IN can find themselves in the same situation as folks 70 years ago – not a lot of Santa Claus in Santa Claus around the holidays. 

As part of the park’s 70th anniversary celebrations, the “Freedom Train”, the miniature railroad engine that had been the last original ride removed from the park, was brought back as a stationary display, considered by the park’s president as “an important part of our history”.

As for the Santa Claus School, it too is still in operation. It operated in Albion until 1968, at which point Charles Howard’s friends, Nate and Mary Ida Doran, moved the school to Bay City, MI. Tom and Holly Valent took over operation in 1987, and the school moved to Midland, MI, where it still teaches approximately 300 Santas per year today. 

And as of 2010, professional Santa Phillip L. Wenz authored the Santa Claus Oath, a set of guiding principles for those seeking to embody Santa Claus. It was dedicated in the honor of Charles Howard and Jim Yellig, in the rotunda of Santa’s Candy Castle, there in Santa Claus, IN. https://santaclausoath.webs.com/abouttheoath.htm 

Conclusions

Now, to the pedantic out there as we get back to our question about earliest theme parks. You might also award Knott’s Berry Farm the title of the first theme park, as it had a Wild West and Ghost Town area that opened all the way back in 1941. However, it was still primarily a restaurant at the time and didn’t become an enclosed theme park officially until the 50s or 60s. But that’s really neither here nor there. And of course, if you broaden the question to include “amusement” parks and not just theme parks, you’ll have to go back to the 1500s.

Of course, there was another Christmas theme park that was also considered one of the first theme parks in the US. But we’ll have to save that one for another year.

I really liked this quote I found while researching for this episode, in an article about historical preservation and Charles Howard. Orleans County historian Matt Ballard writes in a 2018 article: “Material culture serves a valuable purpose in the process of interpreting the past. Void of any physical representation of past cultures, we would lose all ability to understand the lives of those who lived without a voice.” It’s this quote that shines a light on at least my own fascination with abandoned places and abandoned theme parks. What we leave behind helps us understand what came before, especially if they were a person of less power.

Charles Howard, one of the great Santa Clauses, himself wrote a letter in favor of historical preservation for landmark buildings in Albion in the 1960s. From a young age, too, Howard realized that teaching the role of Santa was a great task and always viewed that task as a privilege. So important was this role, that Howard remarked, “To say there is no Santa Claus is the most erroneous statement in the world. Santa Claus is a thought that is passed from generation to generation. After time this thought takes on a human form. Maybe if all children and adults understand the symbolism of this thought we can actually attain Peace on Earth and good will to men everywhere.”

References

Santa Claus, AZ

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Santa Claus, IN; Charles Howard; Santa Claus Land

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54. The History of Santa Claus, Indiana. http://web.archive.org/web/20151103203238/http://www.hohoholdings.com/schistory.htm. Published November 3, 2015. Accessed December 4, 2019.
55. The year-round Santa. http://westsidenewsny.com/pastarchives/OldSite/westside/news/2003/1222/feature/theyearround.html. Accessed December 11, 2019.
56. Dahl DL. Those Kids Deserve Water Too: A History of the Patoka Lake Regional Water and Sewer District. Lulu Press, Inc; 2019.
57. Marimen M, Willis JA, Taylor T. Weird Indiana: Your Travel Guide to Indiana’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.; 2008.
58. Western New York Amusement Parks – Rose Ann Hirsch – Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=xtrLDCJYVsAC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=igloo+tunnel+christmas+park&source=bl&ots=jAmCGrIUyu&sig=x3-ggbRI5W5iqooOk2SoEEZJHXg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6bS8UP6vMvOs0AHDwoH4BA&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=igloo%20tunnel%20christmas%20park&f=false. Accessed December 6, 2019.
59. World’s Oldest Santa Statue, Santa Claus, Indiana. RoadsideAmerica.com. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/16624. Accessed December 9, 2019.

Other Santa Claus References

1. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Life_and_Adventures_of_Santa_Claus&oldid=929426527. Accessed December 5, 2019.
2. Boissoneault L. A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda. Smithsonian. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/civil-war-cartoonist-created-modern-image-santa-claus-union-propaganda-180971074/. Accessed December 5, 2019.
3. Christmas. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christmas&oldid=928552167. Accessed December 5, 2019.
4. Copyrigit Messages. http://smib.tripod.com/copyrght.htm. Accessed December 5, 2019.
5. How Coca-Cola invented Christmas as we know it. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2017/12/16/how-coca-cola-invented-christmas-as-we-know-it_partner/. Published December 16, 2017. Accessed December 9, 2019.
6. How Santa brought Coca-Cola in from the cold. National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/santa-coca-cola. Published December 17, 2014. Accessed December 5, 2019.
7. Ought it not be a Merry Christmas? https://www.alexandriava.gov/historic/fortward/default.aspx?id=39996. Accessed December 6, 2019.
8. Santa Claus. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Santa_Claus&oldid=928457109. Accessed December 5, 2019.
9. Santa Claus, Georgia. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Santa_Claus,_Georgia&oldid=926675816. Accessed December 8, 2019.
10. The True History of the Modern Day Santa Claus. The Coca-Cola Company. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-santa-claus. Accessed December 5, 2019.
11. Thomas Nast | Santa Claus in Camp (published in Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1863) | The Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/427502. Accessed December 5, 2019.
12. Trolley park. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trolley_park&oldid=919839820. Accessed December 4, 2019.
13. Solutions UCC-O. USPS Operation Santa. http://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm. Accessed December 9, 2019.
14. Where Was the First Department Store Santa Claus? New England Today. December 2018. https://newengland.com/today/living/new-england-history/first-department-store-santa-claus/. Accessed December 6, 2019.

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The Human C. P. Huntington

The roots for this episode began growing a long time ago. I was looking at pictures of miniature theme park trains on Google. I started seeing these trains that looked really similar, except for the numbers on the sides, and started casually making A List. I later learned they were called C. P. Huntingtons, but I still had that question: what was the deal with all these trains?

The story of the C. P. Huntington trains begins with a member of “The Big Four”, the four tycoons who built the Central Pacific Railroad. We start our story with a great man from the 1800s: robber baron Collis Potter Huntington.

Collis had a nose for buying and selling. If you’re at all a fan of Star Trek, he would’ve made a fine Ferengi – very concerned with profit. Born in 1821 on the East Coast, Collis came westward in his late twenties, making money by selling supplies during the California gold rush. He was an entrepreneurial man, making his way up in the world by moving on to hardware store ownership before setting his sights on the “railroad issue”.

Collis invested in the new Central Pacific Railroad Company, along with the other members of the Big Four: Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker. Ultimately, their railroad in California connected with railroads from the east to finally make transcontinental travel possible.

Starting in 1861 in Sacramento, CA, the Central Pacific railroad began building eastwards until it met the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. This was accomplished with the driving of a ceremonial “golden spike” which is now on display at Stanford University.

This was a huge deal – coast to coast train travel was finally possible, allowing for people to reach the opposite coast in about eight days. This replaced months-long sea voyages around South America’s Cape Horn, or rickety and dangerous wagon rides across the United States.

Huntington continued on throughout the rest of his life as a railroad tycoon, getting involved in the Southern Pacific Railroad line, too. He became a lobbyist, bribing politicians and Congressmen. He was reportedly one of the most hated railwaymen in the country by the end of his life, due to his preference for profit over people. According to his contemporaries, he was “possessed of the morals of a shark.” 

The CP Huntington Locomotive

Now that we’ve talked about the man, let’s get into the story of the locomotive that bore his name: the C. P. Huntington. 

“In the early days of locomotive building, it was considered a great achievement when that pygmy engine with a flaring superfluity of a smokestack, the C. P. Huntington, was put on the road,” wrote a 1926 newspaper op-ed.

Stories from a century ago often seem to bring up the wild adventures of these “Monarchs of the West” as the early Iron Horse engines were called. Apparently, all of these vintage engines were known for having interesting stories or thrilling escapes. 

The CPH was one of these. 

Origin of the CPH

Collis Potter Huntington needed some engines for his transcontinental line, but nothing else was available due to the Civil War – only these two small identical engines. Both engines had originally been built for a different railway back East, but were never delivered as the original purchaser did not pay for them. Collis Porter Huntington went ahead and purchased the CPH and her sister.

The engines shipped from Cooke Locomotive Works (also known as Danforth-Cooke) in New Jersey, all the way to San Francisco in a journey of 131 days around Cape Horn. CPH was #277 out of the locomotive works, and given the #3. The identical sister engine was #325 out of the factory, less popular in cultural references, was named the #4 T. D. Judah, in honor of the CP railroad’s first chief engineer who surveyed a passable route over the Sierra Nevada mountains. The CPH engine was put to use to help build Huntington’s transcontinental railway. 

The CPH: 4-2-4T

In technical details, the CPH is a 4-2-4T. I’ll give a layman’s definition of what this means, but I’m not a true train junkie (yet?), just a research nerd, so please forgive any errors. (I already know I’ll get letters about calling it a “train” and not a “locomotive”. Be kind, my train-friends.) 4-2-4T is train shorthand for the configuration of the wheels on the locomotive. A 4-2-4T has four leading wheels on two axles, two powered driving wheels on one axle (on the CPH, the big wheels) and four trailing wheels on two axles that support the tank (here, a “side tank” is noted with the T-suffix). There were other trains beyond the CPH that also bore this configuration, but a 4-2-4T is apparently colloquially known as a Huntington.

Working History of the CPH

The CPH did good work on the Central Pacific Railway, used in construction as well as pulling some passenger cars. Notably, she pulled the first passenger cars over the newly completed Western Pacific Railway from Sacramento to Stockton in August of 1869. In 1871, Southern Pacific purchased the engine and re-numbered it the #1. 

Under Southern Pacific operation, things were not as rosy for the CPH. In 1872, the train suffered a massive collision with a larger train. The engineer in the CPH was killed. Quote: “The San Jose Mercury of June 7, 1872, noted: “the construction locomotive is small, and when the collision occurred the larger engine went completely through the smaller, taking in steam boxes, cylinders, smoke stack, driving wheels, boilers, etc., and leaving it a mass of ruins.”” 

It took several years before the engine was rebuilt. Quote from “May 1, 1875, the following account appeared in the Minor Scientific Press of Nevada – most likely taken from an article originally appearing in a San Francisco newspaper. “Certainly a peculiar looking craft it is [the CPH]. The engine is of a most unique pattern, there being but one or two others like it on the coast. ”” 

However, the CPH was only put to limited use once she was rebuilt.

Around the turn of the century, the engine spent some time in storage before being rebuilt as a weed burner (someone’s got to clear the tracks, after all). Reportedly this didn’t last long either. The engine was rebuilt again back to her original configuration, and bounced back and forth out of storage in Sacramento at Southern Pacific’s machine shops, where it was put on a platform to display at the shops. She was pushed into official service retirement around 1900.

Disuse of the CPH

Why all this bouncing around instead of actually using the engines? Well, apparently this 4-2-4 locomotive design had significant issues. The single driving axle was too light and did not carry the full weight of the engine’s trailing rear end. The engine couldn’t reliably pull trains, particularly not on gradients. And the Forney-style water tank was too small, so the trains would consume all their water (necessary to make the steam) if they went any moderate distance. 

Something that’s hard to convey from all of this discussion so far is how small the CPH is. Technical schematics indicate she is 7 ¾ ft wide, 12 ½ ft tall, and 29 ½ ft long. This is incredibly small compared to many other locomotives. Indeed, some of my favorite pictures of the CPH I’ve found during my research are those where she is posed next to a larger engine.

The CPH Out of Working Service

As the years went on, loads grew larger, and the small CPH just couldn’t handle the requirements for larger modern loads of the times. With a need for bigger locomotives, the small 4-2-4s were left in storage, on back spurs at the train yard, or up on high trestles in the paint shops, for longer and longer, until they were scrapped.

The T. D. Judah, C. P. Huntington’s sister engine, was rebuilt into a 4-2-2 configuration at some point in the late 1800s. Some reports indicate that the Judah worked at a sugar plantation in the Hawaiian islands (“Sandwich Islands”); others say she was sold to the Wellington Colliery Company in British Columbia, sometime around 1889. Ultimately, the Judah was scrapped in between 1912 and 1914. (Though several of the 1922 texts I found indicated she was still in active service, nothing else I could find to substantiate this. Another 1899 text indicated she had been scrapped several years earlier. Central Pacific #93 was also converted to a 4-2-2 configuration, so it’s likely that the confusing reports is a result of mixing up the two. Big mystery, our T. D. Judah.)

Why the Poor Railroad Records?

As an interesting sidebar, you might be wondering why the stories of the CPH and the Judah are relatively light with details and mixed in with a bit of confusion. Well, as so often happens, this is a tale of fire damage. The 1906 San Francisco fires, the result of a devastating earthquake, destroyed nearly 80% of the city. Among the losses were those of the railroad: records, drawings, and photographs. A decade later in 1917, another fire in the Sacramento train shops destroyed more railway documentation. What we have available to us now from the time of the Iron Horses is what was saved by families of employees and the occasional state library record – the tip of the iceberg compared to what had been.

Back to the end of the working service record, we’d been talking about the scrapping of the T. D. Judah.

The C. P. Huntington was nearly scrapped in 1914 as well, but was saved this fate by the decision to have her put on display for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This was a World’s Fair, meant to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and showcase San Francisco’s recovery after the 1906 earthquake. 

At the World’s Fair, the C. P. Huntington was displayed alongside a much larger loco, a 2-4-4-2 Mallet. This was meant to drive home to the visiting audience the massive changes in railway needs over the prior 50 years, and it did so very well. The 1840s CPH looked practically like a child’s toy next to the large and modern 1900s locos.

The Original CPH on Display

Thus began the history of the original C. P. Huntington engine as a display piece and a showcase from a different era. 

In January of 1920, national papers reported the CPH being put on display in a place of honor outside Sacramento’s train shops. They called her “California’s oldest locomotive”, and in a bit of revisionist history, the papers declared that she had been the first loco to ever operate in California, a claim which certainly cannot be true. Tall tale or not, the CPH was getting a rest, and getting the due come to her.

She next went on major display at the “Days of ‘49” celebrating the 1849 Gold Rush. Not just a poem by Joaquin Miller that was turned into a song by Bob Dylan…no, in this context, I’m talking about the May 1922 celebrations in California to commemorate the Gold Rush. Old #1 was cleaned up and hooked up to a flat car with seats. She pulled passengers around the city for a modest fare of 49 cents. 

After this, she was kept in better repair, and participated in other displays and showcases, such as being part of the filming for the 1924 movie “The Iron Horse”, the highest grossing movie of that year.

The Iron Horse movie (click for more information).

Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, a lavish movie palace in downtown Hollywood that opened in 1922, held the premiere of “The Iron Horse”. During the movie’s run there, the little CPH was parked in the forecourt of the theater, facing the street, in order to help promote the film. 

She went to state fairs, dedicated bridges and railroad depots, and so on. When she was not out on display, she sat in front of the railyard there in Sacramento, under a small pavilion.

On December 16, 1935, she was even driven on a flat car down to New Orleans, where she was the first train to cross the new Huey P. Long Bridge. 

1939 Opening Ceremonies

In 1939, the engine participated in the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station. 

The occasion was observed by Ward Kimball. If this name sounds familiar to you, that’s because he was one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”. Kimball was an animator, responsible for the creation of Jiminy Cricket (Pinocchio), Jaq and Gus (Cinderella), and the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland) among many many others. 

Kimball was also a railway fan. He had his own narrow-gauge railway collection which he ran in his 3 acre backyard. Reportedly, Kimball’s train enthusiasm bumped up against Walt Disney’s, and Kimball helped encourage Disney to install the iconic railroad at Disneyland when it opened in 1955. 

Well, don’t mind me, going down a Ward Kimball rabbithole. He was a very interesting man, particularly if you’re into Disney. 

Why did I bring him up? 

Oh yes. Kimball was on hand to observe the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station in 1939 because he was a train buff. Not only did he see the ceremonies, he filmed them on 16mm color film video, incredibly expensive in 1939. 

Kimball captured the only known footage of the opening. Decked out in brilliant red and green paint, Southern Pacific’s engine #1 was a relic from a different time, even in 1939 – the little engine was 76 years old at that point! It can be seen puffing smoke, wheels churning, steaming down Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles.

It’s an incredible sight.

This was likely one of, if not THE, last time the boiler of the venerable CPH was fired and moved under her own steam.

Later Years of the CPH

The CPH was towed out for a few more railway events in the late 50s and 60s, but primarily sat on static display in the Sacramento park in front of the trainyard.

The railway donated the CPH to the state of California in 1964. It was displayed at the Stockton fairgrounds for years. After refurbishment at the Southern Pacific’s Sacramento train shops, the CPH was moved to an exterior display at the Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station.

C. P. Huntington on display. Click for more information.

In 1981, the CPH moved into the newly-opened California State Railroad Museum, where it is still on display in 2019. 

She was restored to her 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition appearance, covered in complicated and artistic gold leaf highlights. A 1930s newspaper article on California railroad history devoted several newspaper inches to descriptions of the paint schemes of the old wood-burning locomotives – what a luxurious, different time it was to see a newspaper devote column inches to such a thing.

The engine is reportedly the only surviving standard steam engine of its type. Danforth-Cooke’s factory produced well over 3000 engines in the Iron Horse era between 1852 and 1926. Of these, only 11 reportedly remain in existence now in 2019, one of which is the CPH; she is the only 4-2-4 remaining.

Reportedly, this locomotive will never operate under its own steam again. The California State Railroad Museum made investigations as to the state of the CPH in 1998. Reportedly “the boiler shell is too worn out to be safely steamed again without major repairs and replacements that would compromise the state of the otherwise intact artifact.”

The C. P. Huntington is the second oldest locomotive owned by the California State Railroad Museum, and one of the older surviving locomotives worldwide. (The oldest known locomotive is the 1813 “Puffing Billy” at London’s Science Museum, an engine some fifty years older than our heroine the CPH.) The CSRM currently owns eight of the 45 pre-1880s locomotives still extant in the US, inclduing the CPH. The CPH silhouette even serves as the logo for the museum.

The Chance CPH

Now, if you’ve sat through this episode in confusion so far about how all this locomotive talk ties into the theme of the podcast, get ready to have a galaxy brain moment. You might think back to the Joyland episodes, for a bit of a clue to the rest of the story. 

In the mid-twentieth century in Wichita, Kansas, a man by the name of Harold Chance was building miniature steam trains. First under the Ottaway Amusement Company name, Chance incorporated his own company as Chance Manufacturing in 1961. A year earlier, in 1960, Chance had begun production on the first version of a new miniature train.

It was the beginning of something magical.

According to the CSRM, the C. P. Huntington had been displayed at at least two occasions: the Southern Pacific Centennial Celebration in 1955, and the Salute to Steam Age in 1958. (The latter event was a good-bye ceremony marking the last run of the last steam engine of SP, #4294. The engines were placed side-by-side in the park in Sacramento to mark the beginning and end of the steam era in Southern Pacific’s history). 

Additionally, scale models of the train were reported nationally around this time in the papers, including a 1951 half-size model by a man named Jack Collier, and much smaller 1.5” scale rideable models by a man named Bob Harpur. Oh, and a very large model made entirely out of fruit by an enterprising Lions Club. 

Being a person interested in trains, it’s highly likely that Harold Chance saw news reports of these events, at the very least, particularly the reports on the end of the steam era for the Southern Pacific in 1958. And like a train at a switch, we can see the leap Harold Chance might have taken.

He began building a miniature C. P. Huntington train for use in amusement parks.

Chance’s CPH was a one-third scale model of the original. His miniature version was faithful to the original as far as looks – handmade, and incredibly detailed. The littler steam engine had the unique design of the original, with the iconic stack and wheel arrangement. 

From a mechanical perspective, his models made some changes. Apparently the big “drive” wheels are false (they can even be removed without affecting the locomotive’s operation, which many operations do to ease maintenance) and the engine powers drive shafts on the front and rear trucks of the locomotive. Gone too was steam power: Chance’s model used gasoline for fuel.

He delivered his first engine to Joyland Park, there in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961.

Joyland’s iconic train served that park from 1961 until 2006. “Joyland’s train really launched Chance Rides,” said Larry Breitenstein, National Sales Director at Chance Rides, some time later. The train was last seen publicly when the park closed in 2006. Reportedly, it is in the hands of a private collector local to Wichita.

Other Chance CPHs

Joyland’s CPH wasn’t Chance’s last miniature CPH, though.

The company has produced over 400 miniature CP Huntington rides as of the time of this recording – 400+ trains over about 60 years. 

Some basic stats: engines run about $200k, and coaches run around $60k (prices from Wikipedia, date unclear). The trains are a narrow gauge. Most CPHs are 24” gauge. However, some of the early CPH models were 20” gauge. Chance still provides individual parts for the CPH in their sales inventory. This is unsurprising, as the CPH is reportedly Chance’s most popular ride.

To some in the amusement park world, the train is frowned upon – considered a cookie cutter train, which is both sad and inaccurate. Each engine has its own modifications and personality, and each engine runs differently. But to a general audience, the CPH is an incredibly popular thing – because it’s a train! Who doesn’t love to go on a train ride?

CPH #1-400+

I’m not going to talk about every single engine on this podcast – that would be a wild, very long episode and I’ll tell you right now that this will already be a long one as it is. But I will hit a few highlights. 

Why should you care, and what is the reason for me even doing this episode in the first place? 

Rabbitholes and those giant numbers on the side of the locomotive.

The best and worst thing about these trains is that they often (but not always) have the engine number visible on the side. This number is usually (but not always) the loco number from Chance. This is the reason I got into the topic in the first place – I got sucked down into a Google image search, wondering why there were similar-looking trains all around parks and zoos, and why they had the numbers they did.

A minute ago, I said “usually” the numbers reflect the manufacturing number from the factory. It’s not always true. Some park remove the numbers, some parks never have the numbers installed, and some parks change the numbers to reflect internal numbering schemes, confusing us all. The only way to accurately know which number CPH a particular train is would be to look at the builder’s plate, attached to each loco, which contains the engine’s serial number. But sometimes these too have been removed, or have become illegible.

Additionally, they are usually robust little trains. (Engine #2 has been in operation for almost 60 years at the time of this recording!) Given their hardy nature, the trains are often sold from park to park. This often leads to confusion about the trains, as when they are in storage or in the hands of private owners, their locations are unknown or unclear. Some engines have also been scrapped, such as the #29, formerly of the St. Louis Zoo, where it was involved in an accident that more or less destroyed the entire engine. Others are nearly so, such as the #8, which currently sits without wheels on the dirt at New Orleans City Park.

Should this podcast ever make money (lol) it would be fantastic to do a history on each of the parks associated with a CPH. I cannot count the number of times during my research for this topic that I would get stuck down a rabbithole for a particular train.

I’m not even going to include a list of the CPHs in my shownotes, the List being the holy grail of CPH research. For that, I’m going to direct you to the incredible Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, where you can find an incredible Excel spreadsheet and some very smart people and a lot of cool photos.

Anyhow, let’s talk about some of the engines. Every engine has a story, and here are a few.

#2 – “Robert D. Morrell” at Story Land (Glen, NH)

The #2 is the oldest train currently in public operation, as the #1 from Joyland is in storage or private ownership. It lives at Story Land in Glen, NH, a small family amusement park aimed at the under-teen set. They have five CPHs: #2 (red), #4 (blue), #14 (in storage), #18 (used as a backup), and #47 (green).

There are a lot of interesting things about the Story Land engines that we could get into at another time. For today, we’ll talk about the number on the front. Every CPH has the year 1863 on the front of the engine – that was the year the original CPH was manufactured. There’s only one exception: CPH #2, the red engine from Story Land named “Robert D. Morrell”. It says 1861 on the front. It’s a bit of a mystery why this is. One possibility is that this is a reference to the incorporation date for the Central Pacific Railroad, which of course was where the original CPH first operated as engine #3. It’s not clear why only one engine has this plate, however (and only #2, not #1!). 

#34 – Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad

The trains with the smallest numbers are the oldest, and some of these have been through multiple hands. Let’s take the case of #34, and I’ll illustrate how you might go down a rabbithole of fascination with just a single engine. 

This engine #34 was a 1964 model, part of the “Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad” in Cincinnati. It was painted light blue and red, the “standard” color scheme, and was called “Mad Anthony Wayne.” Coney Island in Cincinnati is a park with an incredibly long history, which we may get to one day. For now, we’ll just talk about the train,where engine #34 operated with engine #35 (“George Rogers Clark”). The train and amusement park delighted guests there at the site of a former apple orchard until 1971, when Coney Island moved to Kings Island. This was a larger site, further away from the river floods that had constantly plagued Coney Island throughout its history, and most of the rides from Coney Island were moved over to Kings Island. However, Kings Island already had trains – larger Crown models, so the small CPH engines were no longer needed. 

CPH #34 was sold to the World of Golf in 1971, reportedly along with the former station which had been cut into sections. Unfortunately, shortly after it was all installed, the nearby Florence KY sewer treatment plant overflowed in 1976 into the area, and the park, including railroad, was shut down. The train was reportedly stored in the deteriorating station for most of the next 20 years. 

In the early 1990s, it was sold to the Oil Ranch in Hockley TX. It has been repainted black and red and lost its number but still operates there as of this recording in 2019.

#235 – Michael Jackson’s Neverland

Other notable trains belonged to public figures. Take #235. Michael Jackson was a hugely influential public figure, of course, no matter what your stance on his personal life and the decades of abuse allegations against him. 

His private ranch, Neverland Ranch, was over five times the size of Disneyland. It had a zoo, a movie theater, an amusement park, and two different trains. One was a CPH – #235, a 1990 model. It was customized for Michael Jackson, and had extra twinkle lights around the coach canopies, extra decorations, and a high end sound system installed. When Jackson died, David Helm (of Helm and Sons Amusements based in CA) purchased the CPH as well as other amusement rides. The engine hasn’t been seen in public since then.

#195, 196, 178, and 89 – Heritage USA

Other problematic public figures had CPHs, too, like Jim Bakker over at his Heritage USA “Christian Disneyland”. (Don’t worry, Heritage USA is a whole, giant episode for the future. The story of Heritage USA is absolutely wild.) Although general public reporting only refers to one train at Heritage USA, it turns out that there were actually FOUR. 

Two trains were delivered new to Heritage USA in 1979, funded by the many private donors who believed in Jim Bakker’s televangelism – these were #195 and #196. One of these was featured on the Tammy Faye Bakker album cover for “Movin’ On To Victory”. The other two trains were purchased used (one was described as a “shell” and the other barely ran), one of which was #178. 

When the park went under in the late 80s as Bakker’s pyramid scheme collapsed, the amusement park assets were liquidated. #195 had been involved in a minor collision with a gate during Heritage USA’s operation, and suffered cosmetic damage. It also was reportedly cannibalized for parts to keep #196 running. As such, #195 was reportedly traded back to Chance Rides during the liquidation of the park in the late 80s (1987/1988). Chance rebuilt the loco, and sold it. This engine is currently in operation at Lakemont Park in Altoona, PA, home of Leap-the-Dips, the world’s oldest surviving, still operational rollercoaster. 

#196, the loco in better shape, was purchased by private collector Mokey Choate, who owned 13+ CPH locos under the business name Big Mokey Trains, Inc. While Mokey passed away in 2016, the business is still in operation. Big Mokey Trains leases out its fleet of trains to parks. Perhaps someone needs short-term extra capacity for an event, or perhaps a park finds it cost-effective to have the trains only during the season and outsource any maintenance costs. This of course adds an extra level of confusion for any CPH hunters, as trains are rotated in and out for maintenance and may not always be at the same park. #196, then, is one of the Mokey trains, and was last seen operating at the Jackson Zoo in Mississippi.  

The other two locomotives, #178 and the unknown loco, have not been seen since.

Electric #400 and it’s Electric Brother, #402

If you’re in Houston and you’re hearing this, I hope you’ve visited the Houston Downtown Aquarium. That’s the home of the groundbreaking landmark CPH #400, the first electric CPH train from Chance. It was named “Electric Eel”. CPH #402, also an electric CPH but this time with a blue color scheme, went to the aquarium just recently, in July of 2019. 

Both trains run through an incredible exhibit called the Shark Voyage, where the trains travel through a completely see-through tunnel with a unique view on a massive shark aquarium exhibit.

Chance Rides spent quite some time perfecting their electric train. One of the few train videos they’ve posted on YouTube is from fall of 2017, showing the electric prototype in a stripped down state, taking some test laps in the Chance lot there in Wichita. 

It is likely not surprising considered today’s environmentally conscious consumers, but it appears that Chance will be making a big push for electric trains as the main CPH going forward. Reportedly, many places looking to make a new train purchase have inquired about electric models. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the next trains be predominantly electric over gasoline models, particularly for more environmentally-minded zoos.

The St. Louis Zoo’s Many CPHs

Finally, the last in the case studies I’ll cover today…the St. Louis Zoo. If there were a record for the place that has had the most CPH engines pass through it, that place might be the St. Louis Zoo.

The zoo has a long history with the engines. They started with engines #27, 28, and 29 in 1963 and 1964. The Zoo caught the CPH bug, and began purchasing additional trains for what became known as “The Emerson Zooline Railroad”. They are reportedly the business that has purchased the most trains direct from Chance, and in the early years, replaced their trains after 10 years of service. 

So when it came time to purchase the next engine, we reach the slight snag in the story. Remember how I mentioned that sometimes, the big numbers on the side of the tender don’t always reflect the manufacturer’s number? This is one of those times. The St. Louis Zoo wanted the numbers of the new trains to be consecutive. So St. Louis Zoo #30 was not CPH #30, muddling the issue of The List significantly. And, as noted, they’ve moved through a number of different trains, with their old trains being sold across the country, continuing to muddle the history of the individual trains. 

All told, St. Louis Zoo has owned a total of 23 different CPH trains to date. The current trains in operation are St. Louis Zoo #45 “Daniel Boone” (CPH #247), #46 “Pierre LaClede” (CPH #263), #47 “Lewis and Clark” (CPH #289), #48 “Ulysses S Grant” (CPH #300), #49 “Charlton Tandy” (CPH #303), and #100 “Emerson” (CPH #362, purchased during the zoo’s centennial). 

Reportedly, the Zooline Railroad is in the preliminary steps of exploring an electric locomotive purchase. Apparently the Zooline Railroad is reputedly the steepest of any CPH railroad, and there is some question as to whether the electric version could handle fully loaded trains on that grade. 

And if you’ve got a child who’s a train lover, you’ll love the St. Louis Zoo – they’ve got a program where kids can shadow an engineer for part of the day.

Other Variations on the CPH

Of course, Chance isn’t the only game in town when it comes to the CP Huntington. 

Western Train Co CPH

Western Train Co, in California, builds its own variation of the 24” miniature engine, suitable for theme parks and zoos as well. There are subtle differences between the WTC versions and the Chance version, but both are beautiful miniature trains.

Little Engines and Bob Harpur

Or, if an even smaller version is your speed, Little Engines makes a 1.5” scale model. Yep, still to this day! These can hold 2-4 people, perched on top of the cars like giants. Remember the 1950s model written up in the newspaper by Bob Harpur that I mentioned, oh, thirty minutes ago? Yep, that was these. Bob’s miniature CPH can actually be seen onscreen in the 1956 film “The King and I” starring Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr. http://www.trainweb.org/jeffhartmann/CPH_models.html 

The episode is running long, so we probably don’t have time to get too in-depth here. However, the short version is that Bob Harpur was a fascinating man. He was incredibly involved with the live steam engine scene through his work with the Little Engines company after his discharge from the Army. He met Walt Disney in 1949 when Walt and his daughter came to the shop to look at the trains. Bob ultimately joined the Walt Disney company as an Imagineer twenty years later, in 1969. He had his hands in a number of different projects, notably including the trains at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney Paris, and WDW Animal Kingdom. 

So there you go, information on two different Disney Imagineers in an episode that has little at all to do with Disney. Isn’t life grand?

CPH in Pop Culture

Elsewhere in pop culture, the CPH (or T. D. Judah, depending on your perspective) are iconic, providing inspiration for books, film, etc. The most well-known of these is the design for the Little Engine That Could – think on that friendly blue engine in your mind, and you might immediately see the parallels. Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the logo for the California Railway Museum is a silhouette of the CPH. And the engine was featured on the cover of the Nostalgia version of Monopoly.

#44, #55, the Pittsburgh Zoo, and Chris Churilla

It’s not just the classic Little Engine That Could, though. There’s a whole series out there in recent days, aimed at the elementary school and younger audience, starring zoo trains Zippy and Guido. 

The best part is that Zippy and Guido aren’t fictional. The series is based on author Chris Churilla’s experiences with the real trains, CPH #44 and CPH #55, both from from the Pittsburgh Zoo. I know I said I was done with case studies of individual trains, but let’s get into just one more.

Churilla actually spent several years as engineer for the #44 and #55, there at the Pittsburgh Zoo. At the age of 14, he began spending summers as “host” of the trains (since he wasn’t allowed to engineer/drive them until age 18). At that time, the Pittsburgh Zoo train ride was dilapidated, giving out a lot of problems for the zoo and receiving very little love in return. After all, the trains had been there since 1965. Chris was instrumental in restoring the trains. He gathered together a group of train lovers, and together they cleaned up the trains, performed regular maintenance, and began raising funding from donors to keep the trains running. 

Eventually, Chris became the primary engineer, in charge of the whole train operation. “Engineering them was a dream come true!” he told me. In 2010, he upgraded the train exhibit (along the train route) to tell the history of the Pittsburgh Zoo and breathe new life into the ride. 

Unfortunately, despite a new paint job for the trains in 2011, the entire train ride was shut down indefinitely in 2013. Although the trains themselves were in good shape, the tracks weren’t. The zoo didn’t see sufficient value in the train ride. They were unable to find funds to repair the tracks, and were looking instead for a place to locate a new dinosaur exhibit. 

To honor Zippy (#55) and Guido (#44), Chris honored them by writing and illustrating first one, and now four, books about them. “There were so many people who loved riding the zoo trains so I wanted them to be able to continue to bring smiles to families for years to come!” If you follow him on social media, he’s recently been showcasing delightful hidden details from each book, such as the real-life counterparts to the cats, coaches, and other engines in the book. 

He still loves trains today. The CPH Facebook group I referred you to is a project Chris moderates, along with several other train-minded folks. There, they collect information on each of the C. P. Huntington trains. Chris now travels the world to ride CPHs, especially those where he can participate in “engineer for a day” programs to get his engineering fix. He also consults with zoos and parks on all things train: finding used trains, operations, and historical information. 

As of the time of this recording, a private train collector has purchased the real #44, Guido, and the real #55, Zippy, and is in the process of slowly restoring them.

No End to the CPH Rabbithole

There’s something about the CPH, that quirky little engine and her 400+ quirky little Chance copies. The CPH gets in your head, gets her hooks in you, and you can’t stop falling down the rabbithole. Maybe it’s something in the steam?

I don’t quite understand it, myself. I’ve reiterated this a few times on the podcast so far, but I’m not really a train buff, not particularly interested in the technical specs and all that. But this episode on the C. P. Huntington train is the one I’ve been working on the longest. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d spend fifteen single-spaced pages writing an essay about theme park train history, I’d have called you mad. But there’s just something about the diminutive overall size, the comically large smokestack, the proportions of the wheels…the CPH just such a classic-looking train, and she really gets in your head.

There’s so much interesting information out there, not only about the 400+ Chance trains but about the namesake engine herself. Someday I hope to visit many of the places I’ve covered on the podcast and visiting the original CPH on display in northern California is definitely high on my bucket list.

Chances are (see what I did there?) that there’s a CPH at a zoo or theme park near you. Maybe get out there and ride one soon. 

All aboard!

Acknowledgements

I’d like to particularly thank Chris Churilla for patiently answering my many questions on the C. P. Huntington trains. You should check out his Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, an exhaustive resource and archive for the person interested in compiling a more complete history of each Chance C. P. Huntington. And check out his books about Zippy and Guido – ask your local bookstore, or find them at a major online retailer. 

I also recommend the 1943 article by D. L. Joslyn, “The Life Story of the Locomotive C.P. Huntington As Told By Itself”, available for free online. It’s a charming chatty first-person history of the original locomotive, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. C. P. Huntington photo is by Chris Churilla, used with permission. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental sounds and ambience: FreeSound.org (Dungeness miniature railway – jjbulley; old railway station – YleArkisto; Jacksonville Zoo Ambience – inspectorJ; Amusement Park – _alvaro_; Steam Train Interior – allh; Brighton carousel – onetwo-ber) and freesfx.co.uk (Blacksmith Working on Anvil With Hammer).

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app. You might also leave a review, or share an episode on social media. Your word of mouth brings new listeners to the Abandoned Carousel fold.

I’ll be back soon with another great episode, so I’ll see you then. As Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post C. P. Huntington appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

This was first written for The Abandoned Carousel podcast, which you can listen to or watch. Or, read on below.

Origins of the Abandoned Planes

Gigi Stecca reportedly spent years managing nursing homes in Venice. His time brought him into conversation with many elderly Italians who wistfully gazed at the skies, and who expressed the desire to board such airplanes. The story goes that he decided to make a place where anyone could see the inside of a plane if they so chose. But given that this is a story to be covered on The Abandoned Carousel, we can be sure it wasn’t just any regular type of place. 

Stecca purchased two airplanes from a private collector, and at considerable expense, had them disassembled and moved to a place near Venice. In the quiet town of Villamarzana, at the site of a former convent, he had the airplanes reassembled. 

One was a Douglas DC-6 airplane; this model is notable for serving as Air Force One for Truman and JFK. The other was a Tupolev TU-134-A, a Soviet model. 

Reportedly, Stecca was quite proud of his purchases, as one of these planes had been Italian president Leone’s personal aircraft for a time. The DC-6 was apparently used as a disco for some time in the 1980s, prior to coming to Villamarzana. The Tupolev has the operating number OK-CFE. 

Michelangelo da Vinci

Stecca didn’t want a simple airplane museum or airplane graveyard, though, which are fascinated and can be found all over the world. No, he wanted more than that.

He had the planes “parked” almost nose to nose at a roughly 90 degree angle. 

And then he built a “control tower” between them. 

Then he built a swimming pool underneath the wings.

And this was all part of a complex containing a former convent and church.

Did I mention that there’s a helicopter, too?

It was named Michelangelo da Vinci.

Glory Days for Michelangelo da Vinci

Stecca had students from the school of art in Venice decorate the gardens and the interior of the buildings. The theme was “Renaissance”. There were statues and sculptures and frescoes in every corner of the outdoor gardens, incongruous next to these shiny airplanes. 

Oh, and the helicopter, the Agusta AB 47J-3 Super Ranger, shiny and red, parked on some fake aquaducts behind the planes. This helicopter was built in 1962 and served as part of Italy’s National Fire Corps until 1984. 

And inside, massively oversized versions and cheap imitations of classics: The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, the head of David. They all sat amongst the stately remains of the convent, with its beautiful architecture and grand central area. The former organ served as part of the inside bar.

Dining at Michelangelo da Vinci

Michaelangelo da Vinci opened as a restaurant in fall of 2000, offering guests delicious pizza and excellent beer, as well as the opportunity for a unique dining venue. 

Initially, guests could dine inside the two planes (the kitchen was the fake control tower). However, this apparently changed within the first few years. Reportedly, the concept of dining inside the planes was better than reality. Fitting four-person tables in the narrow planes was difficult. In addition, carrying the food up and down the narrow stairs was not easy. Reports online from 2010 say that even then, the interiors had been closed for several years.

Guests could dine inside the main buildings, however, apparently even able to eat sitting inside a confessional cabinet. 

TripAdvisor reviews generally paint the food and drink as excellent, although there are mixed opinions on the service. And apparently the place held a few private events, with ambitions to become a nightclub at one point.

You might be asking yourself why, if this place had such a unique theme and pretty good food, why we’re talking about it on TAC. 

Legal Troubles for Michelangelo da Vinci

Locals, in various online discussions, sing a common refrain: that the restaurant was built in the wrong area, and that the location is not a place where one would profit. Too far from city centers, they say. Management costs for the large size of the property also didn’t help. And as online reviews make clear, the quality of the food started out excellent and then declined as the money problems began.  

In addition, there were troubles with the local government. Apparently only three months after the restaurant opened, the municipality of Villamarzana fined Stecca’s company, citing “mega-building abuse”. There’s a bit lost in translation here, as this sounds quite dramatic to my American ears, but essentially, it sounds like Villamarzana didn’t like Stecca’s planes parked as a commercial venture. There’s some speculation that he built the place without the proper permits, but that’s not quite clear.

Bureaucracy and the Abandoned Planes

What happened next was the slow-moving gears of bureaucracy. The municipality fined Stecca’s company to the tune of 1.3 billion lire. At that point, there began to be negotiations and appeals, with dissatisfaction between both parties. Reading between the lines, the municipality appears to have been quite displeased by the large planes parked on easy display from the road. 

Quote from a former local via Reddit: “Having lived for many years in Italy myself I know how slow the gears of bureaucracy can grind, and if the local Council have it in for you then you’re going to face years of legal wrangling and endless disputes, visits from officials, and expensive interventions from your Avvocato (Attorney). I’m not surprised the guy gave up after 14 years, he had probably had enough. Running a restaurant is hard enough on its own without the rest of that shit on top.”

Ultimately, Stecca closed the restaurant and business in 2014. The legal battles were an ultimately Pyrrhic victory: the municipality was able to collect its fines, but with the company and business shuttered, there was no one to collect the fines from. 

The Abandoned Planes

The Planes, as the site is known locally, now sit. The once-glimmering blue pool is now sludgy and green, much more menacing than originally intended.

The planes themselves are still in place and the interiors of the site appear in good repair, likely due to the security systems that multiple urban explorers have gotten themselves caught in. Minus a coat of dust, the interiors appear closed almost yesterday.

On the exterior, though, with no one to maintain them, the planes have become covered in grime and look incredibly weather-worn and sad. Streaks of green and gray obscure the formerly brilliant paint, which is starting to peel in places. 

The garden surroundings have become overgrown, and the exterior too looks weather-worn, grimy, and unhappy. 

Future of the Abandoned Planes

Several deals on the property appear to have come and gone. In 2016, it was reported that a Paduan entrepreneur had purchased the property, with the intent of reopening it as a restaurant as well as potentially using the space for film sets. However, by 2017, this deal had reportedly fallen through. 

In March of 2019, the local paper reported on the current status of the attraction, though of course, the article is light on details. The mayor of Villamarzana has apparently received an offer from an entity interested in reopening the airplanes. More information will apparently be available after the bankruptcy auction of the property, date unknown. 

Gigi Stecca’s Prospects

And what about Stecca?

He’s still alive, moved on to other business ventures. These days, he’s receiving awards for the “Ray of Life” glassware he created while operating the Michelangelo da Vinci. You see, Stecca was apparently trained in an abbey in Belgium, so he’s got some brewing creds. His glassware has special ridges on the inside that release the carbon dioxide, reportedly allowing the drinker to absorb less alcohol into their bloodstream.

We’ll have to wait and see what comes next for the abandoned planes of Villamarzana. For now, let’s raise our glasses and toast to a very interesting restaurant concept, indeed. 

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post The Abandoned Planes of Villamarzana appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

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Imagine you’re an urban explorer. If you’re listening to this podcast, then you probably have some small or large interest in urbex. The footage is shaky, poking through the remains of a couple of buildings where a small wildlife park once was. Not too much of note: lots of limp paper and half-broken arcade games.

You turn a corner: it’s a room filled with debris. A giant rectangular box sits in the middle, filled with an opaque green fluid.

Huh, that’s weird.

Hey, there are arcade games over there.

You check out the arcade games and turn your head back.

Now backlit with the light from the open doorway, you can see it. A shadowy figure suspended in the green fluid. A great white shark emerges from the gloom, right there next to you.

This is the story of Rosie the Shark.

Rosie the Shark: Origin Story

In the late 1990s, a large white shark was repeatedly sighted in the waters near Port Lincoln, in South Australia. The shark was seen so often that the locals reportedly gave it a nickname. And that nickname was Rosie.

In 1998, Rosie was hanging around the tuna farms of the Lukin family, for several days. One day, she reportedly chewed through the “predator net” (meant to keep the predators out) and made her way through into the main tuna net. Rosie the Shark reportedly ate quite a bit of tuna before getting tangled in the nets. She was shot and put to a merciful death.

Seal Rocks Sea Life Centre

Around this time, the owners of the nearby Seal Rocks Sea Life Centre were putting out feelers about purchasing a shark to display at their center, which opened in spring of 1998. This place was a small ecotourism attraction on Phillip Island, directed at the time by former insurance man Ken Armstrong. It had standard educational displays, a cafe, and a gift shop. The business had goals for a grand second stage of development, however, including an underwater tunnel that would allow visitors to walk to a large fur seal colony offshore and view the seals and their predator, the sharks.

The tunnel was opposed by the government at the time, with quite the political fight, and the plans for the grand tunnel fell through. The center’s scope was reduced to “a glorified kiosk where you can get a cup of tea and go to the toilet”.

(Ultimately, the Seal Rocks Sea Life Centre was a winner despite the original ruckus. The property was damaged by a tornado in 2002, and the government repaid the center over $42M in compensation and legal costs over the failed expansion. Today, they are “The Nobbies”: still offering guests a view on the fur seal ecotourist trade, but this time via digital remote cameras.)

Anyhow, Armstrong became the owner of this newly dead shark off the Lukin tuna boats, but in the end decided that a dead animal wouldn’t work with the center’s themes.

Rosie the Shark and Transport to the Giant Earthworm Museum

Ultimately, Rosie the shark was (either permanently or temporarily) transferred into the care of the Giant Earthworm Museum in Bass, Australia.

This necessitated a trip of over 900 miles for the two-ton shark: not an easy task.

Max Bryant, then responsible for procuring the shark in the first place, is quoted as saying “It was a hell of a task.” The shark was frozen at the Lukin tuna business near Port Lincoln, where it sat while a custom-built 20-foot steel frame was made to transport it.

The logistics didn’t stop there.

The truck driving Rosie was impounded by the South Australian Government as the truck crossed the Victorian border. At the time, a local woman had gone missing on the beach, and they reportedly were worried she might be inside the shark.

Rosie was then detoured to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. She was defrosted and dissected, though only her stomach was removed.

The missing woman was not found inside the shark.

Rosie the Shark’s Vitrine

The decision was made not to refreeze Rosie the Shark. Instead, she was placed in a tank of formaldehyde and left to cure for several months.

Her tank is also known as a “vitrine”, meaning “glass display case”. Rosie’s vitrine was made out of glass and heavy duty steel, and it was filled with the preservation agent formaldehyde.

One of Rosie’s later owners, Chris Cohen, says that this preservation likely cost somewhere in the range of $250,000.

If this seems like a wild number, let’s stop and consider Damien Hirst.

Damien Hirst

You’ll often see Damien Hirst’s name dropped when reading about Rosie the Shark, and for good reason. Hirst is a British contemporary artist who dominated the British art scene in the 1990s, and is reportedly the UK’s richest living artist.

Hirst’s works are about the central theme of death. He’s most well-known for his 1991 piece, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. This contemporary art work is a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. (If you were not previously aware of the confluence between Hirst and Rosie the Shark, you may now be having a galaxy brain moment.)

The New York Times described the work thusly: “In keeping with the piece’s title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.”

In later years, Hirst continued to explore the theme of death, responding to “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, as well, with his pair of works, “Death Explained” and “Death Denied”. “Death Explained” is a tiger shark bisected longitudinally, and “Death Denied” is a similarly sized shark, whole, positioned next to the first work. Together, the pieces make up a pair of works Hirst named: ‘Coming to Terms With and Trying to Understand the Complexity of the Feelings and Ever-Changing Fears and Doubts that Every Human Being Experiences when Faced Every Moment with the Unfathomable Uncertainties of Death’.

Hirst’s work has sold for astronomical figures, making the exorbitant costs of the materials seem paltry. It is said that the original 1991 artwork cost somewhere around 50,000 pounds (roughly $65,000 USD). The replacement artwork in 2006 cost over 100,000 pounds for the formaldehyde process alone.

Replacement artwork? Yep, Hirst’s original shark-in-formaldehyde began to decay and grow opaque. Eerily familiar, perhaps.

(Damien Hirst’s “The Kingdom”, yet another shark-in-formaldehyde work, sold for 9.6 million pounds.

If you like Rosie the Shark, you should check out Damien Hirst.

Rosie the Shark and The Giant Gippsland Earthworm Museum

After a jaunt in the formaldehyde spa (not really a bacta tank), Rosie the Shark eventually made it to her new home: the Wildlife Wonderland, featuring the Giant Earthworm Museum. This small park/museum was created by John Matthews in the mid-1980s, and purchased by Robert Jones and Chris Cohen in the early 2000s.

Gippsland, east of Melbourne and in the area where the museum is located, is the native home to the “giant Gippsland earthworm”.  These worms average 3 feet long, and can reach up to 10 feet long. The museum was created to promote the giant worm, and the main building itself was shaped like a worm. Visitors were invited to crawl through an oversized replica of a worm burrow and worm stomach. Other attractions, including a small movie theater, other live animals, and Rosie the Shark, were second fiddle to the giant worm.

A common thread among recollections of visitors from the early 2000s is that Rosie the Shark left little impression, while the giant worms, wombats, and koalas were much more memorable. Robert Jones, a co-owner of the park, described her as “ultimately underwhelming”, just another object after the initial curiosity. The park did well with visitors who were heading from Melbourne out to the popular Philip Island; tourists loved the wombats, the koalas, the dingoes, and the peacocks.

Disputes over Rosie the Shark’s Ownership

Apparently in a generous mood after Rosie had already been dropped off with the earthworms, Ken Armstrong, Rosie’s original owner, apparently promised Rosie to the Melbourne Museum. Remember, she was only “temporarily” housed at the Wildlife Wonderland. A small legal battle ensued, with the Melbourne Museum reportedly very eager to acquire her. The then-director of the museum’s collections described Rosie as “an extremely important specimen for the public”.

Robert Jones and Chris Cohen, the new owners of the Wildlife Wonderland, stood firm and ultimately won.

Their case, apparently all rested on timing, as no one disputed that Ken Armstrong had offered Rosie to the Melbourne Museum. However, the offer had been made after the park had already been sold to Jones and Cohen, including “the entirity of its contents, listed and otherwise”. Melbourne Museum parent company spokespeople, when asked recently about Rosie the Shark, said, a bit snootily, that they “investigated the acquisition of this specimen some time ago, but the decision was made not to acquire the object due to its poor condition”. Museum staff were reportedly frequent visitors to the shark exhibit, despite this.

Structurally Challenging Rosie the Shark

Rosie the Shark was not an easy occupant of the Wildlife Wonderland. She had an admissions price tag of $0, which was nice for visitors but not great for the pocketbook.

A concrete bunker pool was built underneath Rosie’s vitrine, with the purpose of capturing any formaldehyde if necessary. The fluid had to be continually topped off and filtered to avoid becoming cloudy. The daily monitoring was neither free nor cheap.

Rosie herself was a challenge, requiring the roof of the building to be removed so that she could be placed in the new vitrine by crane. John Matthews, original owner of the Wildlife Wonderland, estimated that it could’ve cost over 500,000 pounds to prepare and maintain the Rosie the Shark display.

The investment did pay off, at least initially. The park received over 350,000 visitors per year in the early 2000s, with many saying that they came to visit because of Rosie the Shark.

Closure of the Wildlife Wonderland

The Wildlife Wonderland park operated for several more years. Visitors of all ages still describe their many positive memories associated with this place. But under the surface, all was not rosy.

In 2006, Jones and Cohen had a falling out. Jones sold his part in the business and Cohen continued to run the park with two other investors.

The government upgraded and expanded the M420 highway nearby, but did not add a turn-off for the park. Traffic dwindled, as without a convenient exit, tourists would continue on to the popular tourist destination of Phillip Island.

Cohen described the park as “already in decline” when he sold it in 2011. The park reportedly quickly fell into neglect. The day-to-day managers and operators had a very casual relationship with both maintenance and paperwork.

The government noticed in 2012, citing the Wildlife Wonderland for violating the “Wildlife 1975” rule, displaying animals without a license.

The Wildlife Wonderland park was shut down. The 130 live animals were put into the control of the Department of Sustainability and the Environment.

The live animals departed. But Rosie the Shark remained.

An Abandoned Shark in an Abandoned Park

It is mind-blowing that no one took away Rosie, not even the Melbourne Museum which had been so interested before.

Perhaps it was the expense of relocating her, perhaps it was the challenge of finding a new site to host her, perhaps it was her condition? As epitomized by the David Hirst sharks, vitrines full of dead animal and formaldehyde can be an expensive operation.

The park began, or perhaps continued, to fall into disrepair. The sudden closure of the park left much of the material onsite to decay, including signs, pictures, displays, and games. And, of course, Rosie the Shark.

Soon after the closure, Tom Kapitany, among other interested parties, visited the former Wildlife Wonderland site with the option of redeveloping the park. They of course saw Rosie the Shark at the time of the visit. The park redevelopment was ultimately not viable for logistical reasons and didn’t proceed any further, and they were unable at the time to do anything to save Rosie.

Without any immediate plans for redevelopment, the former Wildlife Wonderland became a haven for squatters and vandals and casual urbexers.

Urbex and the 2018 Viral Rosie the Shark Video

After the closure of the park, in the early years, word of the shark in the vitrine was whispered, hush-hush, from person to person. People in the urbex community kept this sort of fact close to the chest, as it were, and the knowledge wasn’t passed along unless the recipient was deemed worthy.

In December of 2014, a post on Reddit attracted some attention, sharing an artistic image from Flickr user Murdoch80. It was black and white, with the shark in profile: head on the right, fins up and tail proud and tall on the left. Ghostly light seemed to filter through, and the reflections on the vitrine made the shark look unearthly, glowing, yet transparent. A broom or pole could be seen in the background behind the vitrine, and the juxtaposition of something so ordinary with something so unusual was very unsettling, to say the least.

Beyond this, internet rumor about Rosie was pretty quiet. The silence surrounding her in the digital space made any tidbits that much creepier, that much more eerie. Like Steven Spielberg has discussed in the context of Jaws, the *idea* of the shark is a lot scarier than actually seeing it, because you build it up in your own mind.

Lukie MC Puts Rosie on the Map

On November 3, 2018, an Australian urbex Youtuber, Lukie MC, posted a video with the title “Abandoned Australian Wildlife park. Decaying, left to rot.” Burying the lede, a bit.

The video shows the moments described at the top of the episode, with the discovery of Rosie the Shark in her tank, amidst other, fairly prosaic abandoned place videography.

Lukie MC’s video became a viral sensation, picking up YouTube hits, and then media outlet coverage. It is by far his most popular video, with over 13M views as of June 2019.

Copycat and amateur urbexers quickly caught the Rosie fever, inspired by Lukie MC’s video. New exploration videos went up that more or less followed the same pattern, with a bit of pretend interest in the wildlife park, a long focus on the shark, and commentary about the smell.

You see, vandals too caught the Rosie fever. Viewed chronologically, the urbex videos display the vandalism right there. The lid to Rosie’s vitrine was pried off, and items were thrown into the tank: a TV, CDs, a chair, bolt cutters. Two panels of the glass had something heavy thrown at them, shattering into a delicate spiderweb.

Toxic Fumes From Rosie the Shark

The formaldehyde began to evaporate.

Rosie’s doral fin became exposed.

And again, the smell.

When Damien Hirst was repairing his famed piece of art in 2006, the New York Times writer Carol Vogel described the process, saying that “so toxic was the air that the property could be reached only through security-coded iron gates, and no one, not even the artist, was allowed near the shark without protective gear”.

Yet here was a similar scenario, in an unlocked shed in an abandoned theme park in South Australia.

Like I said, everyone mentioned the smell. The smell of formaldehyde is potent, and obviously toxic. Yet here were all these inexperienced folks, moseying on down to see the shark. Some reports described police needing to visit the property four times per shift.

“Save Rosie the Shark”

The property owner quickly recognized the liability issues, and made plans to destroy Rosie the Shark at the local landfill.

Numerous campaigns spread across the internet, television, and radio, and these caught the attention of Sharon Williamson, part of Australian Animal Rescue and one of the people who’d investigated redevelopment of the park right after it closed. She got in touch with Thomas Kapitany.

Tom Kapitany is a collector, a museum owner. He opened “Crystal World and Prehistoric Journeys” in Devon Meadows, about an hour away from the Wildlife Wonderland, as a place to source interesting natural history specimens. They have the largest collection of fossils on display in the Southern Hemisphere there, and Tom also serves as one of the directors for the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra.

At the last minute, the owner of the Wildlife Wonderland property got in contact with Tom Kapitany, and agreed to donate Rosie the Shark to Crystal World, including the removal and transportation costs.

The toxic formaldehyde was pumped out.

Rosie lay awkwardly on one side in the tank, surrounded by rubbish and debris. Her skin was a wrinkled, dark brown; her eyes wide and flat and very unsettling; and her mouth wide-open, gums visible, gaping with sharp, sharp teeth.

The roof was removed from the shed she’d called home for the last fifteen or so years, and a crane was called in. Rosie the Shark and her vandalized tank were removed from Wildlife Wonderland and driven on the back of a truck the hour drive up to Devon Meadows.

Rosie: Safe but Not Saved, Yet

By this point in early 2019, the social media coverage on Rosie the Shark was overwhelming. Several Facebook pages and groups have been made, each with differing degrees of officiality. The entire process of moving Rosie has been filmed and will be made into a documentary.

Described on the Gofundme page and shown in a personally narrated video on his own Rosie the Shark page, Tom Kapitany has reasonable goals for Rosie the Shark, with a restoration estimated at $100,000. The first steps were to remove the formaldehyde, then neutralize any remaining formaldehyde on Rosie or her vitrine. The tank needed repairs, not only to the shattered glass but to the rusting steel frame.

And after repairing any damage to Rosie herself, she will be re-immersed: not in formaldehyde this time, but in glycerine. Costs for the glycerine alone are estimated between $30,000 and $50,000. As her tank has been slowly refilled, the cost of each portion of glycerine is marked on the side of the tank in marker.

The glycerine added to date has rejuvenated the look of Rosie, plumping her out a bit, and she now sits on a gleaming layer of pink rose quartz.

Informational displays have been added around Rosie’s tank, sitting out to one side of a back lot. Her ultimate home will be inside a show building that has yet to be built. It is clear that Tom Kapitany is treating Rosie the Shark with the utmost respect. On the “RosieTheShark” page (Facebook.com/RosieTheShark) Tom and his team have started posting regular videos updating fans on the happenings with Rosie and describing the challenges of preserving her.

Rosie’s story after her death has been at turns sad and fascinating, and it is heartwarming to know that Rosie is now safe from vandalism and in the process of being saved (restored).

The license to display an animal is prominently posted next to Rosie’s tailfins.

Visitors can come to see Rosie for free at Crystal World, any day except Christmas. The original most eerie and unsettling of images, Rosie the Shark floating in a murky vitrine, has become prosaic, normal: just another object for the background of a tourist’s selfie.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post Rosie the Shark appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

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“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” — Walt Disney

Walt and the Skyway System

Walt Disney loved transportation. If you’ve ever thought about Disneyland or any of the other parks, you know how much transportation is a theme. In fact, Disney’s first “park” was a 1/8th scale steam train, built at his home in California. He operated the “Carolwood Pacific Railroad” until 1953, when he began focusing on the construction of Disneyland, which opened in July 1955.

On a trip to Switzerland, Walt heard about a new gondola ride system that was being tested. He visited the Von Roll company and knew that he had to have it, before he even knew where the ride was going to go in his parks. He purchased a used Von Roll type 101, also called the 1947 sidechair model. Parts of his purchase came from previous uses at a 1955 Rotterdam Fair and German Federal Garden Show, and the system was being finalized as early as November 1955. It became the first aerial ropeway of its kind in the US.

Though it seems somewhat basic to a modern audience, this was cutting edge technology in the 1950s.

Walt was quoted in “Disneyland: the Nickel Tour” as saying that the Skyway was “ ‘a transportation system of the future, for use in parking lots in huge shopping centers.’ “

     

Skyway before the Matterhorn

The Skyway was one of the first major rides to debut at Disneyland after opening day in 1955. The Skyway ride opened in Disneyland in June 1956 less than a year after the park opened, as two attractions: the Skyway to Tomorrowland and the Skyway to Fantasyland. For most of the ride’s history, the ride was one-way: Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, OR Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. This was a D-ticket ride.

The ride was placed in the park with the heavy operating machinery in the Fantasyland Alpine chalet, and the ballast counterweights in the Tomorrowland station.

The original ride contained 42 round buckets, each able to carry two passengers. The seats of these early cars were literally patio chairs, bolted in place.

The cars moved at 4 miles per hour, and were dispatched from a station on average every nine seconds. It was like working in a tire factory. Stations contained wind meters that would alert the cast members to shut down the ride in cases of extreme wind (over 12 knots).

The ride covered a large section of the park, 1200 feet from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland, 60 feet up in the air. It took about four minutes to ride from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland, or vice versa. The excellent view, height, and slightly swaying buckets combined for a scenic ride that gave you a little thrill; it was a hit with guests.

When the ride open in 1956, the “peak” of the Skyway was a support beam on top of “Holiday Hill”, the dirt pile that remained after the castle and moat had been dug out the year prior.

Skyway After the Matterhorn

In 1957, the Skyway closed. Four major rides were being added as part of an expanded Tomorrowland that was billed as the “grand reopening” of Disneyland. These were the Matterhorn Bobsleds, Submarine Voyage, Monorail, and Motor Boat Cruise. As part of the renovation, the Skyway’s central support beam and Holiday Hill were demolished. The magnificent Matterhorn Alps (or at least a scale replica) was rebuilt in it place, directly in the path of the Skyway.

When it reopened, the Skyway passed directly through two openings on either side of the mountain, with the mountain structure itself serving as the new central support tower for the cables (in addition to being a major E-ticket ride for the park, of course).

Originally, the view inside the Matterhorn wasn’t particularly interesting, despite the name “Glacier Grotto” given on the official park map. The framework structure of the mountain was roughly covered in drywall, but it was basically a big, echoing cavern. There wasn’t much to look at, but it was pretty exciting to hear the riders of the bobsleds screaming as they zoomed around you.

Redesigning the Skyway

The ride continued to gain and maintain popularity, and went through several redesigns over the years.

In 1965, the buckets were redesigned, and replaced with higher-capacity four-passenger rectangular buckets using a different grip system. Imagineer Bob Gurr was tasked with redesigning the buckets to improve capacity. However, he couldn’t significantly change the weight of the vehicle. He used high-tech ABS plastic over a steel frame to create the buckets that most of us remember.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, speakers were added to each car to allow for emergency safety announcements.

In 1978, the interior of the “Glacier Grotto” inside the Matterhorn was glammed up, with realistic fake glacial caverns and a peak at a terrifying Abominable Snowmonster.

In the early 80s, the entire land of Fantasyland was closed for a major remodel to “New” Fantasyland. The Skyway still operated during most of this period, but performed round trip rides only, departing and disembarking from Tomorrowland station. When New Fantasyland opened in 1983, it included upgraded support beams for the Skyway (expect for the main Matterhorn supports), at the urging of the Von Roll company.

     

1994 Skyway Injury

In present day, rumours abound that the ride closed because of all the deaths and injuries that occurred, which simply isn’t true.

On April 17, 1994, a man named Charles Randle jumped from his Skyway bucket and landed in a tree near the Alice in Wonderland ride. He was treated for minor injuries at the hospital, and later filed a $25,000 lawsuit against Disney for permanent injury as a result of the fall.

Though his lawyer did initially assert that Randle hadn’t done anything wrong, the case was dismissed prior to going to trial in September of 1996, with Randle admitting that he “came out” of his bucket and that the lawsuit was “ill-advised”.

Closure of the Skyway

Despite a continued popularity, the Skyway officially closed on November 9, 1994, with Mickey and Minnie Mouse riding in the last bucket.

A number of different reasons for closure have been given over the years. The most common one, the 1994 injury, is the least likely to be the cause, given that this was the only injury on the ride in its 38 years of operation. It was probably a number of factors put together:

Structural and safety requirements

this is an often-cited official reason. It’s rumored that the main structural supports inside the Matterhorn were beginning to suffer from metal fatigue, repair of which would require both the Skyway and the Matterhorn (a major E-ticket ride) to be closed for an extended period of time. This would’ve cost a lot of money at a time where the park was feeling pinched due to the disastrous finances of Disneyland Paris.

Staffing changes

The Skyway took quite a few cast members to operate, and the new Indiana Jones ride was scheduled to open several months after the Skyway closure – resources would need to be directed there. It was less that the specific cast members would be needed for Indy, and more about overall park cost containment and resource allocation. Additionally, the Skyway had a lower ride capacity than other rides, making it less desirable in Disney’s eyes.

Declining interest

Possibly. It was still a great way to rest your feet, see the sights, and get across the park when a parade was happening. Skyway was a popular ride, right until the end.

ADA requirements

When the Skyway was built, the rules were different. While the ride technically did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, because it was grandfathered in, the ride was an inconvenience for all parties when a mobility-impaired guest rode. On both ends, the loading platforms required the ride to be completed stopped in order to allow a mobility-impaired rider to board, and there was a step up and down at each platform; in addition, the ride could not accommodate wheelchairs.

So there were a lot of reasons that factored into the overall closure decision; no single reason stands out. As with many things, it was just time for a change. Still, it was incredibly sad to see the ride go. The park really lost something without the dynamic energy of the Skyway somewhere overhead.

                       

Abandoned Skyway

Fantasyland’s Abandoned Chalet

Once the Skyway closed, the Alpine chalet (the Fantasyland station) was quickly stripped of all the mechanical Skyway parts, but the chalet building itself remained, perched up on a hill, a silent watcher for the next twenty years. The trees, once tiny evergreens, quickly grew and masked the building once there was no need to keep the gondola line clear. Though many rumours thrived over the years, no practical public use was ever made of the Alpine chalet. A chain roped off the old exit staircase, and vending carts blocked the entrance staircase.

Considering how small Disneyland really is and how tight space is, it’s surprising that the chalet was never put to a guest-facing use. It’s possible however that any new use would’ve changed the ADA requirements and required serious upgrades and cash investment; given that finances were part of the reason for the closure, well….

In my own visits to Disneyland in the 90s and 2000s, I always found the presence of the lightposts along the staircases as the most eerie part of the abandoned Chalet. These posts had this graceful curl on the top, holding a lantern-style light, like a faerie welcoming a weary traveler. Tucked in amongst the dark evergreen trees in a part of the park that was fairly quiet in the evenings, they always seemed a little ethereal and spooky. The occasional shock of movement from one of Disneyland’s cats living in the structure made it even moreso!

Tomorrowland’s Abandoned Station

So what about the other half of the ride in Tomorrowland? At one point, the abandoned Tomorrowland station served as a servicing station for the Rocket Rods.

Some accounts say that the Tomorrowland station still exists, though it has been walled off from view. Others say that it has been completely demolished. However, look behind and above the Autopia Winner’s Circle gift shop in Tomorrowland, and you’ll see a “staircase to nowhere”, once a part of the entrance to the ride’s loading platform, a reminder and a remainder of the Skyway’s original home.

Skyway Parts for Sale

In fall of 2018, a Disneyland collectors’ auction was held. Many notable items were sold, with an original Skyway vehicle selling for $621,000, breaking the record for the highest price a Disneyland ride vehicle had ever fetched.

Other Remnants and Tributes to the Skyway

The original pylons for the ride’s support system did take up space. If you look carefully in the queue for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, there is an awkward square planter that still remains: this was once a pylon for the Skyway.

In 1998, the Premiere Shop featured an original Skyway bucket hanging from the ceiling.

In 2015, after a major ride renovation, a new tribute was added inside the Matterhorn Bobsleds, which have of course been tied in with the Skyway throughout the parks history. In a new scene, several wrecked original Skyway buckets and broken bobsled cars sit just past the top of the ride’s first lift hill, as if torn to shreds by the ride’s Abominable Snowman.

Demolition for Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge

In August 2015, Star Wars land (now called Galaxy’s Edge) was announced. This expansion was planned to take over huge areas of Disneyland, including a ton of the backstage areas, the old Big Thunder Ranch, and part of the Rivers of America. All told, Galaxy’s Edge will take up about 14 of the park’s 85 acres – 16% of the park!

Demolition began in early 2016, and as the site was cleared, eagle-eyed fans saw the backside of the Alpine chalet, clinging to life on the edge of the construction site, just peering over a mound of earth.

On May 11, 2016, the city of Anaheim issued a permit for “Demolition of 5,132 sq.ft for Skyway Building.” The cost for the chalet’s demolition, from the permit, was estimated to be $67000.

Fans were sad but resigned. The chalet had been out of use for over twenty years. It was very unlikely to be structurally sound at all. But the chalet had been there from nearly the beginning. It seemed like an integral part of the park. Fans raced to the park to document the last vestiges of the old chalet, with its intricate gingerbread, painted details, and beautiful Alpine clock. The clock was decorated with a lovely sun and moon detail, highlighted in gold leaf with astrological symbols around the edge.

Alas, the chalet was reduced to a pile of lumber after the park’s closing on June 14, 2016.

The staircase with the chain across it remains behind the vending carts in Fantasyland, where the stairs now quickly end in a riotous pile of green flora.

A New Hope for the Skyway

The Skyway did exist at Walt Disney World and at Tokyo Disneyland, but the ride had closed at both of these parks by the end of the 90s.

All that was left were memories…

…or were they?

In July of 2017, Disney announced the Disney Skyliner, a groundbreaking new transportation system for Walt Disney World. This new system calls back Walt’s original hopes for a “transportation of the future”, as the Skyliner will connect several different resorts to both Epcot and Hollywood Studios.

The Skyway was a beloved Disney style icon, groundbreaking for its time, and memorable in its constant presence over the parks. Even in the years of its abandonedment, the Skyway was familiar and comfortable, always there. But remember, what did Walt say?  “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post Skyway at Disneyland appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.