Palisades Park (59 page)

As it drowses beneath its quilt of snow, it dreams of all the people who flocked to its midways: men, women, and especially children, the joy the park brought them, the laughter that was like oxygen for the park, which breathed it in as it floated up from the Cyclone, the Funhouse, the Wild Mouse, the Carousel. But there are dark moments, too—fires, accidents, deaths, robberies—as there are in anyone’s life.

Shaking off sleep, the park wakes to the familiar sounds of workmen repairing, repainting, and remodeling the rides and concessions. By April, visitors are again thronging the midways, flying high above the park on the Sky Ride, being whipped around the steel curves of the Wild Cat, or piloting a rocketship on a Flight to Mars. In May the park pool opens, officially marking the start of summer. On the surface there is nothing to indicate that this summer of 1971—the seventy-fourth summer in the park’s life—will be any different from the ones that preceded it.

Nothing except the faltering heartbeat of Irving Rosenthal, who has for the past thirty-five years
been
the heart of Palisades Park. But the increasing crime, the recent accidents in which two youngsters died—a girl thrown from a ride, a boy gruesomely drowned, trapped beneath a toy boat in a shallow channel—all these things are a weight on his heart. The towns of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee want the park gone, along with the thefts, noise, and traffic congestion it attracts, and in 1967 they rezoned the land it sits on for residential development. Rosenthal’s faith in himself and in the park has always been strong enough to keep the towns at bay, but now his heart is failing and his faith has faded. He longs for the son or daughter he never had, someone to take over Palisades, to make it new again.

But there is no one, and even before the final season begins, in March of 1971, Rosenthal has made his decision.

And so at the end of the 1971 season in September, Irving Rosenthal announces that he has sold Palisades Amusement Park, for twelve and a half million dollars, to a real estate developer from Texas who will raze it to the ground to build high-rise condominiums.

Everyone but the park is shocked.

Irving Rosenthal is only two years older than Palisades itself; they have grown old together, grown accustomed to the rhythm of each other’s heart, and each somehow knows that the time left to them is brief.

Concessionaires who have worked here for decades now strip bare their display cases for the last time and empty the stock in their storerooms. Palisades has been more than just a livelihood for them, it’s been a family, and for some, a family business for generations. So they mourn its death as they would one of their own, along with thousands of heartbroken children and adults for whom Palisades was also part of their family.

If laughter is the park’s oxygen, grief is an opiate, numbing and dulling the surgery that is soon under way.

Ride operators begin dismantling rides they have lovingly tended for years—dismembering the arms of the Octopus, stripping the canopy of green skin from the Caterpillar, using a giant crane to pull the steel ribs out of the Ferris wheel three at a time. The magnificent Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel, Irving’s pride and joy, is painstakingly taken apart and preserved—from the antique paintings, mirrors, and “gingerbread” woodwork atop the carousel to the hand-carved horses embedded with rhinestones. Rosenthal refuses lucrative offers for it, hoping to find a buyer who will keep it intact and operative for a new generation of riders.

Many of the rides will be sold off, in whole or in part, to other amusement venues: the Flight to Mars will rocket to Gaslight Village in Lake George, New York; the Roto-Jet flies to Whalom Park in Massachusetts; the Love Bugs find a new home at the Canadian National Exhibition; and the coaster cars from the Cyclone will again carry passengers around hairpin curves at Williams Grove Amusement Park in Pennsylvania.

So far the dismantling has been done with surgical precision, but the biggest and most beloved of the rides will experience the most brutal end.

John Rinaldi, the park’s most recent superintendent, finds new employment with a local construction company. Rinaldi’s first job: to tear down Palisades Park.

As the heavy demolition equipment begins to roll in, sending threatening tremors into the park grounds, the numbness of grief gives way to something new, as the park understands for the first time the fear that every human being already knows: the fear of death.

The Cyclone, seventy-nine feet tall and two blocks long, has been Palisades’ most defining feature for decades—the backbone of the park. At first Rinaldi tries to respectfully dismantle it, track by track, timber by timber—but the Cyclone literally refuses to bend to his will and the old lumber made from white pine simply falls apart in the attempt. The wooden colossus built by Joe McKee is not so easily dismembered, clinging to life as stubbornly as any human.

In the end, John Rinaldi does what he has to do. He attaches thick steel cables to the Cyclone at three different locations, then hooks the cables up to the biggest bulldozers he can find. When he gives the signal, the bulldozers rumble off in three different directions.

The bulldozers literally pull the Cyclone down, breaking its back, its wooden skeleton collapsing in on itself. Metal track that has survived for decades tumbles to the ground along with the shattered uprights that once held it aloft. Chains that once pulled the roller coaster’s cars come rattling down like falling shackles on an executed prisoner. The Cyclone crashes to earth amid an enormous cloud of sawdust, dirt, debris, and dreams.

The park’s spine has been broken. It can no longer feel anything.

In this painless limbo, it dreams again. It dreams of music. Opera. Swing. Rock and roll.
Last night I took a walk in the park.
It dreams of young people dancing—fox trotting, jitterbugging, twisting.
A swingin’ place called Palisades Park.
It remembers every burst of laughter that escaped every passenger on every ride, now only memories to give it breath.
We took a ride on a shoot-the-chute.
Every daredevil who ever drew a gasp from an audience, every boy who ever stole a kiss in the Tunnel of Love or at the top of a Ferris wheel.
That’s where the girls are!
It remembers the orphans for whom the park was not just a diversion but a miracle, and the girls who died on the Virginia Reel, and an eleven-year-old boy in 1922 who had never been as happy as he had been at Palisades Park.

Palisades has the rides,

Palisades has the fun,

Come on over …

Eight days after the Cyclone falls, a fire erupts in the pool’s bathhouses; no one will ever know why. Within minutes the park is ablaze for the last time, hundred-foot daggers of flame piercing the sky, consuming the bathhouses, pool, and Circus restaurant. Embers blow in burning clouds over the cliffs, commanding attention from across the Hudson as the towering
PALISADES
sign once had. It takes three hours and six engine companies to contain the fire, and at the end of it, the park is no more—just a blackened, demolished shell of an enchanted island that brought so much joy to so many. Palisades Amusement Park has gone out in a blaze of glory, put on its final show, and taken its final bows.

The following year, its impresario, Irving Rosenthal, takes his.

CLOSING BALLY

Hazard’s Dock, 1974

I
T WAS A CLEAR,
sunny morning in April, and from the driveway of her house on Valley Place Toni could see a light wind combing the surface of the Hudson, the whitecaps catching the sun the way it used to glint off the tiny crucifix he wore pinned to the collar of his T-shirt. The Hudson had begun its daily tidal push north and back, its cycle of centuries. “I follow the river,” he once told her. “The river never has plans either.” She wanted to cry.

High above, on the summit of the Palisades above Edgewater, construction crews were erecting twin monstrosities, high-rise condominiums, on the bluffs where Palisades Amusement Park once stood. Toni thought of her brother’s wistful eulogy to the park published in the
Bergen Record
’s “Voice of the People” column after Irving Rosenthal’s death last year. Irving might have been the heart of Palisades, but for Toni, the soul of Palisades had been Bunty Hill, and now he, too, was gone.

She got into her car and began the short drive to Hazard’s Beach.

The news had stunned everyone; Bunty had always been the very embodiment of robust health, and last September, on his seventy-second birthday, he had again commemorated it by making his sixtieth crossing of the Hudson. Then just weeks ago, what seemed like a bad cold took a turn for the worse and into the hospital, where he passed away of pneumonia.

Toni couldn’t believe it when she first heard. Not Bunty—he seemed eternal, everlasting, like the river he loved. It seemed even more of a mistake at John G. Heus & Son’s Funeral Parlor in Fort Lee, where the name on the guest book read:
JOHN HUBSCHMAN.
She didn’t know anybody named John Hubschman—she knew Bunty Hill, and he couldn’t be dead.

But as the wake got under way and Toni approached the casket and saw his creased face, like worn granite, in unnatural repose, she knew the truth—that only the river was eternal.

It was a simple, modest service, like the life the man himself chose. Among the small group of mourners were friends like Toni and Eddie, Tommy Meyers and his family, as well as a Hubschman cousin named Betty. At one point a group of about fifteen youngsters came in: thirteen, fourteen years old, they were the latest graduates of Bunty’s college of swimming, Hudson River history, the picking of racehorses, and above all, learning the importance of doing your best, of becoming your best self. They filed up to the casket one by one, each murmured a prayer, then left.

About halfway through the wake a young woman of about thirty entered, walked up to the casket, knelt to say a prayer, then placed a single red rose on the casket and left. No one knew who she was and no one asked. Tommy Meyers thought she might have been one of the thousands of people Bunty had saved from drowning over his forty-one years as a lifeguard, someone who might not be walking the earth today but for him.

Toni said a prayer over her friend too. This would be the last time she would ever see him like this, but not her last opportunity to say goodbye.

That came today, on this bright, warm April morning.

Toni parked her car off Henry Hudson Drive and made the short hike along a dirt path that ran beneath the George Washington Bridge to Hazard’s Dock—Bunty’s dock, where he spent each day in the sun, at times entertaining and teaching youngsters, at times sitting alone reading, enjoying the beauty of the Palisades and the Hudson, but always watchful.

Already gathered at Hazard’s were Tommy Meyers, Eddie, and a few of Bunty’s other pals from Palisades and Fort Lee.

“I guess this is all of us,” Tommy said as Toni joined the group. “As you all know, Bunty asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the Hudson—partly because the river had been so much of his life, and partly because over the years he’d seen too many kids sneak down to the river to swim and he’d have to pull them out when something went wrong.

“He told me, ‘I want my ashes in the river in case any kids from town have trouble there—so maybe I can be there, in a way, to help.’”

His voice broke a little as he said it. Toni had tears in her eyes.

“Since the Hudson’s a tidal river,” he went on, “Bunty’s ashes, just scattered every which way, could end up as far north as Albany or as far south as Tierra del Fuego. So we got this idea for a special kind of … anchor.”

Tommy held up the small cloth bag containing Bunty’s ashes—and tied to it was a bottle of his favorite Ballantine Ale.

Eddie laughed. Toni laughed. They all did.

“Perfect,” Eddie said. “All that’s missing is crackers and cheese.”

“And a racing form,” someone else suggested.

One by one Bunty’s pals came up, briefly held his ashes in their hands, and said a few words of farewell.

When it came Toni’s turn, her eyes brimmed with tears. “Follow the river, Bunty,” she said. “You showed me how to follow mine.”

She handed it back to Tommy to do the honors.

Tommy turned to face the river, tossing the bag and its anchor of ale into the welcoming waters of the Hudson. Bunty vanished under the waves, returning to the river he loved, of which he would now always be a part.

*   *   *

Eddie, his arm draped across Toni’s shoulders, walked his daughter back to her car as she sought to compose herself. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah. I just need a minute.”

“Want to come back to the restaurant? We’ll drink a toast to Bunty.”

“Another time, okay? I’m doing a fire dive tonight at Coney Island. Arlan’s set up the equipment but I need to go over and check the rigging with him.”

“Jeff and Dawn doing okay?” he asked.

“Dawn loves her new acting teacher at NYU, but Jeff’s still a little unsettled at Rutgers. He’s thinking about changing majors.”

“Late bloomers run in the Stopka family,” Eddie said. “Except for you. You knew what you wanted to do right from the start.”

“How could I not,” she said, “growing up at Palisades?”

They had reached her car, parked on the side of the road next to his.

“Minette says hi, by the way,” Eddie said. “She and her sister Mary are going great guns with that dress shop they opened in Point Pleasant. And they can still dance the rumba on a tabletop.”

“Send her my love.” She kissed her father on the cheek. “Jack too. Tell him I’ll see him on Sunday for dinner, and I want a copy of that Ellery Queen mystery magazine with his new story.”

“I will.”

Toni slid behind the wheel of her car, keyed the ignition. She took a last look at Bunty’s dock in the distance and thought: Goodbye, dear friend.

Traffic in New York was the usual nightmare and it took more than an hour to get to Coney Island. She and Arlan wolfed down a couple of Nathan’s hot dogs and French fries—they really couldn’t compare to her dad’s, though the franks were as good as Callahan’s—and then set about checking the rigging and other equipment for Toni’s eight o’clock show. At forty-three, her joints might be getting a little stiff, but she fully intended to keep doing this at least as long as Arthur Holden, if not Ella Carver, who had remained active almost up to her death last year at the age of eighty.