We were back in Rochester to visit Seabreeze Park. Their Jack Rabbit roller coaster turned 100 years old in 2020; we'd had a loose idea of visiting for that but it was 2020 and all. Besides riding another century-old roller coaster (Leap the Dips, in Lakemont, was 111 years old when we first rode it together in 2013) we also hoped to see the park by night. When we visited in June 2019 it was a drizzly, underpopulated day, and they closed early citing imminent rains and gave rain checks we couldn't use. We wanted to see the park by night, and trusted this sunny late-July day would have a crowd.
The park over-rewarded our trust. When we visited in 2019 we parked outside the admissions gate, in the second row of the parking lot. Their admissions gate parking lot was filled, with signs pointing to go onward in directions I didn't know they had parking lots. But yes, down the hill a little was a second, grass lot. It was full. Down the hill further. There was another grass lot, also full. Down a little more: there was a third grass lot. It wasn't full, but it was close. We thought of that crazy day when we dropped in at Dorney Park, enjoying stopping in on a capacity-crowd day just to ride their roller coaster from the 1920s and their antique carousel. This might well be a day where we hoped to achieve the same, except we didn't have season passes to make it free. The lifeblood of a small park like this is groups holding picnics and renting pavilions. This Saturday, something like ten of the fourteen pavilions were rented out, and we kept seeing groups of people in matching shirts, moving around like the Roller Coaster Tycoon simulation got hung up on something.
Our first goal, though, was lunch. Fries or pizza? Ah, but Walk-Away Tacos And Subs offered ... well, you have some idea. We waited through a not-so-awful line for me to order a cheese hoagie and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger to order a cheese hoagie when it turned out they didn't have the empanadas on the menu. We took all this over to a shaded table kind-of overlooking the carousel and enjoyed a much-needed break. I think the hoagies were actually that good, but can't dismiss that the circumstances made it taste better.
That done we rode our first ride, the carousel. Seabreeze lost its antique carousel in a devastating fire in 1994. The one they have now opened in 1996. It was made in part from the mechanism of Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel #31, which was built in 1915 and operated at parks in Ohio until the 1970s. The horses were carved in the mid-90s by Ed Roth, who somehow managed to carve 32 animals that capture the look of the golden-age-of-carousel carving magnificently. And this in front of a band organ playing from the park's massive collection of Wurlitzer scrolls assembled after their old carousel was also lost in the fire. They claim to have the most complete set of Style 165 band organ rolls in the world, mostly re-cut copies replacing the original worn-out paper.
The carousel building also serves as a small historical center, with a great array of old photographs and artifacts from the park's history. This includes signs from the old animal enclosures. They still had the raccoon sign, but nothing except a mention of the coati they kept in the 1950s in what I can't imagine was a happy condition.
The historical attractions have a new addition, one for Jack Rabbit 100, with a special logo showing the illustrated jackrabbit leaping through the 0 in 100. (They also had versions of this with 101 and 102.) Dominating the walls of the building in a way only the band organ can match is a ten-foot wooden wheel: the old lift hill drive wheel, used until I'm not sure when. A modern chain lift mechanism drives the coaster now, but this makes an amazing and wonderful piece, and they use it to include photographs showing the ride's historical context. Among its appeals is that it claims to be the first roller coaster to use the upstop --- or as the patent they reproduce calls them --- under-friction wheels. These are the wheels on the side and bottom of the roller coaster tracks that make it impossible for a train to leap off the tracks, and make it sane to have a ride with air time.
There also was a fascinating piece I don't remember from our 2019 visit. They had flyers to give out explaining the history of the band organ and I took photographs of both pages of that. But they also had photocopies of the transcript for ``The Long Family's Involvement In The Carousel Business''. The Long family has built or owned carousels since 1876, and owned Seabreeze Park since shortly after World War II; and this talk was given by Robert A Long at the National Carousel Roundtable Conference held in Flint, Michigan, in October of 1974. We've seen references to this conference at the Merry-Go-Round Museum in Sandusky, but have never known why it was held in Flint (or why particularly 1974). But this five-page talk discusses the family history and makes for fascinating reading and I want to know more about how there came to be an important carousel association meeting in Flint --- a town which, then, didn't have a carousel to my knowledge --- in 1974. There's a story there.
And now I bring you the last of my Indiana Beach pictures for our anniversary trip. Go ahead, guess which amusement park or pinball tournament will be the next set of pictures.
The swings ride, at speed, takes you over the water --- or at least looks like it's going to --- and while we didn't ride it this time I remembered vividly how terrified I was our last visit of my car keys flying out of my pocket. They did not.
Two of the illuminated signs seen in the most night-like sky we got.
Illuminated I.B.Crow promising us, 'There's more than corn in Indiana!'
Paratrooper ride, by night, with the gorgeous look of the lights reflected in the turbulent water.
bunnyhugger snagging a picture of the Scrambler just as the park turns its lights off for the night.
A last view, looking south from near the Fascination parlor (you can just make out the sign), as we leave for the night.
Trivia: Intelligence Information Bulletings issued by the United States 6th Group Army forecast a guerilla war once the Allies subdued the Wehrmacht, imagining a core of thirty thousand ``Werewolf'' resistance members supported by four to five hundred thousand activists. They warned American soldiers of explosives concealed in hay wagons and cigarette packets and of German agents wearing belts filled with explosives. Source: Germany 1945: From War to Peace, Richard Bessel.
Currently Reading: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography Of Space, Rip Bulkeley.
PS: Did you want to know What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Shouldn't Boog be like 18 by now? June - August 2022 in recap, here.
