Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I stum,bled on this the other day, and it relates to an older thread of mine about Amusement Parks that Failed – Freedomland in New York City (literally IN the city) and Pleasure Island not far from where I now live, in Wakefield Massachusetts.

It turns out that both were designed and developed by the same guy – Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood. He also designed another amusement park that failed – **Magic Mountain[./B] in Golden, Colorado. All three of these went broke in a surprisingly short time.
Why would anybody hire tghis guy, wityh such a poor track record? Because he also designed Disneyland!.
Wood had a falling-out with Walt Disney in 1956, and has apparently been written out of the official histories of Disneyland. Damn!

(despite the fact that this latter one appeared in 2001, there doesn’t seem to be an update – so I assume no one ever got back to him with more information.)

Since I first posted about the failed amusement parks, I’ve come to the conclusion that Wood’s other parks failed partly because they were located in northern areas, where snow and cold weather forced them to close for better than half the year (while DisneyLand and the later DisneyWorld could tremain open year-round), and because they didn’t have the ubiquitous advertising power of the Disney machine.

To his credit, Wood later did design successful venues – Lake Havasu Patk in Arizona (where they moved the London Bridge – I’ll bet that was Wood’s idea) and Warner Brothers Movie World in Queensland, Australia. Note that these had warmer climates and/or Big Name advertising behind them.

Interesting case, and a guy that deserved to be better-known. We’re familiar with “unpersons” from Soviet history, but there are cases of corporate “unpersoning” in the entertainment biz, like C.V. Wood, or 1950s low-budget monster-maker Paul Blaisdell (publisher Jim Warren refused to let Forrest Ackerman publish anything about him in his magazines, probably the likeliest venue for his stuff, probably because Blaisdell started a rival magazine)

http://www.badmovieplanet.com/3btheater/tributes/paulblaisdell.html

2

There are many successful amusement parks that are not open year 'round. Off the top of my head I can come up with Great Adventure (NJ), Busch Gardens (VA), Coney Island (NY) and the many amusement parks which dot New Jersey’s boardwalks from Wildwood to Point Pleasant.

I think the failure should be attributed more to their locations and, as you surmised, lack of sufficiently motivational advertising.

3

Hershey Park (PA), too.

4

Yeah, but Wood’s parks were more ambitious than your typical park. They all feastured live entertainers of national fame, something that a still-successful northern park (like Storyland, in New Hampshire – a place that still astonishes me) didn’t. Wood’s failures NEEDED corporate sponsorship and lots of people to make a profit.
Great Adventure is part of the Sixx Flags operation now, and associated with Warners stuff as well as a high-power national chain.

Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey featured live acts and was seasonal, but it had the advantage of being well-established, and the owners advertised relentlessly, especially to the local audience that would frequent the place.