You’re perfectly welcome. Your contributions to the site are always exemplary.
We live on the North Shore and thus drive by the Wonderland site (or use the Wonderland T stop) every time we go to Boston or points south. I knew about the place name from the movie, Next Stop Wonderland (1998), long before we moved to the area, but I learned about the origin of the name from your posts here.
The sign for the dog racing track is still there.
The bulk of Wonderland Amusement Park was actually where the Wonderland Shopping Mall now sits, and its parking lot. Only a little of it extended into the area that later became the dog track. Also very interesting – the buildings of the main complex of the mall sit precisely where the original Wonderland buildings sat. I assume that’s because, although the site feels pretty dry and solid today, it was a tually a marsh when they built the amusement park. They drove a huge number of pilings into the ground to give them a solid foundation to build on (the connecting areas of the park were a boardwalk that st 2-3 feet above ground level). I guess when they built the mall, they couldn’t resist the already-existing pilings as foundations.
Have a look at the sub-webpage about maps. At the very compare a map of the park with the modern mall:
I used to go to the Tacky Tourist Tour in Seattle in the early 1980s, which was a gay cruise from Seattle harbor, through the locks, and into Lake Washington. It was created primarily for drag queens, and there were contests for things such as “Miss Palm Springs”, etc. Drag queens were encouraged to wear their tackiest drag, and it was a lot of fun and very entertaining. It also shocked some of the people on the lake, which was also funny. The boat had loud disco music and a drag queen with the hugest dress sitting at the very top of the boat with her dress spread out like a huge umbrella.
The Tiger’s Tale in Sheffield Tasmania. A funky but fun animatronic presentation formerly found in the “town of murals” on the way to Cradle Mountain National Park.
There used to be a Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade and restaurant complex in Concord, NH called “Bear Right”. If you were coming south on Route 93 from northern NH you did, indeed, “bear right” to get there. There was a big sign on the side of the road directing you.
Inside it had an audio-animatronic Bear Revue, kind of like a smaller, cheaper version of Disney’s Country Bear Musical Jamboree. There was also a tree with places for critters to pop out of.
It disappeared about 25 years ago or so:
This shirt has the logo that used to be on the sign you saw from I-93
Yeah, the WTC is the big one. There’s also the part of the road in Denali National Park that went through Polychrome Pass. It was the victim of a landslide a couple of years ago. Now there’s a bridge there over the missing road. Yeah, it’s a stretch.
The old Bird House bar on the Seward Highway burned down in 1996. It was mostly a hang for skiers and other bums like me. It was a log house half sunken into the muck, so you sat at a bar that was tilted 15-20 degrees. The bartender would slap your order on the bar and if you weren’t ready, it just slid down and splattered against the wall. The ceiling was adorned with women’s underwear, donated by past customers. They also had a phone that wasn’t connected to anything and provided a lot of laughs for regulars at the expense of visitors.
Otherwise, all of the major touristy places around the world that I’ve visited are still there, AFAIK.
My family and I went there when we went to Cooperstown. We had a choice between that and a boat tour of Otsego Lake, and my brother and I chose the dino museum. As a teenager it wasn’t that great, partly because it wasn’t real dinosaurs but mostly because it had so few displays compared to formal indoor museums.
If given a choice between that or the boat tour today, if they still existed, even though the museum was pretty cheesy, my choice would depend on the menu for any food items on the boat tour, since while I prefer to look at smaller lakes than Otsego from the shore, for a sitting-down tour, I’d prefer larger lakes since their sights would be more varied.
That Tazzy Tiger is just sad.
Looks like they’re still there, if only four days a week.
I used to go to the B & I Circus store when I was a kid, back when they had a real gorilla. B&I Circus Store (Lakewood) - HistoryLink.org
Gettysburg, PA, had Fantasyland; closed 1980, demolished soon after.
I went through 505 once with my dad, some time in the Seventies. That was enough!
And then the pirates threw the goats to the shark filled
Lagoon.
But they were nurse sharks so all theatre ah twas great to be alive
I was trying to remember a new park built in the 80’s
had batting cages and a giant slide maybe never seen before big arcade. Possibly Boomers. Teenage hangout for mixing it up with kids from other areas.
The Arizona roadside attraction The Thing? still exists, but it’s nothing like the one that existed prior to 2018. The original was a kind of boring collection of dusty vehicles and artifacts. The new attraction is a completely different theme that espouses the “What If?” theory that ancient aliens came to earth, had a war with dinosaurs and continued their influence throughout history.
The namesake Homer Tate creation is still there at the end of the tour in all it’s fake glory.
I’ve been to the location of The Thing? but didn’t experience the exhibit itself. While I’d seen the highway signs, all I wanted was some gas, and I’m not even sure I knew that the station I was pulling into was the actual location of The Thing? until I went inside and saw the exhibit entrance. The description of it was too vague to pique my interest since it could be anything from fairly amazing to a complete ripoff.
@chela …
If you don’t mind saying, where in SoFL did you grow up?
My GF is a Miami native as were both her parents & 2 of her 4 grandparents. That goes back a long ways. A very long ways.
I asked, and she spent a lot of time as a teen at Pirate World. By then her parents lived in Miramar.
Huh. I peered into the space, saw it was full of arcade machines, and made an assumption.
I’ve been to Mt. Rainier many times, but never climbed to the top. I’m glad that I got to see the Paradise Ice Caves before they melted.
There are still ice caves, but they are no way as accessible as the ones that melted in the 1990s.