Frank Adamo guided his Jeep down Bartow Avenue in the Bronx. To his left were the towers of Co-Op City. To his right, the Bay Plaza shopping center. But in his mind, he was someplace else entirely.
“We’re going through the Great Lakes,” he said, his voice raspy and his mood upbeat. “The Santa Fe Railroad was over there. We’ll pass Little Old New York and go down to New Orleans.”
Lost? Only in thought.
Today’s bland urban landscape of concrete towers and big box stores rests atop what was once Freedomland, which shrank the United States down to theme-park size. Visitors to the park — which opened 50 years ago this weekend — could ride a stern-wheel boat on the Great Lakes, help fight the Great Chicago Fire or experience the San Francisco earthquake.
Mr. Adamo, 82, has a unique take on the park, which was often touted as the Disneyland of the East. After helping build Freedomland, he spent the next five years supervising maintenance and operations there. And when the park went into bankruptcy, he helped sell off what he could, then helped demolish the site and prepare it for its next incarnation as a shopping center.
Mr. Adamo has chronicled this history in a book called “Freedomland,” just released by the prolific local-history publishing house Arcadia. He will be giving a talk on the park on Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Barnes & Noble in — appropriately enough -– Bay Plaza, a couple of hundred feet from where the Northwest Fur Trapper attraction stood.
Mr. Adamo’s co-author, Robert McLaughlin, a theme park aficionado based in Massachusetts, said the park represented a new era in amusement, unlike carnivals or earlier parks that were on the ocean or at the end of trolley lines.
“They created their own environment,” said Mr. McLaughlin, who lived near Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Mass., whose backers would help build Freedomland. “It was themed out to create an experience for families. It wasn’t like a carnival where all these crazy bastards were working. You went to these parks and you didn’t have to worry about your kids being attacked. That’s what Freedomland was.”
Farms, lowlands and landfill occupied much of what would become the park when William Zeckendorf Sr. leased 205 acres to Freedomland’s developers, including C.V. Wood Jr., whose Marco Construction company handled development and design for a number of theme parks of the era. The parks were Disney knockoffs — Mr. Wood had been a key player in building Disneyland, until he parted ways with the mouse (under circumstances that might have involved embezzlement).
It took only about a year to build the park.
“It was hectic,” Mr. Adamo said with a laugh. “It’s difficult for the average mind to comprehend what we accomplished in that short a time. But we had a scheduled opening date.”
Even when a fire destroyed some attractions that were under construction, the workers did not tarry.
“The debris from the fire was made part of the Chicago Fire area,” Mr. Adamo said. “There were a lot of smart people involved in the thought process.”
But there would be plenty who would take advantage of the many Californians who had ventured East to work on the park’s design, said Todd Pierce, an English professor at Cal Poly who studied American theme parks for “The Artificial Matterhorn,” an unpublished manuscript. Unions hit them up for unwarranted overtime, and even city officials made blatant demands for favors.
Mr. Pierce said that when permits for the Chicago Fire attraction were delayed, a local fire chief said it could be fixed with an “extra” application fee.
“They handed him an envelope,” Mr. Pierce said. “And he said, ‘Well, you can have as much fire as you can afford.’ These California guys knew the old-boy network that ran the studios. But not this kind of overt, sanctioned corruption. They fell pretty much for every trick that came along.”
Tens of thousands of people descended on the park for its opening day. And over the years, celebrities like Duke Ellington, Tony Bennett, Paul Anka and Benny Goodman performed there, too.
The park proved expensive to build and to run. Worse, as the baby boomers who flocked to Disneyland in the 1950s got older, they wanted more thrills at theme parks. Freedomland offered some midway-style rides, but it would not be enough. Making matters worse, the World’s Fair opened up in Flushing, Queens, in 1964, offering a new experience just over the Whitestone Bridge.
“Freedomland came along five years too late to capitalize on the baby boomers,” Mr. Pierce said. “Thrill rides were becoming popular, and Freedomland was still doing the information shuffle. But that boat had sailed by the time the park opened. The park needed to grow with its audience, but that memo never got to the Freedomland people.”
And all those references to the “Disneyland of the East” didn’t help, either. Turns out that Mr. Wood was tossing about that phrase a little too freely, Mr. Pierce said, resulting in a lawsuit for trademark infringement that was settled out of court. And just to show that the business of theme parks was anything but child’s play, Disney bought a share of a company that produced theme park rides to stop the spread of knockoff parks.
“Walt and his team were running around trying to figure out where to build their own East Coast park, and they did not want Freedomland’s people messing up their plans,” Mr. Pierce said. “Disney saw it as a very legitimate threat.”
By the end of the park’s fifth season, the matter would become moot. The park filed for bankruptcy. Mr. Adamo went to work for the trustee, helping to sell whatever could be sold to other amusement parks. One of the stern-wheel boats that plied the Great Lakes attraction became a party boat, moored on the Byram River in Port Chester, N.Y.
“There are pieces of the park all over the place,” he said. “You got part of the aerial tramway out by Niagara Falls.”
Mr. Adamo ended up with the park’s photo archive, which became the heart of the recently published book. He went on to help prepare the site of the Bay Plaza shopping center, overseeing the landfill, which was the final resting place for the debris from the 1970s renovation of another Bronx institution – Yankee Stadium.
As for burying the theme park he helped build, Mr. Adamo was surprisingly unsentimental.
“You put them up,” he said. “You take them down. We were just closing it up. It’s part of life.”
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