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Health & Fitness

From the Archives: Palisades Amusement Park Famous Cyclone Roller Coaster Car Found!

Palisades Amusement Park Cyclone Roller Coaster Car to Come Home to Fort Lee 42 years After the Park Closed!

Almost one year ago our From the Archives centered on the famed Palisades Amusement Park roller coaster (http://fortlee.patch.com/articles/in-search-of-the-cyclone-of-palisades-...). 

As mentioned in that 2012 piece, the Cyclone history started in Coney Island in 1927 when brothers Irving and Jack Rosenthal opened the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney.  That world famous roller coaster is now a landmark and is still operating in Coney Island.  If you want to experience this roller coaster in all its glory I suggest a short trip out to Coney, perhaps during the upcoming June 22 Mermaid Parade which kicks off the summer season on the isle of Coney.

And you can go back in time to visit the Cyclone at Coney circa 1953 via viewing the classic 1953 independent film The Little Fugitive - see the attached YouTube clip.

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Irving and Jack purchased Palisades Amusement Park from the Schenck brothers in 1935 and the Rosenthals operated the park until its closure in September of 1971.  The Cyclone of Palisades Amusement Park rose out of the disastrous fire that hit the park in the summer of 1944.  Out of the ashes of that fire rose the new Cyclone built by Joe McKee.  This traditional wooden structure of the Cyclone became a signature of Palisades Amusement Park for the rest of its life.  You can read more about the Cyclone and the park itself in the wonderful new book "Palisades Park" by Alan Brennert.

What became of this iconic Palisades Amusement Park ride – of course not the wooden rollercoaster structure, as it was demolished - but what happened to the Cyclone roller coaster cars?

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See this link to Vince Gargiulo's website for some rare Cyclone photos.

The road leads us to a now defunct amusement park in Mechanicsburg, PA. According to Palisades Amusement Park historian Vince Gargiulo, Mickey Hughes operated Williams Grove Amusement Park through 2006, when he sought a buyer to operate the park. Failing to find one, many of the park’s rides were auctioned off that same year.  Prior to this, Mickey was the fella who brought most of the rides to Palisades Amusement Park for the Rosenthals and after the park closed in 1971 he took some of those rides, including the Cyclone roller coaster cars, to his park in Pennsylvania.

Mickey died in 2008. The park, though closed today, still contains some rides. Through Vince’s efforts we established that the ownership of the park resides with the Hughes family.  Vince recently spoke with Mickey’s daughter who has agreed to donate one of the iconic Cyclone cars to the Fort Lee Museum for permanent display.  Our next step in this Back to the Future travel through time is to organize a road trip to the defunct amusement park in Pennsylvania to assess what we will need to remove the car from the tracks and get it onto a flatbed truck for delivery back to Fort Lee for display in our museum

Members of the Fort Lee Historical Society, under the leadership of Mr. Palisades Amusement Park, Vince Gargiulo, are hopeful that we can have this car returned home to Fort Lee before summer’s end.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to once again sit in a Palisades Amusement Park Cyclone roller coaster car and transport yourself back in time when summers in Fort Lee echoed with screams and laughter from a long gone park atop the Palisades?

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