History
Palisades Amusement Park
For the hottest ticket this side of the Hudson, crowds flocked to Palisades Amusement Park, which drew thousands upon thousands of kids and adults in its heyday. The Cyclone whirled, the Matterhorn thrilled and the Tunnel of Love… .ahem. Well, you get the idea.
But on a blazing summer day packed with long lines and tubs of vinegar french fries, one attraction held the key to cooling off: the world-famous wave pool. The park’s ’60s-era TV jingle exhorted listeners to “come on over” and “get cool in the waves of the pool,” and that’s exactly what countless visitors did.
Billed as the largest outdoor saltwater pool in America, the park’s wave pool opened on June 8, 1913. It featured tons of sand to make an artificial beach, a wave machine and a waterfall at one end. It was an instant hit.
It was also quite the feat of contemporary engineering. Most obvious was its size. According to the Palisades Amusement Park Historical Society, the pool’s not-quite verified dimensions rang in at an impressive 600 feet long and 400 feet wide. That meant the pool boasted the square footage of five football fields.
More impressive, maybe, were the pool’s hidden workings. Inventor William F. Mangels, the developer of the system by which carousel horses move up and down to simulate galloping, built a wave-making machine. Once installed, it used paddle boards to push water around and create waves. Meanwhile, the park pumped salt water all the way up the Palisades from the Hudson River, filtered it and poured it into the pool every day. The pool was even drained and cleaned every night.
Why all that effort? Tom Meyers, secretary of the Fort Lee Historical Society, says Nick and Joe Schenck, the brothers who owned the park from 1910 to 1935, wanted to compete with a certain island in Brooklyn.
“They had everything Coney Island did except for the beach, waves, and salt water,” Meyers says. “They managed to get all three with that pool, which is pretty amazing.”
While the pool remained wildly popular among swimmers and sunbathers for decades, it wasn’t all fun and games. The Palisades Sun & Surf Club effectively restricted the pool to whites only until the early ’50s. That policy changed in part because • the Congress of Racial Equality protested at the park in the ’40s.
Just as the Cyclone stopped spinning and the Matterhorn went dark, the wave pool dried up when Palisades Amusement Park shuttered on Sept. 12, 1971. Crowds, congestion and the general disruption of coexisting with one of the country’s most popular amusement parks prompted Cliffside Park officials to rezone the land as residential property, and the park and its famous pool drifted into legend.
2 Boys Tumble 75 Feet
Roll Down Bank of Palisades to Henry Hudson Drive
A game of “cops and robbers” ended in near-tragedy for two young boys ! here this evening when a tree to which they were clinging at the top of the Palisades gave away and allowed them to roll down a seventy-five foot bank onto the Henry Hudson Drive.
The two boys, George and Richard Hubscbman, 7 and 5 years old, or this town, received severe cuts, and bruises. They ended their fall in front of a truck of WPA workers who were working on the drive and had warned the boys earlier in the afternoon. The men took them to the police, who rushed them to the Englewood Hospital, where their condition was said to be fair.
According to their companions, who were questioned by authorities, the younger boy was clinging to tree limb which began to sag. His older brother went to his rescue but could not hold the limb. Richard had just been picked up by the WPA workers when George came tumbling after.
