The Rosenthal Brothers: 1934-1971
In 1934 or 1935, Nicholas and Joseph Schenck sold the site for $450,000 to Jack Rosenthal and Irving Rosenthal. The Brooklyn brothers and entrepreneurs had built a fortune as concessionaires at Coney Island. They also owned some concessions and a carousel at Savin Rock Park in Connecticut. The Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster was built by the Rosenthals in 1927, and is still running today (not to be confused with any of the Traver Cyclones). There was another Rosenthal brother, Sam Rosenthal.
In 1935 the park was partially destroyed in a fire, and in 1944 a second fire erupted. The fire closed the park until the start of the 1945 season.
The Rosenthals restored the park's previous and most recognizable name, Palisades Amusement Park. At the start of World War II, the Rosenthals sold the Cyclone coaster at Coney Island to Silvio Pinto who operated until it was sold to the city of New York in 1969. The city put it up for a bid for someone to operate it in 1974 and Jerry Alberts from Astroland won the bid and operated the ride until Astroland's closure after the 2008 season. It is not yet known who will operate the Coney Island Cyclone in the future.
One of the many attractions, rebuilt and redesigned by construction superintendent Joe McKee, included the Skyrocket roller coaster. The Rosenthals named the newly repaired coaster the Cyclone after their beloved Coney Island coaster. Later, Joe with his construction foreman Bert Whitworth, went on to build the Wild Mouse roller coaster in 1958.
The park's reputation and attendance continued to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to saturation advertising and the continued success of the park's music pavilion, Caisson bar erected during the Schencks' ownership era. In the mid-1950s the park started featuring rock and roll shows hosted by local disc jockeys Clay Cole and Bruce Morrow, also known as "Cousin Brucie," and starting in the 1960s, Motown musical acts performed. The park's renown extended far beyond the New York City metropolitan area, as advertisements for it were frequently run in the back pages of 1950s and 1960s comic books. The Rosenthals realized that NYC-area youths represented the largest single market for comic books in the nation, and thus comic book advertising was a cheap way to reach thousands of potential customers. In 1962, Chuck Barris wrote and Freddy Cannon recorded a song about the park, "Palisades Park," which got nationwide airplay and boosted the park's fame even further. "At Palisades and Salisbury Parks the rolly coasters are flyin'" is a line from the Beach Boys' song "Amusement Parks U.S.A." from their 1965 album Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). Radio and TV commercials in the New York metropolitan area encouraged the public to, "Come on over!".
Behind the music stage lay the park's worst-kept secret: a hole in the fence used by local children to sneak into the park without paying admission. Despite the fact that the Rosenthal brothers knew all about this breach, it was purposely left unrepaired. Unlike more modern amusement parks that sell unlimited ride passes, Palisades Amusement Park charged individual fees for each ride and attraction inside the park in addition to the entrance fee. Feeling that children, who had little money to start with, would be more willing to spend it once inside if they had more left after entering, Irving Rosenthal, a man who loved children even though he had none of his own, allowed this "secret" entrance to remain and instructed security personnel to ignore anyone sneaking through it. The same thinking led Rosenthal to saturate the market with free-admission offers printed on matchbooks and in other places. He owned an advertising company that put up billboards known as "three sheeters" all over New York City. In addition, parking was free for the same reasons, but as the park began attracting bigger and bigger crowds in later years, the onsite parking lot became less and less adequate, often rapidly filling to capacity. An overflow parking lot was opened at the bottom of the cliff in Edgewater, NJ with shuttle buses carrying visitors back up to the park. Once the lots were full on weekends, traffic coming from the George Washington Bridge would be sent down the road towards the Lincoln Tunnel and the traffic coming from the tunnel would be sent towards the bridge, with no real place to go. Consequently many visitors were forced to park their vehicles wherever they could find a spot on nearby side streets (in some cases, up to several miles away) and local business establishments, clogging traffic and taking up street parking spaces, much to the great frustration of many area residents.
Read more about this topic: Palisades Amusement Park