She was staring down into a sea of fire. Her body was covered in sweat, she shook with fear and wanted to call for help …
But still she couldn’t move. Gripped by panic, she barely heard the murmurs of alarm and apprehension floating up from the crowd.
No one was more alarmed than Adele, who saw her daughter standing there swathed in flame and knew something was wrong. In all the times she had seen Toni perform, she had never seen her hesitate more than a few seconds before diving. And yet here she was, nearly engulfed in flame, and still she didn’t move. What was wrong, what was she think—
Oh, God. Suddenly, Adele knew exactly what Toni was thinking.
By now Toni’s body was drenched with perspiration, the sweat dripping down her forehead and into her eyes. She wiped it away with her sleeve, but it was the only movement she seemed capable of.
Where was the Human Torch? Where was Bee Kyle? She could command these flames to retreat, couldn’t she? But there was no one to come to her aid, and her nose twitched at the smell of burning canvas …
“Toni!” came a voice from below. “TONI!”
She looked down.
Her mother was standing by the tank, calling up to her: “Jump, Toni! You have to jump! Do it now, Toni! Go!”
The cars in the parking lot exploded like firecrackers and her mother said, “Let’s go!”
Toni finally shook off her nightmare and jumped.
She plummeted straight down, dragging a comet’s tail behind her, the bubble of heat surrounding her almost unbearable as, below, a tank of writhing flame beckoned … with just six feet of open water in the middle.
Threading the fiery needle, she plunged safely into the water, the flames on her back sizzling and sputtering, a steaming waterspout dousing the ring of fire. Toni relaxed her body, threw back her head and arms, slowing her descent into the now tropically warm waters.
She was alive—but no thanks to herself.
She flutter-kicked upward, and as her head broke the surface she was greeted by cheers and applause from the crowd.
She knew she didn’t deserve it. She had screwed up, almost fatally.
Arlan stood on the walkway, and beside him was Adele, conspicuous in her magician’s costume (sans high heels, which she had kicked off).
“Honey, are you okay?” her mother called out over the applause.
Toni swam over to the ladder.
“You—you saved me,” Toni said wonderingly. “Again.”
Arlan offered her a hand up the ladder, and on reaching the walkway Toni embraced her mother with tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I thought I saw—”
“I know,” Adele said. “Believe me, I know.” Even though her daughter was sopping wet, Adele never wanted to let go. But she smiled and said, “We’ve got to make the crowd think this was all part of the act.”
Toni nodded. “Follow my lead.”
She took her mother’s hand and led her to the front of the walkway surrounding the tank. Then she raised Adele’s hand in a victory salute.
“If you think this was miraculous,” Toni called out, “go straight to the Palace of Illusions to catch the next performance of—the Magical Adele!”
The crowd laughed—it was all a stunt, after all. They hooted and cheered, Toni took her bows, then she and her mother climbed down the ladder and hurried behind the stage.
Arlan had a bottle of water for Toni as soon as she got there, and she chugged it down almost in one gulp.
“My God,” she said softly, “I could’ve died.”
“But you didn’t,” Adele said. “Thank God.”
“Ella can have her damn fire dive—I am never trying that again.”
Adele looked her square in the eye and said, “Don’t you dare.”
Toni blinked in confusion. “What?”
“Don’t you dare give up,” Adele told her. “You can do anything you set your mind to, Toni. You can be anything you want to be. Don’t you ever think you can’t.”
Toni hugged her mother and held her tight, as she had on that fiery day twenty-two years ago, the years between vanishing in a puff of smoke.
The Last Days of Palisades
BY
JACK STOPKA
THE PARK SLUMBERS through the long winter, weighted down by ice and snow, dreaming of spring. It dreams of its infancy before the turn of the century, of the trolley cars that came clanging up the hill to The Park on the Palisades and the passengers who came to enjoy its gardens, picnic groves, and shaded paths overlooking the Hudson. It dreams of its childhood in the first years of the new century, and of the visitors who now sought out more worldly attractions like a Ferris wheel, games of chance, balloon flights, a dancing pavilion, and a high diver named Arthur Holden. The park grew along with the century, reaching adolescence in the ’teens with the Big Scenic Railway and saltwater pool, and adulthood in the twenties with the addition of a sideshow, two new coasters, even an opera company.
As it drowses beneath its quilt of snow, it dreams of all the people who flocked to its midways: men, women, and especially children, the joy the park brought them, the laughter that was like oxygen for the park, which breathed it in as it floated up from the Cyclone, the Funhouse, the Wild Mouse, the Carousel. But there are dark moments, too—fires, accidents, deaths, robberies—as there are in anyone’s life.
Shaking off sleep, the park wakes to the familiar sounds of workmen repairing, repainting, and remodeling the rides and concessions. By April, visitors are again thronging the midways, flying high above the park on the Sky Ride, being whipped around the steel curves of the Wild Cat, or piloting a rocketship on a Flight to Mars. In May the park pool opens, officially marking the start of summer. On the surface there is nothing to indicate that this summer of 1971—the seventy-fourth summer in the park’s life—will be any different from the ones that preceded it.
Nothing except the faltering heartbeat of Irving Rosenthal, who has for the past thirty-five years been the heart of Palisades Park. But the increasing crime, the recent accidents in which two youngsters died—a girl thrown from a ride, a boy gruesomely drowned, trapped beneath a toy boat in a shallow channel—all these things are a weight on his heart. The towns of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee want the park gone, along with the thefts, noise, and traffic congestion it attracts, and in 1967 they rezoned the land it sits on for residential development. Rosenthal’s faith in himself and in the park has always been strong enough to keep the towns at bay, but now his heart is failing and his faith has faded. He longs for the son or daughter he never had, someone to take over Palisades, to make it new again.
But there is no one, and even before the final season begins, in March of 1971, Rosenthal has made his decision.
And so at the end of the 1971 season in September, Irving Rosenthal announces that he has sold Palisades Amusement Park, for twelve and a half million dollars, to a real estate developer from Texas who will raze it to the ground to build high-rise condominiums.
Everyone but the park is shocked.
Irving Rosenthal is only two years older than Palisades itself; they have grown old together, grown accustomed to the rhythm of each other’s heart, and each somehow knows that the time left to them is brief.
Concessionaires who have worked here for decades now strip bare their display cases for the last time and empty the stock in their storerooms. Palisades has been more than just a livelihood for them, it’s been a family, and for some, a family business for generations. So they mourn its death as they would one of their own, along with thousands of heartbroken children and adults for whom Palisades was also part of their family.
If laughter is the park’s oxygen, grief is an opiate, numbing and dulling the surgery that is soon under way.
Ride operators begin dismantling rides they have lovingly tended for years—dismembering the arms of the Octopus, stripping the canopy of green skin from the Caterpillar, using a giant crane to pull the steel ribs out of the Ferr
is wheel three at a time. The magnificent Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel, Irving’s pride and joy, is painstakingly taken apart and preserved—from the antique paintings, mirrors, and “gingerbread” woodwork atop the carousel to the hand-carved horses embedded with rhinestones. Rosenthal refuses lucrative offers for it, hoping to find a buyer who will keep it intact and operative for a new generation of riders.
Many of the rides will be sold off, in whole or in part, to other amusement venues: the Flight to Mars will rocket to Gaslight Village in Lake George, New York; the Roto-Jet flies to Whalom Park in Massachusetts; the Love Bugs find a new home at the Canadian National Exhibition; and the coaster cars from the Cyclone will again carry passengers around hairpin curves at Williams Grove Amusement Park in Pennsylvania.
So far the dismantling has been done with surgical precision, but the biggest and most beloved of the rides will experience the most brutal end.
John Rinaldi, the park’s most recent superintendent, finds new employment with a local construction company. Rinaldi’s first job: to tear down Palisades Park.
As the heavy demolition equipment begins to roll in, sending threatening tremors into the park grounds, the numbness of grief gives way to something new, as the park understands for the first time the fear that every human being already knows: the fear of death.
The Cyclone, seventy-nine feet tall and two blocks long, has been Palisades’ most defining feature for decades—the backbone of the park. At first Rinaldi tries to respectfully dismantle it, track by track, timber by timber—but the Cyclone literally refuses to bend to his will and the old lumber made from white pine simply falls apart in the attempt. The wooden colossus built by Joe McKee is not so easily dismembered, clinging to life as stubbornly as any human.
In the end, John Rinaldi does what he has to do. He attaches thick steel cables to the Cyclone at three different locations, then hooks the cables up to the biggest bulldozers he can find. When he gives the signal, the bulldozers rumble off in three different directions.
The bulldozers literally pull the Cyclone down, breaking its back, its wooden skeleton collapsing in on itself. Metal track that has survived for decades tumbles to the ground along with the shattered uprights that once held it aloft. Chains that once pulled the roller coaster’s cars come rattling down like falling shackles on an executed prisoner. The Cyclone crashes to earth amid an enormous cloud of sawdust, dirt, debris, and dreams.
The park’s spine has been broken. It can no longer feel anything.
In this painless limbo, it dreams again. It dreams of music. Opera. Swing. Rock and roll. Last night I took a walk in the park. It dreams of young people dancing—fox trotting, jitterbugging, twisting. A swingin’ place called Palisades Park. It remembers every burst of laughter that escaped every passenger on every ride, now only memories to give it breath. We took a ride on a shoot-the-chute. Every daredevil who ever drew a gasp from an audience, every boy who ever stole a kiss in the Tunnel of Love or at the top of a Ferris wheel. That’s where the girls are! It remembers the orphans for whom the park was not just a diversion but a miracle, and the girls who died on the Virginia Reel, and an eleven-year-old boy in 1922 who had never been as happy as he had been at Palisades Park.
Palisades has the rides,
Palisades has the fun,
Come on over …
Eight days after the Cyclone falls, a fire erupts in the pool’s bathhouses; no one will ever know why. Within minutes the park is ablaze for the last time, hundred-foot daggers of flame piercing the sky, consuming the bathhouses, pool, and Circus restaurant. Embers blow in burning clouds over the cliffs, commanding attention from across the Hudson as the towering PALISADES sign once had. It takes three hours and six engine companies to contain the fire, and at the end of it, the park is no more—just a blackened, demolished shell of an enchanted island that brought so much joy to so many. Palisades Amusement Park has gone out in a blaze of glory, put on its final show, and taken its final bows.
The following year, its impresario, Irving Rosenthal, takes his.
CLOSING BALLY
Hazard’s Dock, 1974
IT WAS A CLEAR, sunny morning in April, and from the driveway of her house on Valley Place Toni could see a light wind combing the surface of the Hudson, the whitecaps catching the sun the way it used to glint off the tiny crucifix he wore pinned to the collar of his T-shirt. The Hudson had begun its daily tidal push north and back, its cycle of centuries. “I follow the river,” he once told her. “The river never has plans either.” She wanted to cry.
High above, on the summit of the Palisades above Edgewater, construction crews were erecting twin monstrosities, high-rise condominiums, on the bluffs where Palisades Amusement Park once stood. Toni thought of her brother’s wistful eulogy to the park published in the Bergen Record’s “Voice of the People” column after Irving Rosenthal’s death last year. Irving might have been the heart of Palisades, but for Toni, the soul of Palisades had been Bunty Hill, and now he, too, was gone.
She got into her car and began the short drive to Hazard’s Beach.
The news had stunned everyone; Bunty had always been the very embodiment of robust health, and last September, on his seventy-second birthday, he had again commemorated it by making his sixtieth crossing of the Hudson. Then just weeks ago, what seemed like a bad cold took a turn for the worse and into the hospital, where he passed away of pneumonia.
Toni couldn’t believe it when she first heard. Not Bunty—he seemed eternal, everlasting, like the river he loved. It seemed even more of a mistake at John G. Heus & Son’s Funeral Parlor in Fort Lee, where the name on the guest book read: JOHN HUBSCHMAN. She didn’t know anybody named John Hubschman—she knew Bunty Hill, and he couldn’t be dead.
But as the wake got under way and Toni approached the casket and saw his creased face, like worn granite, in unnatural repose, she knew the truth—that only the river was eternal.
It was a simple, modest service, like the life the man himself chose. Among the small group of mourners were friends like Toni and Eddie, Tommy Meyers and his family, as well as a Hubschman cousin named Betty. At one point a group of about fifteen youngsters came in: thirteen, fourteen years old, they were the latest graduates of Bunty’s college of swimming, Hudson River history, the picking of racehorses, and above all, learning the importance of doing your best, of becoming your best self. They filed up to the casket one by one, each murmured a prayer, then left.
About halfway through the wake a young woman of about thirty entered, walked up to the casket, knelt to say a prayer, then placed a single red rose on the casket and left. No one knew who she was and no one asked. Tommy Meyers thought she might have been one of the thousands of people Bunty had saved from drowning over his forty-one years as a lifeguard, someone who might not be walking the earth today but for him.
Toni said a prayer over her friend too. This would be the last time she would ever see him like this, but not her last opportunity to say goodbye.
That came today, on this bright, warm April morning.
Toni parked her car off Henry Hudson Drive and made the short hike along a dirt path that ran beneath the George Washington Bridge to Hazard’s Dock—Bunty’s dock, where he spent each day in the sun, at times entertaining and teaching youngsters, at times sitting alone reading, enjoying the beauty of the Palisades and the Hudson, but always watchful.
Already gathered at Hazard’s were Tommy Meyers, Eddie, and a few of Bunty’s other pals from Palisades and Fort Lee.
“I guess this is all of us,” Tommy said as Toni joined the group. “As you all know, Bunty asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the Hudson—partly because the river had been so much of his life, and partly because over the years he’d seen too many kids sneak down to the river to swim and he’d have to pull them out when something went wrong.
“He told me, ‘I want my ashes in the river in case any kids from town have trouble there—so maybe I can be there, in a way, to
help.’”
His voice broke a little as he said it. Toni had tears in her eyes.
“Since the Hudson’s a tidal river,” he went on, “Bunty’s ashes, just scattered every which way, could end up as far north as Albany or as far south as Tierra del Fuego. So we got this idea for a special kind of … anchor.”
Tommy held up the small cloth bag containing Bunty’s ashes—and tied to it was a bottle of his favorite Ballantine Ale.
Eddie laughed. Toni laughed. They all did.
“Perfect,” Eddie said. “All that’s missing is crackers and cheese.”
“And a racing form,” someone else suggested.
One by one Bunty’s pals came up, briefly held his ashes in their hands, and said a few words of farewell.
When it came Toni’s turn, her eyes brimmed with tears. “Follow the river, Bunty,” she said. “You showed me how to follow mine.”
She handed it back to Tommy to do the honors.
Tommy turned to face the river, tossing the bag and its anchor of ale into the welcoming waters of the Hudson. Bunty vanished under the waves, returning to the river he loved, of which he would now always be a part.
* * *
Eddie, his arm draped across Toni’s shoulders, walked his daughter back to her car as she sought to compose herself. “You going to be okay?”
“Yeah. I just need a minute.”
“Want to come back to the restaurant? We’ll drink a toast to Bunty.”
“Another time, okay? I’m doing a fire dive tonight at Coney Island. Arlan’s set up the equipment but I need to go over and check the rigging with him.”
“Jeff and Dawn doing okay?” he asked.
“Dawn loves her new acting teacher at NYU, but Jeff’s still a little unsettled at Rutgers. He’s thinking about changing majors.”
“Late bloomers run in the Stopka family,” Eddie said. “Except for you. You knew what you wanted to do right from the start.”