Adirondack Theme Parks and Attractions

A wide-ranging history of twenty family-centered commercial attractions that flourished in the Adirondacks over a one-hundred-year period.

Adirondack Theme Parks and Attractions offers an in-depth history of the diverse array of family-oriented attractions that originated in this upstate New York region during the hundred-year period from the late 1870s. It highlights some of the creative, unconventional entrepreneurs who came up with the ideas for these centers of family fun, including
· Joseph S. Sterling, whose two farms designed for the breeding of animals for the fur-coat trade morphed into popular wild animal attractions
· Arto Monaco, designer of Santa's Workshop, two Gaslight Villages, Old McDonald's Farm, later iterations of Storytown, and his own Land of Makebelieve
· Arthur L. Bensen, whose initial interest in America's historical "frontiers" led to cowboy-themed Frontier Town.
· Charles (Charley) R. Wood, who imagined Storytown, as well as one Gaslight Village, and eventually oversaw an amusement-related business empire in the Lake George area
· Thomas J. Yund, and his enthusiasm for astronomy that laid the foundation for future-oriented Time Town