Trolley Park: Midway Memories

- [Narrator] Next on Trolley Park, Midway Memories, visit one of the oldest trolley parks in the country.

- When I think of Midway Park, I think of the bumper cars and riding on those things with my friends and just having a ball.

- Midway Park makes me think about roller skating.

That's my main happy memory of Midway Park.

- Midway Park reminds me of summer.

- [Announcer] This program was made possible in part by the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation working with donors to support the causes they care about now and into the future.

And by the John R. Oishei Foundation, whose mission is to enhance the economic vitality and the quality of life for the Buffalo Niagara region.

A proud sponsor of Trolley Park Midway Memories.

Additional funding provided by the following.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] There was a time in this country when, in almost any city, you could ride a trolley.

In the early 1900s, trolley companies operated over 17,000 miles of track.

These companies started buying land at the end of the line, adding picnic areas, playgrounds, and carousels.

These trolley parks helped usher in the golden age of amusement parks.

Once, there were over a thousand trolley parks.

Now only a dozen remain.

This is the story of one of those trolley parks.

(gentle music) - [Woman] My earliest memory of Midway is when I was quite young and my grandmother belonged to the First Mission Church and they had their picnic here and she took me with her.

But my skating years, I lived in Mayville.

So we'd go down the bottom of the hill at the trolley stop and hope that somebody went by that we knew.

And if they didn't, we took the trolley, came down to Midway.

It was just where everybody went.

- [Woman] And we'd come to Midway Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sunday nights.

You were able to come here and do so many things.

You could skate and you could be in that arcade once in a while.

But mainly it was skating for us.

We always went down during intermission downstairs to the bar, and that's the first time I had a Tom Collins.

(laughs) - Midway Park is an original trolley park.

It's located on the east side of Chatauqua Lake, halfway between Jamestown and Mayville.

So it started in 1898 as basically a picnic ground, but by the early 1900s it was adding attractions and rides, they built the big Hippodrome.

We had a toboggan slide that went down into the lake.

(jazzy music) You know, it became a major draw for this area.

When you see the poster collection that they had, Glen Miller and big bands and what have you through the '30s and '40s, it was a venue on the venue stops in its day for whatever popular music was leading the way then.

In the era where the trolley ran between 1898 when the park opened and the late '40s when it closed, when everybody was buying their own cars and they didn't use the trolley anymore, that was the main way of getting to the park.

And the old stories that we've heard through Friends of Midway, people enjoyed picking up the trolley at various spots and taking it to Midway.

The trolley to Midway pretty much followed along what is now Chatauqua Avenue.

So once the trolley entered the grounds at Midway Park, it would stop right outside the Hippodrome, the roller skating building.

At that time, they had swimming facilities, so folks would go swim in the lake.

They'd have the dances and the roller skating upstairs.

They'd have the restaurant, the bar, and I'm told, a shooting gallery downstairs.

Everybody loves the sort of timeless, it's always the same here, it's like going back in time.

And so it is when you go up to the park.

(birds singing) - Lake Chatauqua is a large lake right in the center of western New York, Chatauqua County.

Jamestown is at one end and Mayville is at the other.

The first street railway, the Jamestown area was the Jamestown Street railway, that was 1884.

It was a good way for traveling the muddy and rutty streets of the day.

Before that, people were having to hook up their wagons and get out and the roads were not that good and they were muddy.

The trolley tracks went down the center of the road or between little cities and villages, and it was a nice clean way to get from point A to point B.

It was all about ridership.

The more people you had taking the car, the more money the, the line made.

The owners of the trolley and the streetcars decided that there's another way we can get more money, and that's to create a park somewhere where it's not too easy to get to yourself, but the trolley or the streetcar can take you right there with no trouble at all.

And that's pretty much the idea behind the whole Trolley Park idea.

This is Jamestown Street Railway, trolley car number 93.

We had a restoration project started back in 1996.

I was at the gym playing basketball and I was telling a friend about my interest in local history, and he told me about the trolley car that was on their property.

I probably should have just left it there, it was in pretty bad shape.

But long story short, I met up with Jim Mitchner, the main craftsman on the job.

He was a woodworker and most of the things in here, Jim had his hands on, you know, all the mahogany.

I used to call it the mahogany assembly line.

Every piece of mahogany was sanded down, refinished and varnished, and it was a real treat for us the day when we started putting the pieces back on.

(laughs) Well, when I was a a kid, my father worked for Marlin Rockwell in Jamestown.

They always had their company picnic and it was at Midway Park.

The best thing I remember about it didn't have so much to do with the park, but they had the big piles of sawdust and they threw a bunch of nickels into the sawdust and the kids would just jump in there and try to find everything they could, and that was fun.

But we'd have these little coupons and things and we'd go around, we'd be able to use the rides and get refreshments and play the games or whatever.

And that was the fun thing for me.

- Midway Park, around 1939, was bought by Thomas Carr.

He's the one that actually started incorporating the rides into the park.

And in the 1950s, the Walsh family bought the park from Thomas Carr's Estate, Allan Herschell, which was a amusement park manufacturer in North Tonawanda, near Buffalo.

And what they did is they designed special rides that were made for the smaller children.

So they're really getting in that two to five year range, which really, there wasn't a lot of rides before that for the smaller kids.

And then Walshes and Thomas Carr, little by little, one by one brought those into the park.

(kids squealing) My favorite ride when I was a kid was we had this big red, white and blue slide.

It was a metal slide.

I would say I was eight to 10 years old, I can't remember, and my grandfather's company was a local paint factory in the area.

We used to come here for their company picnic every year.

And when we would come, it would just be my grandma and grandpa and my cousins and my sister and I.

And we would come and they would just give us long armloads of tickets and we would just go up and ride the rides all day long.

I remember Midway Park so fondly because I came here with my family.

I have wonderful memories of my grandparents here.

(garage door creaking) (machinery buzzing) Midway Park is one of the oldest, continuously operating amusement parks in the United States.

The crew at the park takes great pride in their work.

Their whole goal here is to carry on the mission of really making sure the park is here for future generations.

(ride whirring) - Yeah, can you go down?

- Yep.

(water splashing) - It hasn't been run in a while.

- One of my earliest memories when I first came here, we came here for a factory picnic.

And the first thing that caught my eye was just the go-carts.

I want to go ride the go-carts, I want to be in the go-carts, I want to drive the go-carts.

You feel nervous, 'cause the first time you're driving a car and you're like, oh wow, I'm going to drive this.

And you are all nervous and you got all these butterflies going around your stomach.

But once you start running the car, everything just goes away.

It's really, really amazing to see a park like this still have all the old rides the kids used to love back in the days.

(tractor engine roaring) - The hook will be right here and that will lay over there.

That's what keeps it- - From flopping out.

- Yeah.

- If we lost one of those carriages, it wouldn't be good.

We would have to search the country, possibly even junkyards, just to find a replacement, they're so unique and obviously they don't make 'em anymore.

And whoever has 'em knows that they got a piece of gold because they could pretty much name their price.

The engine and the entire train got overhauled 10 years ago maybe.

But 10 years is a lot on the engine, because the thing runs, sometimes, seven hours a day nonstop.

So, eventually things just wear out.

Like on the kiddie coaster, the Little Dipper there, a lot of the parts have to be custom made now, sections of the track and stuff.

I mean, when you have 80 years of wear and tear on, you know, banging around on all that metal.

Same with the carousel.

The sweeps up top, you know, you really got to pay attention and maintain them, because if you can't get the parts, you have to get 'em custom made.

Oh, here we go.

(engine starting) My grandmother's house is probably, oh, a half a mile away, and they couldn't really tell me that Midway wasn't open because I could hear the train horn.

Every time I heard the train horn I'd ask somebody to take me down the Midway.

I wouldn't always get to go, but once I was old enough to ride my bike, I'd just take my bike down here and whatever money I had, go ride rides or play in the arcade.

Riding around on the helicopters and being the last one to let my helicopter down, parents yelling at me to let the bar out, and I was up there laughing 'cause I didn't want to come down.

Everybody waiting on me.

(laughs) - Midway has made its name, pretty much, as a young kid's park.

They don't have huge roller coasters or thrill rides.

But a lot of the kiddie rides, they're made by some of the classic amusement ride makers, the Herschel Company, the Mangels Company, those kinds of things that you don't see much of anymore.

But Midway's been able to preserve them.

The Walsh family started their ownership of the park in 1951.

Walshes had made it known in the mid 2000s that they were interested in moving on and selling the park.

So this community started to worry that it was going to be sold to a developer who would tear down the park and put in a condo development, or that kind of thing.

Maple Springs has a special relationship with Midway Park.

Families from this community have been going to Midway with their children, their grandkids, for years and years and years.

- When I heard that Midway Park was coming up for sale, I and many of my neighbors were concerned, first off, that we would lose the park, because the park has been such a part of our history and what draws people to this area.

But also receiving a postcard showing what the tract of land looked like, we realized that the park owns a whole lot more land than what the rides occupy.

And we were concerned that further development of that land into either condominiums or a trailer park or a campground or something like that, would add tremendously to the density of the population in the area.

A group of just normal local people got a letter-writing campaign, then we had petitions signed by everybody in the area.

Everybody was interested in saving Midway Park.

- Local people who were thinking about the future and knowing that the state was in a little period of opportunity, I guess, when money was there and they wanted to develop more park amenities in the western part of the state.

So Dalton Burgett and some local folks who had influence in Albany and had the Governor's ear eventually interested them in this deal.

And it came together in 2007 under Governor Pataki.

And he came, made an announcement that we value what's been here for these hundred-plus years and we want it to be here for another a hundred-plus years.

So in 2007 when the state acquired Midway Park, it became Midway State Park.

New York State has a tradition of having friends groups buddy up to state parks because they help with volunteer energy, they raise extra money, they do little projects that help the park do some special things.

So the Friends of Midway State Park started in 2010 at the invitation of the park manager.

We adopted a mission to keep restoring attractions at the park that kept with that late '50s kind of feel that we all considered to be kind of the heyday of the park's glory.

Since then, we've helped them purchase a couple of rides, and that's still the agenda that we're on, pretty much, is figuring out the rides that were common to the era of the late '50.

You know, The Twister and the Ferris Wheel are the next ones to go in.

We're looking for a Paratrooper and other rides like that that were common and that the park actually had.

The state didn't continue with the roller skating because the building was considered unsafe.

They didn't continue that much past the couple of early years.

But right over there on that bureau, there's a pair of roller skates which were given to us by the park.

(flowing music) - My earliest Midway memory, it's probably the skating rink.

It's old and it's traditional and friendly.

The fact that it's small is what makes it friendly.

I really am a lifer, a Midway Park lifer.

I've been going there since I was four.

And my daughter and grandson spent their childhoods at Midway Park.

The skating was basically our social life, and so we would go there a lot.

Then there were also dances there.

I remember when I was in ninth grade there were DJs that used to come, real rock and roll singers who had actually made records.

Rockin' Robin Tweet, tweet, tweet Rock, Rock, Rockin' Robin Tweet, tweedle-dee-tweet Go Rockin' Robin 'cause we're really going to rock tonight - Gentleman by the name of Jim Rosselli, in his early career, he went to Midway and was our local Dick Clark.

So I would go to the sock hops, and one time I went with my cousin and we had a great time, and he was the one that spun the records and we danced in the skating rink.

And everybody went to those sock hops, all the teenagers went there.

It was the place to be and be seen.

Well, the first time I took Bill to Midway, we hadn't married yet, we were still dating.

I don't have vivid memory of really taking him to Midway Park, the memories I have are more after we married and moved back here.

He was in the service and went away to school and finished his degree work and we came back here.

I'm sure we found our way to Midway Park and he he fell in love with it as we all do because it's so unique.

And even today when we drive by the park, when it's up and running, and you know, summers are very fleeting here, and you blink your eyes and it's July 4th and the next thing you know it's Labor Day.

So when we would go by the park most summers, sometimes we'd stop along the road and just watch that train go by.

That always brought a smile to my face, and it still does.

(train whistle blowing) (gentle music) (doors opening) - These are fun.

(children chattering) - Woo-hoo!

(train whistle blowing) - Woo!

- yeeaah!

- Woo-hoo!

(engines roaring) (train whistle blowing) - Car.

- Yep, okay, we'll ride those cars.

(train whistle blowing) - So basically when you ride the train, you're- - You're going around Midway and you get to enjoy the view.

- You basically get a tour of Midway.

- Without anybody talking.

- Yeah.

- [Jeremiah] Okay, that one you can go high and there's like fake guns you can shoot.

The helicopters over there, if you push the bar, you'll go high.

If you pull it, it'll go low.

- There's also a Tilt-A- Whirl.

With the Tilt-A-Whirl, you can just spin.

So it'll just like spin around, and then what you're in, those little carts you're in, they will also spin.

- Oh, Fun Slide!

I know the fastest.

I know the actual fastest slide.

- Yeah, it's pink.

- No it's not pink.

And there is the ones over there where you're like, and you got to spin this wheel.

And if you spin it so fast, you'll get dizzy.

- Fun.

- Really fun.

- Well, I hear children laughing and having a good time, and a little screaming on the some of the rides as it might scare them.

And the merry-go-round and the music, that merry-go-round.

And that was really a big part of going to that park is hearing that instrument play that was part of that merry-go-round.

- When I think of Midway Park, I think of the bumper cars and riding on those things with my friends and just having a ball.

- Midway Park makes me think about roller skating.

That's my main happy memory of Midway Park.

- Memories.

Me, my brother, my sisters, we were here.

Me and my brother looked around, and when we saw those go-carts, like, oh wait a minute, we want to go over there.

And we didn't care about nothing else, we just wanted to go to the go-carts.

- Midway Park reminds me of summer.

I'd be in my grandma's yard, bored Then I hear the train go and my eyes just light up.

And alls I'm thinking is, who am I going to try to con into bringing me down to Midway today?

(laughs) - Almost everybody in this community can latch onto whether it's their own personal memories if they grew up here, or those of their kids being attached to certain rides or certain features of the arcade.

Everybody's got those memories and that's what keeps you coming back.

(carnival music) (bells dinging) (kids chattering) - [Announcer] This program was made possible in part by the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation, working with donors to support the causes they care about now and into the future.

And by the John R. Oishei Foundation whose mission is to enhance the economic vitality and the quality of life for the Buffalo Niagara Region.

A proud sponsor of Trolley Park, Midway memories.

Additional funding provided by the following.

(bright music) (bright music)