Willow Grove Park

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This article is about the former amusement park. For the shopping mall that now occupies its site, see Willow Grove Park Mall.

Willow Grove Park was an amusement park located in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania (the part which is in Abington Township) that operated for eighty years from 1896 through the 1975 season. The park also operated under the name Six Gun Territory for a short while just before closing (1972-1975). After closure, announced in April 1976, the park sat vacant until the land was cleared for a large shopping mall also known as Willow Grove Park which opened in August 1982. The mall pays homage to its predecessor by displaying banners and other objects which harken back to the land's days as an amusement park; a merry-go-round built and installed in 2001 also operates within the mall.

The park was originally conceived by the local traction company (Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company) as a trolley park to encourage weekend ridership on the trolley line. Willow Grove was for a long time one of the premier amusement parks in the United States, until being eclipsed by the openings of Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ, Disneyland and other more modern theme parks beginning in the 1950s.

One of the biggest attractions in the park was the music pavilion, at which John Philip Sousa and his band played all but one year between 1901 and 1926. The pavilion was demolished in March 1959.

A documentary of the park was created in 1991 titled "Life was a Lark at Willow Grove Park" [NTSC / 1991 / 50 MINS]. The title is based of the popular park slogan "Life is a lark at Willow Grove Park".

A book from Arcadia Publishing entitled "Willow Grove Park" (2005) includes over 200 photos of the park and is the only comprehensive history of the park published thus far. The thoroughly researched book also correct many of the historical inaccuracies that have grown-up surrounding the history of the park.

[edit] Willow Grove Park, named Paradise

James A. Michener wrote a novel entitled The Fires of Spring, telling the story of a young orphan boy named David Harper growning up in a poorhouse in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is near Willow Grove. Harper works at an amusement park named Paradise which is loosely based on Michener's own experiences as a young man when he worked at Willow Grove Park.