| Oaks Park | |
|---|---|
| Entrance to Oaks Park. | |
| Location | Portland, Oregon |
| Website | http://www.oakspark.com/ |
| Owner | Oaks Park Association |
| Opened | 1905 |
| Operating season | Spring weekends and daily during summer (rides) Tuesdays-Sundays (rink) |
Oaks Park is a small amusement park located 3.5 miles (5.6 km) south of downtown Portland, Oregon USA, near the Sellwood Bridge. The 44-acre (18 ha) park includes midway games, about two dozen rides that operate seasonally, a skating rink that is open all-year, and picnic grounds.[1]
Contents |
Park rides and midway games are open weekends during spring and daily during summer.[2] Rides include the following:[3][4][5]
The park includes a 100 by 200 feet (30 × 61 m) wooden roller skating rink, open year-round.[6] The rink has had a pipe organ for most of its history; since 1955 it has been a Wurlitzer model with four manuals, moved to the rink from its previous home at Portland's Broadway Theatre,[7] where it had been installed in 1926.[8] All pipework for the organ is mounted on a platform hanging over the skate floor.[7]
The park, conceived as an attraction timed to accompany the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, was built by the Oregon Water Power and Railway Company and opened on May 30, 1905,[9] during a period when trolley parks were often constructed along streetcar lines. It attracted 300,000 visitors during its first season, and continued to attract about that many patrons throughout its first decade of existence.[9]
In the early 1920s, the park was sold to John Cordray, one of its managers. After Cordray died in 1925, Edward Bollinger, Oaks Park's superintendent, bought all but the land from Cordray's widow; Bollinger acquired the land in 1943.[9] The 1948 Vanport flood submerged Oaks Park for 30 days, killing a third of the bluff's oak trees, warping most of the rides, and resulting in damage to the rink that took five months to repair; the next year, Bollinger's son Robert took over after his father's death.[9] The damage prompted the owners to rebuild the rink floor on airtight iron barrels, which would float in the event of another flood; the floats worked as planned during the area's Christmas flood of 1964 and the Willamette Valley Flood of 1996.[9]
From 1958 until 1974, the park was the home of Southern Pacific 4449, the only surviving example of Southern Pacific Railroad's GS-4 class of steam locomotives.
Two years after the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park closed in 1970, the Oregon Journal reported Oaks Park "may be on the verge of a renaissance"; three years later Sellwood's local newspaper, The Bee reported "30,000 people a month still come during the summer."[9]
In 1985, the park was donated to Oaks Park Association, a not-for-profit corporation created by Robert Bollinger.[10] In 1989, the park and the interior of the roller rink were seen in a long sequence in Breaking In, a film written by John Sayles, directed by Bill Forsyth, and starring Burt Reynolds. It also appears in the 1999 PBS special Great Old Amusement Parks.
The park celebrated 100 years of continuous operation in 2005, making it among the oldest in the US.[11]
Oaks Park's skating rink was featured in the 2008 thriller movie Untraceable, and again on TNT's Leverage on the season four episode four "The Van Gogh Job". The park itself was also featured in Free Willy.