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Electric Park

$30.00
  • Electric Park

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On May 19, 1907 - 53,000 people attended the opening of the second iteration of Electric Park. Originally conceived as a ploy to bring customers to visit the Heim Brewing Company in 1899 (currently being renovated by J Rieger Co. as the home of their new distillery), the park had grown into an attraction in its own right. Each night, the 100,000 lights that gave the park its name illuminated a roller coaster, scenic railway, carousel, skating rink, swimming pool, bowling alley, alligator farm, dime museum, theaters, dance pavilions, bandstand, penny arcade, shooting gallery, flower beds, a lake, and rental boats. Most alluring were the nightly performances of costumed young women who danced to a colorful electric light show on a platform on a large fountain in the center of the lake.

The park, sometimes known as Kansas City's Coney Island, continued to serve the city's greatest amusement park for nearly two decades. šŸŽ”

After Elias Disney moved his family to Kansas City in 1911, a nine-year-old Walt and his younger sister Ruth became regular visitors to the second Electric Park, which was a mere 15 blocks from their new home at 30th and Bellefontaine. šŸŽ¢

Walt would later take many features of the Kansas City Electric Park (including a train whose track ringed the park grounds and the daily fireworks at closing time) and incorporated them into Disneyland when he started developing the plans for the layout of the park that he opened in 1955.
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Unlike many of its contemporaries, the Electric Park's grounds were meticulously maintained with landscaping designed to accentuate the park's rides and other attractions, a trait that Disney insisted to be maintained in Disneyland.
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The second Kansas City park burned to the ground in 1925.