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Last
night I took a walk after dark
A swingin' place called Palisades Park . . .
For Chuck Barris, writing "Palisades Park" was a way station en route to his real
destiny of developing "The Gong Show."
For Freddy (Boom Boom) Cannon, singing the song was a path to the Top 10 in the
summer of 1962.
For millions of New Yorkers, the song was truth.
I took a ride on the Shoot the Chute
The girl I sat beside was awful cute
And
when we stopped, she was holdin' hands with me . . .
Palisades Park, just over the Hudson on the Jersey palisades, wasn't the swankest
or the slickest amusement park around. Truth is, it was kind of square. But it was a good date, a fun date, an affordable
date. It said summer and it made you feel young.
And it was a swingin' place.
From the time Irving and Jack Rosenthal bought Palisade Amusement Park from the
Schenck Brothers in the mid-1930s, they saw their big challenge as getting warm bodies inside. If they did that, the pennies,
nickels, quarters and dollars would take care of themselves at the game booths, the rides, the concession stands and the rest
of the joint.
From the start, then, the Rosenthals' Palisades Park offered the carrot of free
popular music - from vaudeville acts and swing bands through rock 'n' roll, which would become the park's last and loudest
musical signature.
Rock 'n' roll also fit perfectly with Irving Rosenthal's idea of a show: He wanted
artists popular enough to draw crowds but not so popular they'd cost a lot of money to hire. He wanted artists who would draw
patrons in but not keep them away from the paid attractions for too long.
To get these artists, Rosenthal devised the brilliant strategy of hooking up with
radio's popular disk jockeys.
Hardly a one of them - from Hal Jackson to Dan Daniel, Clay Cole, Murray the K
and Cousin Bruce Morrow - did not emcee at Palisades Park. The deejay helped round up the talent, which was easy to do when
you could play that artist's records over a New York radio station. In return, Rosenthal splashed the deejay's name all over
the bill.
Bruce Morrow would become the best-known of the Palisades Park deejays. Cousin
Brucie took the stage in a leopard-skin suit with a white shirt and bow tie. He would harmonize with Tony Orlando, dance with
4-year-olds in the twist contest, get hoisted aloft by pro wrestlers. And he'd bring on the music, one act after another.
On a typical Saturday in the early 1960s, you could have seen Fabian with Bobby
Lewis, Chuck Jackson, the Shirelles, the Regents, Frank Gari, the Echoes, Jo Ann Campbell, the Viscounts and the Rays. If
you came back Sunday, you could see Chubby Checker, the Bobbettes, Bob Crewe, Nino and the Ebbtides, the Jive Five, the Mello
Kings, Timi Yuro, the Earls and the Mystics.
The pace was fast. Herd 'em in, herd 'em out. By the time the show reached the
two-hour mark, Morrow would hear Rosenthal yelling from offstage, "End it!" so everyone would head back to the rides.
A lot of the singing was lip-synched, since Rosenthal was hardly going to pay
for a band. The "production studio" was under the stage, a hotbox where an engineer would cue the record with which the artist
would sing along.
After they did their numbers, the artists would often walk forward to the lip
of the stage, which was about waist-high, and shake hands or sign autographs. It was a folksy arrangement in which most artists
didn't mind participating. The Ronettes were big favorites. Motown acts, from the Supremes to the Temptations, were regulars.
"To play Palisades was to enter a garden of fans ready for the picking," Morrow
remembered later. "These were not jaded pleasure-seekers apt to be fickle. These were simple folk, easily impressed, pleased
and won over. Give them a good performance and they'd buy every 45 you put out."
Whatever Rosenthal's plan, Palisades became an institution, outlasting state-of-the-art
competitors like Freedomland precisely because it was a slice of Middle America.
We ate and ate at a hot dog stand
We danced around to a rockin' band . . .
You'll never know how great a kiss
can feel
When you're stopped at the top of a Ferris wheel
When I fell in love
Down at Palisades Park
The Chuck Barris/Freddy Cannon song captured that feeling. But after Palisades
closed in 1971, many came to feel that its musical signature and finest epitaph was its ad jingle, written by Rosenthal's
wife, Gladys Shelley, sung by Steve Clayton and featured on New York radio perhaps a million times in the 1960s:
Palisades has the rides
Palisades has the fun
Come on over
Shows
and dancing are free
So's the parking, so gee,
Come on over
Palisades coast to coast
Where a dime buys the
most
Palisades Amusement Park
Swings all day and after dark
Ride the coaster
Get cool in the waves of the
pool
You'll have fun
So Come on over.
Originally published on June 21, 2004 | 
