‘Recently rode my motorbike from Toronto, Canada to Wichita, Kansas to document Joyland, an abandoned amusement park. The park operated from 1949 to 2004 and contains the largest (intact) wooden roller coaster in North America. Unfortunately the park has been heavily vandalised but I was able to take a bunch of photographs before being kicked out by the local police. The cop told me it would probably be demolished soon.’
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This capsule was curated by Andrew Horne
I used to go to Joyland all through childhood. One of my aunts still has an old video of a trip there. It truly was a treasured place for people in Wichita. Really miss that place!
It’s sad that it became what it is today..abandoned. I have enjoyed that old wooden coaster since the 1970′s and even more so when I had the kids who enjoyed it with me. I wish the young man who argued the city re-open it had succeeded, but I really don’t know all that went on in that quest. Sad to see such an icon gone.
I only remember two things about Joyland. The first is that roller coaster. It seemed like the biggest thing in the world, and was my first foray into thrill-seeking. The second was an animatronic clown that played a piano near the front gates. That thing creeped me out to no end!
I question the claim about this being “the largest intact wooden roller coaster in North America” without some data to back this up.
-”BB”-
so sad! i wonder why it is abandoned? why do we let things we love become this way?
I went to joyland as a kid and later worked there running rides. This photo set is lame, they are all pictures taken from the parking lot. They didn’t get the main hill or the station of the Coaster.
The clown has a name and the organ was an antique Wurlitzer, but if it wasn’t playing then the park wasn’t open yet. You tune it out easy enough.
The park is in a crappy part of town that no one wants to go to. It was built around WWII when wichita was tha “Air-Capital of the World” making tons of war planes. The city has grown past it and the immediate area is delapidated. Aerospace is still the main player.
The coaster is in no way the biggest wooden coaser, never was. It was always ranked favorably by the american coaster enthusiasts because the braking system was entirely manual/human powered. Lots of leverage tricks in the machinery attatche to that 6 foot tall wooden lever someone had to pull every run.
They had race problems in the 60s and it never fully recovered.
Stan Nelson, the guy who owned it, was a Veteran who was nice in his old age. i hear he is gone now. The Nelsons ‘hired’ a company to manage the park and they pretty much embezzled the place in to a trash heap. It will never recover now.
The kid who wanted to revive it with a loan from the city is an idiot with a fetish for rollercoasters. The people won’t support it. They wouldn’t support a new park either. The Wichita city council is so demb they might buy into it someday to add to their list of stupid failures.