Wonderland Amusement Park

Wonderland was a beachfront amusement park in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego, California, which operated from 1913 to 1916. It was the first amusement park in San Diego. The 8-acre (3.2 ha) amusement park was built on or near the Pacific Ocean beach by the Ocean Bay Beach Amusement Center, owned by Herbert P. Snow and managed by Bert Snow. It opened on July 4, 1913 to a crowd of more than 20,000. It featured the largest roller coaster on the West Coast, called the Blue Streak Racer, as well as a carousel, water slide, and carnival games. A menagerie featured "lions, bears, leopards, wolves, mountain lions, a hyena, and 56 varieties of monkeys". Additional amusements were a dance hall, bowling alley, roller skating rink, and salt-water bathing plunge. There were 22,000 tungsten lights which illuminated the park and by the entrance gate with its towering minarets. The amusement park helped to put the community of Ocean Beach on the map for San Diegans. The formerly 2+1⁄2-hour trip to the beach from central San Diego was reduced to a 40-minute trolley ride in 1909 by the construction of the Point Loma Railroad by developer D. C. Collier. The park thrived for two seasons but saw a massive drop-off in attendance in 1915 due to the opening of the Panama–California Exposition in nearby Balboa Park. Wonderland fell into foreclosure and was sold at auction in March 1915. In J

AmusementPark data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).