Strangely Enough
Through the years as all these wonderful parks have closed forever, many still have devoted fans. The volumes of information available on them is tremendous, wonderful, and yes sad too. The haydays of these parks are the things that memories are made of, and the kind you just don’t easily forget.
With all the noise made about and around the various closings I can’t help but paraphrase something I read. That is if these parks made noise about their fate, they knew the eventuality, and often there was great ‘news’ made. Lincoln park on the other hand seems to have quietly laid down to rest, no hoopla no fanfare, just quietly slipping into the past.
There are a lot of organized sites that list defunct parks, and oddly enough or perhaps not Lincoln is quite often not there. It’s as if it was our little secret, our place to go and we kept it close to us. This website is our attempt to rectify this, and bring to light the huge part it played in so many of our lives.
There is , however and fortunately, a lot of random bits scattered srond the net about our little secret place, and with some help from other kindred folk we can make this ‘the place’ to find out, explore and learn about the park.
The thing I stumbled on that prompted this post started off as simple as most thing are , was to find out more information about the Comets designer Vernon Keenan. This lead me, as so many web searches do along a winding path, from the creative talents of the Dark rides Edward Leis (who collaborated on the comet) all the way to the owner. Oddly many sources say it was John Colins others say Jay Colins, perhaps they were brothers ? or just an oddity in the records.
Anyways I found Lincoln Parks sibling that being Mountain Park in Holyoke. Both parks shared many of the same creative talents. From what I was reading these parks very much felt the same, and their patrons (us) have similar memories and passions. Coincidentally and oddly enough the inception of both Lincoln and Mountain are eerily similar from their humble beginnings as the Street Railway stops, both purchased and developed by the Collins family.
That all said I have added a new category in the Links page for ‘Other Collins Parks’ with several links to excellent articles and sites that clearly detail Mountain in its glory, to its closing and a few that show what has come of it. So take a look it certainly felt ‘familiar’ but different…..
-Pete