Remembering North Jersey's 'Little Coney'

A stone marker in the shadow of a community pool house is the only hint that Bertrand Island Amusement Park existed.

Closed in September 1983, the park that literally transformed Bertrand Island, a small peninsula in Lake Hopatcong in Mount Arlington, now lies under rows of beige town houses.

Small SUVs and compact luxury cars sit in driveways where children and teens once waited to ride the Wildcat, the Whip and the Aeroplane Swing 90 years ago.

“The amusement park helped put the lake on the map as a resort,” said Martin Kane of the Lake Hopatcong Historical Museum. “You always had amusements at the lake, but never in a large format — in what we would call a modern-day amusement park.”

Now it's hard to imagine an amusement park operating on Bertrand Island’s home-lined streets, said Alan Cuda, the grandson of park founder Louis Kraus.

“The property was too valuable,” Cuda said. “Nobody was just going to hang on to that for nostalgia’s sake.”

'Little Coney' on Lake Hopatcong Lakeside amusements included North Jersey's first roller coaster

Lying just north of the Roxbury border, Bertrand Island Park was born on a beach left by developers with grandiose plans to bring a hotel and casino to southern Lake Hopatcong, Kane said.

“It involved some notable local people, who had successful careers in development, but they never developed it — in 1906 when they announced it — other than build a beach,” he said.

The beach, later dubbed “Little Coney,” became a popular swimming and picnic area by capitalizing on the arrival of passenger rail to Lake Hopatcong in 1882. The site’s popularity swelled in 1910 when it became a stop for the Morris County Traction Company trolley from the Landing train station.

The story continues below the gallery.

The delivered crowds spurred intrepid concessionaires to develop beachside attractions, namely food stalls, a pavilion for dancing and amusements. A shooting range, water slide and diving float arrived by 1917.

The beachside revelry caught the attention of Kraus, a Newark teacher who ran Camp Village on the shore of Prospect Point each summer starting in 1909, Cuda said.

“You rented a spot from him to camp, and he’d rent you the tent. He’d rent you dishes. He’d rent anything. You could come up with nothing, literally,” Kane said. “But he thought he’d really like to own a hotel on the lake.”

In 1919, Kraus got his hotel. Kraus and his silent partner Charles Schleicher bought a large chunk of land near the Bertrand Island beach and built California Lodge to cater to visitors. Two years later, the two bought the beach and encouraged concessionaries to rent space and develop new amusements for their new creation: Bertrand Island Park.

“He had this spirit of: Let’s try something else and bring in a little money and develop this piece of property,” Cuda said.

Today, private sidewalks snake along a shoreline transformed under the direction of Kraus and more recently covered in condos. Once an actual island connected to the mainland by a roughly 30-foot bridge, Bertrand Island's 30 acres were permanently linked to the shore to support a Ferris wheel, log flume and roller coaster, Kane said.

The story continues below the video.

Video: Ride Bertrand Island's demolished rollercoaster A first-person video shows a ride on the former rollercoaster at Bertrand Island Amusement Park on northern New Jersey's Lake Hopatcong.

Opened in 1925, the 80-foot-tall coaster started unnamed. It was once called the Cyclone and is best known as the Wildcat.

As North Jersey’s first roller coaster, the $50,000 wooden structure brought 10,000 people to the park in its first week of operation, said Dolores D’Agostino, whose father and grandfather once owned the park.

“The roller coaster became the centerpiece of the park,” Cuda said. “The 1920s is when things got rolling.”

Holding fast Park survives the Great Depression but struggles in World War II

The seasonal park starred during the peak of Lake Hopatcong's resort boom and survived the Depression by hosting daredevil acts, vaudeville shows and beauty pageants — including one of many so-called Miss America pageants during an off year in 1934.

Group outings were welcomed, even when 6,000 Wright Aeronautical employees from Paterson showed up in 1929. Direct bus service, advertisements and a sponsorship deal with “Milkman’s Matinee,” a 1930s radio show, were used to drive attendance, Cuda said.

“My grandfather promoted the park that way, and he got a lot of action,” Cuda said.

In 1937, the regal Illions Monarch II Supreme carousel originally at Coney Island brought prestige to the park. National notoriety also arrived that year, when burlesque dancer and actress Sally Rand performed her risqué bubble dance.

Later in 1937, Miss Bertrand Island, Hackettstown native Elizabeth “Bette” Cooper, was crowned Miss America in Atlantic City at the age of 17 and promptly disappeared.

The story continues below the video.

Video: Miss Bertrand Island talks Miss America 1937 win Hackettstown native and Miss Bertrand Island Elizabeth “Bette” Cooper explains her hesitance to be Miss America after winning the pageant in 1937.

Cooper fled the city overnight with her pageant escort in fear of the demanding schedule, in a move that brought an end to chauffeurs for the pageant’s contestants.

Thanks in part to a new roadside entrance, the park managed to survive beyond the similarly roller-coastered but railroad-reliant Nolan’s Point Amusement Park, which closed in 1931 and again in 1933, Kane said. Still, Bertrand Island Amusement Park struggled during World War II, he added.

The rationing of gasoline, restrictions that required lights off at dusk and the consolidation of the local workforce at Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway and Hercules Powder in Roxbury caused park attendance and revenues to wane, Cuda said.

“There was evidently very little activity,” Kane said. “A number of the rides didn’t even open.”

The impact of the downturn pushed Schleicher to sell his half of the park to D’Agostino’s grandfather — Lorenzo, a park concessionaire — her father, Ray, and parking lot manager Larry Donofrio in 1948. Kraus soon followed suit.

“I think they were old enough, tired enough and had enough debt that they wanted to get out,” Cuda said. “The park then became — I think in the 50s especially and thereafter — more about pure amusements; rides and games at the boardwalk.”

A new focus at Bertrand Island Park Upgrading attractions to meet modern needs

With Kraus staying on as manager until his death in 1955, Donofrio and the D’Agostinos revived “Nickel Nights,” charging just 5 cents per ride on Mondays and Thursdays in a throwback to Depression discounts.

The group also introduced “Kiddieland” in 1951. With pint-sized rides solely for children, the addition helped draw school and church groups to the park.

"We used to get a lot of field trips and day trips up there," said Gay Ann Bucci, who worked the family ice cream stand as a summer job for about a decade starting in 1966.

Improvements such as the Moon Rocket, Tilt-A-Whirl and Tubs 'O Fun — and later the Boomerang and Scrambler — continued into the 1960s. The Aeroplane Swing had its biplanes requisitely replaced with three silver rocket ships from Irvington’s Olympic Park to become the Aerojet.

For the most part, joy reigned, said Dolores Lynch, whose parents ran the carousel. However, the screams when a teenage boy was killed after standing on the roller coaster remain vivid, she said.

Another memory: Several rowdy members of the Pagans Motorcycle Club were shooed off the carousel by Lynch’s toy-mallet-wielding mother. Angered, the group went on to eat all the live goldfish prizes from an adjacent game of chance, Lynch said.

“The lady actually had to close and go to Dover to get more goldfish,” she said.

The story continues below the video.

Video: Bertrand Island Amusement Park's 70s commercial Bertrand Island Amusement Park produced a 30-second commerical in the 1970s, as the park on Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey was struggling to sustain.

In the 1970s, the narrow, home-lined roads on and around Bertrand Island increasingly became home to year-round residents. Many began wondering how long the park could withstand its location, Kane said.

“They couldn’t really expand with any of the more modern rides, and on both sides was a residential neighborhood,” Kane said.

The daily carnival was no longer trending, D'Agostino said. The closure of Olympic Park in 1965 and Palisades Amusement Park in 1971 was countered with the opening of one-ticket theme and safari parks in Jungle Habitat in West Milford and Great Adventure in Jackson.

“The theme parks took away from everything,” Lynch said. “The mom-and-pop parks just started going under, just like when the Walmarts come in a town and some of the stores have to close up. It’s progress, but we didn’t call it progress.”

The last ride Bertrand Island Amusement Park shutters after 61 years

Lynch's father, Joseph DeLorenzo, sold the hand-carved carousel in 1972 to Barnum & Bailey for their theme park experiment Circus World in Florida for $68,000 — a lot of money for a carousel at the time, Kane said.

"I just remember that Labor Day weekend we just went on that carousel over and over again because we didn't want to forget it," said Bucci, the ice cream worker.

Lynch said her father sold the ride believing park closure was imminent. However, the plan to develop the land with condos shifted, Lynch said, spurring DeLorenzo to buy a fiberglass carousel from Flint, Michigan, for the 1973 season.

The replacement carousel was no match for the former carousel, Cuda said. Lynch said her mother would hear those sentiments even while out shopping at the grocery store.

“People were very upset with my parents, [but] they didn’t realize how upset my parents were,” Lynch said. “They didn’t own the land. They were forced to sell.”

Fifteen years later, just two of the ride’s 48 horses would be sold for more than $250,000. Lynch said the family had little clue as to the climbing value of the ride.

Meanwhile, park insurance costs, the one-ticket theme parks and lakefront real estate values continued to rise, Cuda said.

With development inevitable, Cuda’s father, who ran the food concessions, was asked to leave in 1976, he said. Two years later, in 1978, D’Agostino's father, Ray, sold the park to Gabriel Warshawsky.

The small, aging park continued to operate under Warshawsky, but only as a stopgap enterprise until development permits could be secured, Cuda said. The park then began to fall into disrepair.

"It was a phenomenal, magical place in its time. It's too bad that, due to places like Great Adventure, it didn't work out," Bucci said.

Bertrand Island Amusement Park closed on Labor Day 1983. That same year, the park served as a film set for Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo.” One scene shows the coaster’s start house, which was demolished in 1986.

“The park had its heyday and then its sunset song,” Cuda said. “This was the last hurrah.”

Many still gripe about the monotone housing complex, Lakeshore Village, that covered the park grounds in 2003. Bucci said she calls the complex "Alcatraz."

"They've got to be the ugliest condos I've ever seen," she said.

More than just offensively bland to Bucci, the 80 residential units conceal a past that shaped the lives of entire families.

“That’s where I grew up … and that’s also where I met my wife,” Cuda said.

Lynch said she fully expected to fall into the family business and looks back on the park’s demolition with a twinge of regret.

Nostalgia: New Jersey's iconic Fairy Tale Forest to re-awaken in fall

Mountain Creek: ‘Action Point’ brings back memories of dangerous rides

New Jersey: Posh lake communities evolved from weekend getaway cabins

“It was in my blood,” Lynch said. “When I would go back home to visit my family, we’d ride up there and we’d just sit in the car and cry. It was horrible.”

Without Bertrand Island Park churning the action, Lynch said, Lake Hopatcong seems “deserted.”

Kane and Bucci both said that if the park could have lasted another decade, it might have been able to ride a wave of nostalgia to survival. But keeping a developer off that prime piece of lakefront property was an impossible task, they added.

“It was here for 70 years. Its time had come and gone,” Kane said.