Saturday, December 19, 2015

Urbex Blog Post #1-Action Park

Hi Guys! This is my first post about Urban Exploration. Our first spot-Action Park! Ok, technically it's no longer abandoned and it is back to being a park again but ah, what the hell. We'll include some gone-but-not-forgotten spots too, once we can think about it. Ok, here goes.


See, this park first opened back in the late 1970's (in particular, the year 1978). Chances are, if you were a kid, teen, or college kid or whatever back in the 80's or 90's, or god, even the late 1970's (the park closed in the late 1990's, particularly 1998, one year before I was born) growing up in the Pines in New Jersey, you may have heard the jingle on the radio or TV going, "The action never stops...at Action Park". There were two sections of the park, Motorworld and Waterworld. Waterworld was were the water slides were located, and Motorworld was the side of the park that had the non-water rides.   The park was marketed towards kids who were what I would call "Juvenile Delinquent wannabes", those who were daredevil enough to brave the numerous slides and imposing attractions at the park. But...well...the park also was unfortunate enough to receive a rather puzzling moniker, "The World's Most Dangerous Amusement Park." There are reasons for why this moniker was granted, and it's not pretty. And if you want to see an ad for the old Action Park, here's a link to a TV commercial for the park back in the 1980's, particularly 1982. Here it is, in all it's cheesy glory:




To say that the park has had a very checkered and sketchy history would be an understatement. There were/are numerous accounts of serious ride-induced injuries to both employees and visitors that would be too many to even count, and even death stories are there. I am not kidding, look up "Action Park" on the Internet, and even though the injuries were not too bad more often than not, the amounts of chaos that happened there. Holy fucking shit. There were "only" six reported major/minor injuries, though if you ask employees and former visitors, they'll actually say there was more than one time when that happened. In fact, most of the harm was inflicted by the slides: In fact between 1984 and 1985, there were quite a few head fractures  The fact that a large number (not saying all, but a lot of them) of the employees were pretty much apathetic and basically untrained and irresponsible little shits who bummed around and didn't give two craps about visitor safety surely didn't help the horrors of many of the more serious stories either, nor did it help that the fact that rules were not strictly enforced or that security guards were almost non-existent at the park during night-time. Most of the horror stories came from the Waterworld section of the park, surprisingly enough. Most of it was, ironically, surrounding the Waterworld's most popular slide at that time: The Alpine Slide. 90 year old women (yikes) and moms with babies rode the slide (really? Who the Hell would take their baby on a ride with them? That's just a bad idea.).

Umm...thing is, the whole rise and decline of the park thing is difficult to explain in detail... so I'll just stay and wait here for now.