Friday, July 03, 2015

Storyland Asbury Park New Jersey

The first thing that comes to mind when most people here Asbury Park, New Jersey is Bruce Springsteen and beach boardwalk. However in the 1960s, it was home to a small Fairy Tale and Western park called Storyland Village. The park closed in the late 1960s as far as I can tell and was redeveloped into a Sear's store. The park sold this small set of souvenir postcards featuring images of the various scenes from the park. I will let the postcard booklet describe each of the scenes found at this cute park. The sets and buildings were designed by cartoonist and illustrator Russell Patterson. Russell was an illustrator including designs for Broadway, covers for College Humor, Judge and Life, window displays for Macy's and the comic strip Mamie. First up is the cover with a nice die cut feature showing the entrance to the park.

Next are 10 views of the park along with the descriptions. (Make sure to click on the image for a larger scan.)

2 comments:

K. Martinez said...

I have a strong nostalgia for images like this. These little storybook style parks remind me of when I was a little kid and my parents took us to Children's Fairyland in Oakland for the day. That seems so long ago now. Thanks!

Nanook said...

Interesting the image of 'Ol Humpty Dumpty wasn't re-compositioned to conform to the horizontal format of the booklet. I guess the powers-that-be figured it was more flattering to Humpty for folks to simply rotate the booklet.

Thanks for sharing these.