Description: The Official Palace Amusements Online Museum. Dedicated to Asbury Park's National Register of Historic Places seashore arcade, from 1888 to its sad demise in 2004 at the hands of developers.
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At the southern end of Kingsley Street, between Lake and Cookman Avenues in Asbury Park, New Jersey, is a 36,000 square foot graveyard of memories. Until May of 2004, a building stood here, perhaps the most identifiable landmark on the Jersey Shore. Then, as dawn rose over the waterfront, developers used a giant mechanical claw to rip apart 116-year-old walls that had survived it all - hurricanes, fires, abuse, neglect, all, that is, until falling at the end to a combination of politics and greed.
Photo copyrighted by Peter Szikura. For 100 active years, those wooden walls anchored Palace Amusements, a place where people came to spin, to fly, to literally soar through the roof, to rediscover delirium and to laugh at fright, a place of creativity and ingenuity, ever changing, ever suited to the tastes of generations that were confronting great shifts in the world around them.
This place, this Palace, expanded over time to become an L-shaped arcade in five parts, all under a series of interconnected roofs. Its carousel bore the signature of America's greatest carvers of wooden carousels. The rotating wheel carried passengers for more years than any Ferris wheel in American history. Some of the best known and most creative amusements manufacturers in the world infused the Palace with excitement and fun. Designers, painters, mechanics and electricians - enormously talented and larg