![]() ![]() from Rochester posted about how “incredibly steep” the plunge was for kids. “You hoped to get to cozy up to your first boyfriend and get a kiss in the tunnel. “It was Lovers Lane,” wrote Melanie Wollke Wagner. The book notes that Over the Falls became “an operational and maintenance challenge.” And while some people who posted memories of Over the Falls on Facebook mentioned the stink, more posted affectionate recollections. “The water smelled like a combination of the nearby dirty toilets and Irondequoit Bay.” By 1976, Kurycki wrote that the “smelly journey” which included “bumping through old, ill-kept tunnels” wasn’t worth it. ![]() “As a kid, nothing frightened me more,” she wrote. Mary Rita Kurycki wrote about the ride in a 1976 Democrat and Chronicle story. Filtration may have been an issue, as the water, at times, was, well, stinky. In later years, though, it wasn’t soap that some riders remembered. They slip and slide all over the place.’” ‘The kids are riding as if they’ve never seen it before. A park employee said the soap would be flushed from the water, “but not before a lot of fun was had. “Suddenly, it seemed as if every youngster wanted to take a bath,” the story reported. A 1965 Democrat and Chronicle story described one of those incidents as “a mass of soap suds.” On at least a few occasions, pranksters made a soapy spectacle of Over the Falls when detergent was dropped in the water. Over the Falls was in the middle of Seabreeze (which previously was called Dreamland Park), between the Jack Rabbit roller coaster and a “kiddieland.” The lagoon that was created to hold water for the ride forever changed the landscape in that part of the park, the book notes. Said Jeff Bailey, Seabreeze’s marketing manager, “The Over the Falls cars were built like tanks.” The boats, made of wood bolted to angle irons, were much heavier than the fiberglass version used in the modern Log Flume. The ride had a huge paddle wheel as part of the attraction. The hill was 40 feet tall, the fall quite steep, the splash that followed quite huge. Over the Falls was a bit more of a thriller than Caulfield prefers. I was one of the people put in it to test it. “They put sandbags in (the boats) at first, to make sure they were safe,” said Caulfield, now 85. He worked at the park when Over the Falls debuted and helped caulk the boats to make them water-tight. Matthew Caulfield of Irondequoit is the Seabreeze archivist and historian. ![]() “While Seabreeze’s boats made it through the channel without problems, Euclid Beach’s got stuck and had to be reworked.” “He built them a few inches narrower than the plans specified,” the book states. As the Images book notes, Long realized during construction that adjustments needed to be made to the boats. Longtime park owner George Long had purchased plans for the ride from Euclid Beach Park in Cleveland and had it assembled here. “Most of the parks big enough to buy one have bought one, and those that might not have one, had one at one time and removed it.Seabreeze introduced the ride in 1958 as part of a park expansion. “One of the challenges in the United States is market saturation,” says Futrell. Now log flumes can be found just about everywhere, including new parks in China and the Middle East, but the older rides are beginning to disappear, both because of the aging fiberglass construction and because of the ride’s ubiquity. Some kept the simple logging theme, while others built more elaborate versions, like the Timber Mountain Log Ride at Knott’s Berry Farm. Disney’s Splash Mountain turned the flume ride into a perilous journey complete with animatronics, tunnels, and other flourishes.Īccording to Futrell, the other big innovation that helped spread the log flume came in the ‘80s when the Hopkins Rides company, formerly a manufacturer of ski lifts, began selling cheaper, sturdier log flumes that used cement troughs, which were a more affordable option than the usual fiberglass for smaller and midsize parks. ![]()
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