Requiem for Whalom Park

For a Whale of a Time!

There’s an alternate universe in which my teenage friends and I spent the occasional Saturday at Whalom Park, not because we were all that interested in its arcade and single roller coaster, but because it was nearby. I can imagine us easily, sitting around my friend’s parents’ basement like we did every weekend, desperate as we always were for something to do. The guys had wrestled each other until they were out of breath and bruised, and we had run out of movies to watch, and the strip games we’d entertained ourselves with had stopped being as interesting now that most of us had lost. So someone suggests Whalom Park, and someone else groans, and we waffle for half an hour, and maybe the groaners win out, but every once in a while, they don’t.

When you’re below the drinking age in even semi-rural America, your weekend entertainment options are remarkably limited. Your wallet is thin and your car is almost as old as you are. Drinking is still an option, but it requires careful planning. You can’t exactly go to any nearby bars, because even if by some miracle the bartender doesn’t clock you as a minor, the charade will certainly be over when you almost inevitably run into one of your teachers, and so the activity is best reserved for when a friend’s parents are out of town.

The average age of the residents of your hometown is upwards of fifty, and they have made their disdain for you clear. The spaces they have left available to you are few and far between, often overpriced or poorly maintained, and sometimes both. Even if it weren’t for your teenage ambivalence, the venues you’d occasionally crawl out of your basement hovels to haunt would be exceedingly lame. But sometimes you do anyway, because it will at least provide a break in the monotony of sitting there for the tenth weekend in a row.

So you suck it up, and you pack five a piece into your friends cars, and you go to Whalom Park because your parents brought you there as a kid, and even if it’s not as fun now and they only have a few rides, it’s twenty minutes away and admission is only fifteen dollars, and you fear that if you stare at the nail gun-punched indents in the grey plaster paneling of the basement walls for even a minute longer, the shallow lakebed of your sanity may finally dry out. And maybe you enjoy the roller coaster, but mostly you and your friends complain the whole time, and you make jokes and wonder how this relic from the turn of the twentieth century is still operational.

Or, you would, if it had survived the twentieth century.

Whalom Park opened its doors for the last time on September 4, 2000. Somehow, I remember this, barely. I remember crying when my parents told me it was closing, and then willfully refusing to believe this news—and almost succeeding when weeks went by without another word on it—until one night my mom was cooking dinner and she left NECN on the TV in the living room so that she could hear it from the kitchen, and I watched them cover the story from where I sat on the carpet.

I had been to Whalom Park once in my short life, when I was still young enough to be carried on my parents’ hips. My memories of it, of which there are two, are still images, metaphysical photographs. I remember being carried out of a building—their roller rink, if I had to guess—and I remember a carousel, both on a bright, warm day.

We all like to believe our memory is immutable—myself especially—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit to at least some probability that these are mere flashbulbs invented by the knowledge that I had once been to Whalom Park, and that in fact my memories of it are as long gone as the park itself. 

Whalom Park opened officially in 1913 on Lake Whalom, in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. It was one of the first amusement parks in the United States, a trolley park—imagine Coney Island’s little sibling—consisting first of gardens and walking paths before it had even become Whalom Park, and later adding, one by one, your standard theme park rides. As I understand it, it was a fairly big deal for much of the twentieth century.

Though it was no Disney World—nor, in fact, Coney Island—it had around a dozen rides and another handful of attractions, including a ballroom, the purposes of which I can only guess at. Whalom Park still ticked all the right boxes. Even if it only had one roller coaster, everything else you’d expect to find was there; a carousel, a ferris wheel, a tilt-a-whirl, and a swing ride (a personal favorite) branded the Yo-Yo, among others, many of which you can see featured in The Cars’ music video for their 1982 song “Touch and Go,” if you’re willing to withstand some very eighties music and videography. 

Though perhaps unremarkable as far as amusement parks go, it was a well-loved figure of central Massachusetts for nearly a hundred years. Despite this, by the time my generation had just begun to peak into the world, it had entirely ceased to be profitable.

I have no real proof to support the idea that a teenage version of me would have found Whalom Park insufferably uncool. It’s more a gut feeling than anything, but the fact of its financial failure does bolster that argument, as does the fifteen dollar day passes they were boasting back in 2000, which seem remarkably cheap even through the lens of twenty years of inflation.

In this alternate universe where my friends and I spend our teenage years taking pot-shots at Whalom’s continued existence, we have no notion of what we might otherwise be mourning. We are only aware of the ways Whalom Park failed to meet our expectations. In this way, there is a silver lining to its closure—I will never grow old enough for Whalom Park to disappoint me, as it otherwise might have. 

There is, of course, always the possibility that Whalom would have maintained the glory of its heyday through my adolescence and that I would have loved it as much as generations of park-goers had—though, again, its inability to keep itself open makes me think the chance is slim.

Wikipedia has, on each of its articles, a discussion section—a tab labeled Talk at the very top of the page that, unless you’re one of their editors, your eyes have probably automatically glossed over. It’s used primarily by moderators to keep track of changes to the page and for viewers to suggest new ones. Clicking on that tab on any well-trafficked page will lead you to backlogs of maintenance.

But the brief biography of a small New England amusement park that is now two decades defunct is not one of Wikipedia’s more well-trafficked pages. Under its Talk tab, there are two comments, the latter of them—anonymous—from 2008, titled Whalom Will Be Missed. “My parents would take me there on a regular basis also from Worcester, MA. It truly was my favorite place to be as a kid. Very sad that it won't be redeveloped,” it reads in its entirety.

The other comment, preceding that one, is much longer, untitled, and written entirely in lower case, but the commenter identifies herself as Cindy Forrest of Nashua, New Hampshire. “when i was little, my parents took me to whalom park. that was one of the happiest times i remember as a child…a couple weeks ago i was down there. everything is gone except for the old carousel building and an old blue building way out back. everything else is cleared out…i wish we could bring whalom back, and i would be the first one to step and help, but the inevitable is here,” Cindy writes.

The message is undated, though it’s extremely reminiscent of a long bygone internet age. The grammar, the mere option of anonymity, the fact that it was left at all, back when there was little better to do on the internet than leave a comment on extremely niche Wikipedia pages—a message in a bottle that’s been rolling along the ocean floor for years. But even lacking a timestamp, there’s a fairly concrete window that Cindy’s message must have been left in.

Whalom’s sole roller coaster, the Flyer Comet, one of those rickety old wooden coasters run entirely off gravity that creak loudly when you ride them, only adding to the thrill of near-death, was left up for years after Whalom’s demise, a sad memorial somewhere between a corpse and a headstone. It was visible from the road, locked behind increasingly downtrodden chain link fences and obscured by a few trees, whose leaves littered Whalom’s long untouched walking paths, never to be swept away again.

I remember staring out at it from the backseat of my mom’s car whenever we drove by. If you’re not from Lunenburg, in the post-Whalom Park days, there’s almost no reason to visit. Those drives were few and far between, and with every ride the time elapsed had widened enough that, the upkeep abandoned, the ruins grew noticeably more decrepit, a little more rusted metal and rotting wood and chipping paint each time. I’d learned to anticipate the sight of the park’s remnants when we passed the advertisement painted on the stone bridge that preceded the park on the road. Simple and chipping to the point of almost unrecognizability, the park’s name displayed above a blue whale, with the addition of its slogan—For a Whale of a Time. With every pass by the melancholy glowed deeper in my stomach, a feeling that, at that age, was new and unfamiliar.

The sign, like everything else, is gone now, after two decades of New England weather and zero retouches.

The fact that Cindy makes no mention of the Flyer Comet as one of the last vestiges of Whalom’s existence dates her message to post-2006, the year it was finally dismantled. She can’t, however, have left her comment later than 2007.

I know this because that’s the year the condos went up.

If this was fiction I was writing, I might consider the metaphor of both a local historical and cultural landmark and one of the few sources of entertainment in a rather monotonous area being replaced by a condo complex—beige, copied-and-pasted, once-public land made private—a little too heavy-handed. Luckily for me, this is non-fiction, and so the metaphor stands.

Before the condos went up, the remnants that were left, the slowly decaying bones of Whalom Park were, at least,  something. A reminder that once, however long ago, there was a great thing here, even if all that was left now was a chance at urban exploration—no amusement park, but still something to do, a little trespassing some teenage trouble I’d never be old enough in time to get into, a factor, I’m sure, in why the municipality wanted those bones gone in the first place.

These days, that land is unrecognizable. You could drive past Lake Whalom without ever knowing what was once there—and many do. Whalom Park has been gone so long now that many of the websites dedicated to preserving its legacy are, at best, visually outdated, and at worst, entirely unusable, their code defunct or features reliant on Flash, or their servers forgotten by those who once maintained them. Researching this essay felt like something of an archeological dig, combing through incomplete or contextless relics in search of something concrete. Almost every primary source available is about its demise. 

The plight of Whalom Park is becoming an increasingly common one—though not a historical titan like Whalom, the roller rink where I tried (fruitlessly) to learn to skate is currently in the process of being converted to a UHaul facility, its parking lot dug up and fenced off, though its purple paint job and colorful light-up signpost have so far been left untouched. The closest thing my hometown had to a public pool is now part of a rehab facility—another perhaps overwrought metaphor. Though all these things serve their own practical purposes, so does recreation.

I think often of the Rat Park experiment, a scientific study from the seventies where groups of rats were paired into two different environments—one with as much availability for recreation and play as any rat could dream of, and the other barren. Both were given the choice between water and morphine. The former group rarely touched the morphine, but the latter drank it until it killed them.

There’s a wide array of fault both in this experiment and in the way we think of it—not least to do with the fact that its original purpose was to prove that depriving lab rats of recreation skewed the studies they were being used for, but its legacy and human implications remain a metaphorical kernel stuck in the metaphorical craw of the social sciences.

In the decades since, there’s been much debate as to the exact validity of those human implications. People aren’t rats, for one thing, and there are numerous other factors—ones that can’t easily be recreated by rats—to take into account as to why we’re drawn toward self-destructive behavior in the first place; mental health, genetic predisposition, poverty, just to name a few. But there does remain some consensus over the Rat Park experiment—our environment affects our behavior, and when we’re deprived of entertainment, we will make our own.

When my high school friends and I eventually tired of watching each other wrestle on the sweat-infused, foam-matted floor of an unfinished basement, an option for some relief in the lull of boredom manifested itself in the form of our local Price Chopper, the nearest 24-hour grocery store. We’d drive there when we were fully out of options, past ten pm when nearly everything else was closed, and walk its aisles for a little while, and point out brand names or slogans to each other that we thought were funny, and rarely, if ever, buy anything.

Other times, when the basement wasn’t available, we were known to practice the unofficial pastime of rural America known as “driving around,” in which we sat in a car and talked, and drove down whatever side streets suited our fancy, and passed hours without ever once reaching anywhere more than twenty minutes from home.

Some of our peers smashed mailboxes with baseball bats or got high before school. To each their own.

All this is not to say that Whalom Park’s continued existence would have been the panacea for all teenage apathy within a fifty-mile radius. Whalom Park’s demise is a symptom of a greater problem. The less value we allot to these things, however frivolous something like an amusement park may seem on the surface, the more of them we lose.

Cindy Forrest finishes her comment on Wikipedia’s Talk page, “if the chance should arise someday where that land is up for sale, whether there are condos there or not, i will buy that property, somehow, and bulldoze those condos to the ground, and try to rebuild what so many of us have lost, a wonderful piece of history, and a beautiful place where families can come together and have fun and make unforgettable memories.”

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