Lakeside Amusement Park: Denver's White City
Near Boulder, Colorado
On Memorial Day of nineteen oh eight, fifty thousand people poured into a new amusement park on the western edge of Denver to see something they had never seen before: a full acre of electric lights blazing in the shape of a miniature city, surrounded by a lake and a midway full of rides.
The park was called White City, after the luminous nickname the original Chicago World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three had given to its exhibition grounds. In Denver's version, one hundred thousand white light bulbs ran along the rooflines and towers, so many that the glow could be seen from miles away. The park cost an estimated eight hundred thousand dollars to build, a stunning figure for the era, and it featured fifty different amusements including a casino, a ballroom, a theater, a skating rink, and Greek statuary lining the promenades.
Denver brewer Adolph Zang and his group founded the park, which went through several ownership changes, including a nineteen thirty-five purchase by Ben Krasner, before settling into a long family stewardship that would carry it through the entire twentieth century. The name was eventually changed to Lakeside, after the body of water at its center.
The crown jewel of the modern park is the Cyclone roller coaster, which debuted on May seventeenth, nineteen forty. Designed by Edward Vettel, the Cyclone is an all-wooden coaster of the kind that defined the pre-war era of American amusement parks, its structure creaking as the trains climb and drop. It is one of the last works by Vettel still standing anywhere in the country.
Lakeside is today one of the oldest operating amusement parks in the United States and the oldest in Colorado, a survivor of thirteen decades of economic cycles, suburban sprawl, and the theme-park arms race that swallowed so many of its contemporaries.
