Palace Amusements and the Grin of Tillie
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
For a hundred years the Palace Amusements stood near this corner of the boardwalk, a sprawling indoor playground of rides and games. It opened on the seventeenth of August, eighteen eighty-eight, and eventually held a roller coaster, a tunnel ride, and a hand-carved carousel under one roof. But the thing everyone remembers is the face.
In the winter of nineteen fifty-five and fifty-six, a huge grinning fun-face was painted on the building's outside wall. Locals called him Tillie, a nickname widely understood as a nod to George Tilyou, the showman behind the famous Steeplechase Face at Coney Island. Tillie became the unofficial mascot of the whole town, cheerful and a little unsettling, and children waved at him from the beach for generations.
The Palace closed on the twenty-seventh of November, nineteen eighty-eight, exactly a century after it opened. It was demolished in the spring of two thousand four, but not before a group of volunteers called Save Tillie cut the grinning mural out of the wall to rescue it. Those salvaged panels sat in storage for about seventeen years.
Finally, in September of two thousand twenty-one, Tillie came home, mounted on the outside of the Paramount Theatre, still grinning at the sea.
