Why did the Excelsior Amusement Park on Lake Minnetonka close?

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It was once Minnesota’s Coney Island. A century ago this May, a wooden roller coaster began rumbling high above Lake Minnetonka as Excelsior Amusement Park was born.

From that opening 1925 season to its final days in 1973, the lakefront park came to define summertime fun for generations of Twin Cities kids. In later years, thousands turned up with report cards in hand to participate in an unforgettable schoolkid promotion: “Free Rides for Good Students.”

Reader Dave Campbell, who grew up in Bloomington, fondly remembers childhood trips to the park. “It was always wonderful, especially when I was tall enough to ride the wooden roller coaster,” he said.

Campbell has often wondered about the place’s demise. He asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project: “Why did the Excelsior Amusement Park on Lake Minnetonka close and what happened to the rides?”

There are many myths about the park’s final days. Lake Minnetonka Historical Society President Lisa Stevens spends time busting false theories and misremembered moments.

No, it didn’t close because people started going to Valleyfair in Shakopee instead (that park didn’t open until 1976). It didn’t close because business was floundering (the park’s last season was actually one of its best, financially).

Instead, it was done in by a combination of factors, including its hemmed-in lakefront location and the direction of amusement park trends at the time, said Greg Van Gompel, author of “Excelsior Amusement Park: Playland of the Twin Cities.”

“It was a matter of, ‘How are we going to continue to get people to come to our park and to expand out in new major rides?’” he said.

A Detroit amusement park operator named Fred Pearce built Excelsior Amusement Park starting in the winter of 1924. The park was well located at the end of the streetcar line on the southern shore of Lake Minnetonka in Excelsior.

The site included 10 acres of swamp, and Pearce constructed some of the rides on pilings above the wet ground. When the park’s signature wooden roller coaster was first built, teams of horses lifted its frame into place using pulleys.

The ride was the park’s “most popular attraction from the day it opened until the day it closed,” Van Gompel wrote.

Stevens, who grew up in nearby Deephaven, remembers that coaster well. It was an antique by the time she rode as a high schooler in the 1970s.

“It was a big, rickety thing, and it was scary, not just because it kind of went over the lake,” she said. “You just weren’t sure whether you were going to make it or not.”

From the beginning, there was no cost to enter Excelsior Amusement Park, which was open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Visitors paid to ride attractions or buy food. Initial attractions included a brand-new type of bumper cars called Skooters, aerial swings, a miniature railway and a novel ride called the Caterpillar.

There was also a classic Ferris wheel that offered beautiful views of the lake, and a hand-carved carousel crafted by the renowned Philadelphia Toboggan Company, according to Van Gompel.

When it first opened during the park’s third season, the Funhouse was a groundbreaking attraction. There was a spinning barrel that visitors would try to walk through without falling, a giant slide with burlap sacks and startling air jets that would make girls’ skirts fly.

During the hard times of the 1930s, many parks, including Wildwood on the shore of White Bear Lake, closed. Excelsior’s park weathered the Great Depression, offering free attractions like a high-wire artist called “The Wizard of the Wire,” and even high-diving ponies

Starting in 1943, the Miss Minnesota pageant was held at the park. It also came to be a very popular place for company picnics. In later decades, Danceland, the pavilion at the park, hosted popular teen nights and a few historic concerts.

In 1963, the Beach Boys played a free show inside the park and a later Danceland concert for radio station WDGY’s “High School Night.” Posters advertised the band would be “Singing Their Hit Records!” and that “All Rides Are Free 5-7 P.M.!”

It proved a little too popular. That very month, the band’s “Surfin’ USA” peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. Teens flooded the concert from across the Twin Cities, filling not only the venue but the surrounding streets.

“It did stop traffic from all directions,” Stevens said.

The next year, Danceland manager Ray “Big Reggie” Colihan booked an up-and-coming band called the Rolling Stones. Hoping to draw a more manageable crowd, he did little to promote the event, Stevens said.

“He didn’t advertise. He didn’t tell anyone. They hadn’t really hit yet. And they started playing, and nobody came,” she said.

In the end, only about 280 people turned up, according to a Hennepin History Magazine account.

While teens still flocked to Excelsior, the world of theme parks was already changing. Disneyland, which opened in 1955, ushered in a new era, said Van Gompel. The original Six Flags, called Six Flags Over Texas, opened in Arlington in 1961. These new, modern parks had many more rides to keep visitors there, spending money, for as long as possible.

In 1971, Excelsior Amusement Park’s owners faced a pricey city assessment for a sewer improvement project. At the same time, taxes and land values were climbing for the lakefront site.

Fred Pearce Jr., who had taken over the park from his father, hired a former Six Flags vice-president to do a feasibility study. He wanted to know whether the 17-acre Excelsior Park could add other “major thrill rides to continue to drive attendance,” Van Gompel wrote in his history of the park.

The study confirmed that there wasn’t space to support more big rides or the visitor vehicles they were hoping to attract. “The park was old … it was badly lacking parking,” Pearce said, according to Van Gompel’s book.

Pearce decided to develop lakefront condominiums on the site instead and look elsewhere to build a new, modern park, said Van Gompel.

He partnered with IDS Properties, which was developing parcels of land east of Shakopee, on a new park that would become known as Valleyfair.

Excelsior Amusement Park extended that final season and closed on a chilly Sept. 16, 1973. Condominiums and a restaurant — today, it’s Maynards — eventually rose in the park’s place.

Some of the Excelsior Amusement Park rides ended up at Valleyfair, although just one — the century-old carousel — is still operating, said Van Gompel.

Contrary to an enduring urban myth, the park’s famous wooden roller coaster did not end up at Valleyfair.

It was torn down and destroyed. Some of its cars survived. One is now part of a permanent exhibit at the historical society’s museum, along with a Funhouse mirror that still inspires kids to shriek at their distorted reflection.

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