Lakeside Amusement Park - Lakeside, CO
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Outspoken1
N 39° 46.825 W 105° 03.213
13S E 495414 N 4403387
Lakeside Amusement Park was renovated in the Art Deco theme in the 1950s by Richard L. Crowther
Waymark Code: WM9K1C
Location: Colorado, United States
Date Posted: 08/27/2010
Views: 6
This wonderful historic park, oldest amusement park in Colorado, is still family owned and run by the Krasner family. Benjamin Krasner bought the park in the 1930s and gave it a wild Art Deco makeover, with the aid of renowned architect Richard Crowther (
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“I had come to Denver from California,” says Crowther, who is still practicing architecture in his eighties. “Out there I could do anything I wanted. Denver was much more traditional, but Mr. Krasner wanted the park to be modern. I always felt Mr. Krasner himself was very conservative, but he understood the amusement business and realized the park needed a new look. Some things, however, he didn’t want touched. I wanted to do something with the tower, but he wouldn’t let me. Said it was too much of a landmark.”
Nevertheless, Crowther had a free enough hand to turn out a remarkably uniform and pleasins sroup of Hieh Deco buildings. Using neon as his predecessors had used incandescent bulbs, he created sinuous signs and etched his buildings with the rainbow-hued tubes. In front of each ride he set a new ticket booth that might have jumped off the cover of Amazing Stories—delightful buildings, as sleek and stylized as the Bakelite radios of the era, and not so very much larger.
The new look helped business; so did the Second World War, which brought thousands of young men and women to Denver’s military facilities and turned them loose on weekends with money in their pockets. After the war a few new rides came in from Europe, but the basic transformation that Crowther had worked remained remarkably intact. (From (
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