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Bell's Amusement Park was abandoned and left to rot, but not because the crowds ever stopped coming.
Explore the rise and fall of Bell’s Amusement Park in Tulsa, a beloved regional landmark lost due to a hidden lease issue despite its popularity.
Key Takeaways
- Bell’s Amusement Park’s success was deeply tied to its unique lease arrangement with Tulsa County.
- Ownership of land is critical for long-term business stability, especially for large-scale operations like amusement parks.
- Even highly popular and profitable businesses can be vulnerable to political and contractual decisions beyond their control.
- Zingo’s wooden coaster is a significant cultural and historical artifact within the amusement park community.
- Community memory and online groups play a vital role in preserving the legacy of defunct local landmarks.
What the video covers
- Bell’s Amusement Park operated for 55 years in Tulsa, becoming a cherished regional institution with iconic rides like the wooden coaster Zingo.
- Founded by Robert Kiwanis Bell, a welder and hobbyist ride builder, the park began with simple attractions and grew into a full amusement park.
- The park’s location on Tulsa County Fairgrounds gave it a unique advantage by connecting directly to the annual Tulsa State Fair, ensuring steady visitors without advertising costs.
- Despite its success, Bell’s never owned the land, operating entirely under a lease agreement with Tulsa County that ultimately led to its downfall.
- Zingo, built in 1968 by renowned designer John C. Allen, became a legendary wooden coaster attracting enthusiasts nationally.
- The park thrived financially, even in its final years, but lease renewal issues and political influences led to the county refusing to extend the lease.
- After closure in 2006, multiple attempts to revive the park failed, and the rides were dismantled or sold off.
- The original site is now a parking lot, but a dedicated online community preserves the park’s memory and legacy.
- Zingo’s dismantled structure remains in storage, symbolizing the lost heritage of Bell’s Amusement Park.
- The story highlights how a beloved business can be erased not by financial failure but by complex lease and political factors.
Chapters
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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For 55 years, this Tulsa fairground institution pulled in generation after generation of Oklahoma families.
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Built one of the most beloved wooden roller coasters in the country by hand and became something closer to a piece of regional identity than a business.
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Then, almost overnight, it was gone. The real reason wasn't bankruptcy. It wasn't bad rides or bored teenagers or a park that had aged past its prime. The real reason was something quiet, buried in the fine print from the very
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beginning. And it's stranger and far more frustrating than most people who grew up riding Zingo ever realized.
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By the time you get to the end of this story, you'll understand why a park that was making more money than ever, more popular than ever, could still be erased from the map in less than 4 months.
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To understand how a place this loved could disappear this completely, you have to rewind all the way back to 1948.
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To a man named Robert Kiwanis Bell. Bell was not a theme park visionary and he was not a carnival showman chasing a fortune. He was a chemist and a metallurgist by training, a welder by trade, and by 1949, he had taken a
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steady job with the post office just to keep the lights on at home. But Bell liked building things with his hands and what he built, almost as a hobby at first, was rides.
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It started small. He built his son a little race car powered by the motor pulled out of a Maytag washing machine.
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Then he built a miniature train that circled the outside of his own house just for the fun of it, just to see the neighborhood kids' faces when it went by.
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Then, working with a neighbor named Fred Erwin, he started building small trains to actually sell to other people.
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Within a couple of years, Bell had constructed around 15 rides of his own from scratch. A merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, and more.
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And he was running some of them at the Admiral Twin, a Tulsa drive-in movie theater, giving restless kids something to do before the film started rolling.
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In 1950, Bell put in a bid to provide children's rides at the Tulsa County Fairgrounds.
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He won it. [music] And in March of 1951, Bell's Amusement Park opened its gates for the very first time with a three-car train and a Shetland pony ride.
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That was the entire park. No roller coasters, no dark rides, no mascots, no gift shops, no snack stands lined up under bright awnings.
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Just a train, a pony, and a man who liked to build things standing at the edge of a fairground, hoping people would show up.
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Nobody watching that quiet opening day could have guessed this [music] tiny operation would still be running 55 years later.
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Or that it would end up woven into the childhoods of an entire region. But the location Bell had picked, mostly out of practicality, turned out to be the single smartest, and eventually the single most dangerous decision of the
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entire story. The Tulsa Fairgrounds gave Bell's something almost no other amusement park in the country had.
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A direct physical connection to the Tulsa State Fair, held on the very same grounds every single year.
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Bell's wasn't just located near the fair. It was fused to it. Every autumn, Tulsa County effectively delivered an entire region's worth of fairgoers straight to Bell's front gate for free, year after year, without Bell ever having to spend a single dollar on
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advertising to bring them there. It was, in a lot of ways, the best marketing deal any small business could ask for.
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It just came with strings nobody bothered to examine closely. And Bell kept building. Bumper cars arrived in 1955, the park's first genuine adult ride, a signal that this was no longer just a stop for toddlers and their ponies.
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A Tilt-A-Whirl and a miniature golf course followed in 1957. Piece by piece, decade by decade, the operation grew from a single train circling a small patch of dirt into a real amusement park, eventually stretching across roughly 10 acres and
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packing in somewhere around 50 rides and attractions. Families didn't just visit Bell's on special occasions, they built entire summers around it, the parking lot filling up early on June mornings, kids craning their necks to spot the top of
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Zingo's lift hill before the car had even parked. But here's the detail that almost nobody paid attention to on opening day, and it's the detail that eventually brings this entire story crashing down decades later.
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Robert Bell never owned that land, not one square foot of it. From the very first afternoon in March of 1951, Bell's Amusement Park existed entirely at the pleasure of a landlord, Tulsa County.
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The same way a renter exists at the pleasure of a landlord who can eventually decide not to renew the lease.
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For more than half a century, that arrangement simply worked. Bell paid his rent, the county cashed the checks. [music] Nobody in the family, and nobody watching from the outside, spent much time thinking about what would happen if that relationship ever soured.
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Until the day it did. And by then, an entire regional institution, with its own coasters, its own dark rides, its own mascots and traditions, had been built on top of a foundation that was never actually theirs to build on in the
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first place. By the 1960s, Bell's had stopped being a modest kitty [music] park and had become something Tulsa genuinely built its childhood around.
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And the moment that transformation really solidified, the moment Bell's went from a nice local attraction to a legitimate regional landmark, arrived in 1968 with the addition of the park's crown jewel Zingo.
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Bell hired John C. Allen, Allan, one of the most respected wooden coaster designers in American history, along with the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, to build a full-scale out-and-back wooden roller coaster on that fairground property.
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This wasn't some prefabricated mail-order attraction bolted together in a weekend. It was built almost entirely by hand, without the aid of a crane, largely by local high school-age workers who were simply willing to climb 30 and 40 feet
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into open air and hammer beams into place, one at a time, board by board.
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The final structure used roughly 300,000 board feet of lumber and close to 10,000 lb of bolts, nuts, washers, and nails.
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The finished train alone weighed 8,000 lb empty before a single rider ever climbed aboard. All told, it cost $238,000 to build, an enormous, almost reckless bet for a family-run [snorts] operation that had started less than two decades earlier with nothing more than a train
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and a pony. Zingo opened to the public on July 15th, 1968, and it immediately became one of the defining wooden coasters in the entire region. The kind of ride people would drive hours just to experience. Two decades later, in July of 1988,
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members of the American Coaster Enthusiasts Organization actually traveled to Tulsa specifically to celebrate Zingo's 20th anniversary, riding it over and over for an hour straight. A small but telling sign of just how respected this hand-built ride had become within the coaster community
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nationally, not just locally. It even landed a cameo in the 1990 film Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.
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A strange little footnote that speaks to how far Zingo's reputation had traveled beyond Tulsa's city limits by that point.
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People didn't just ride Zingo, they organized entire chapters of their lives around it. Local radio personality Rick Couri rode the coaster 542 times in a single day back in 1990 using the marathon stunt to raise money for a regional drug
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prevention charity called Operation Aware. A story that got picked up by local news and became its own small piece of Tulsa folklore.
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And there's one story that captures the coaster's local legend status better than almost anything else that's ever been said about it. Members of the band Earth, Wind, and Fire, passing through Tulsa on tour, once offered Bob Bell a
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thousand dollars for a single private ride on Zingo after closing hours. He turned them down.
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Not because he didn't want the money, but because he legally couldn't say yes. A 1967 court order issued by District Judge Jess Miracle after neighbors near the fairgrounds filed formal noise complaints required Zingo to shut down completely by 9:00 every single night,
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no exceptions. Even the park's most famous attraction was operating under a lease somebody else controlled.
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A restriction that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the fact that Bell's was a guest on land that belonged to other people.
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It's a small detail, but it's a preview of everything that would eventually happen to the entire park decades later on a much larger scale.
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Bell's kept growing through the 70s, 80s, and 90s adding attractions the way a real regional theme park would.
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The Phantasmagoria dark ride arrived. A genuinely elaborate haunted attraction designed with stunt show scares by legendary dark ride artist Bill Tracy.
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It's cars and track engineered and built in-house by Bell's own crew. The Wildcat, a steel tracked coaster, was added in 1976.
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A sky ride cable system carried visitors on an aerial trip clean across the fairgrounds.
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There was a log flume, a Himalaya, a scrambler, a sea dragon swinging ship, and later in 2004 a Larson drop tower called the Mind Melt.
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This wasn't a nostalgic little curiosity anymore. This was a legitimate regional amusement park competing seriously against much larger operations across the state.
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Third generation president Robbie Bell the third used to describe the park as the place where Tulsa's mini milestones happened. First kisses, first dates, the first summer a kid was finally tall enough to ride Zingo without an adult standing next to them.
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For a huge number of families across Oklahoma, going to Bell's wasn't a special once-a-year occasion.
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It was simply what summer meant. Brochures went out every spring. Local news stations ran segments on the park's newest additions.
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School groups scheduled entire field trips around it. Yellow buses lined up in the parking lot.
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Generations of Tulsa teenagers got their first summer jobs running its ticket booths the exact same way earlier generations had ridden those rides as kids and would later bring their own kids back through those same gates.
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But underneath every single one of those additions, every new coaster, every new dark ride, every new tower rising into the Oklahoma sky, sat the exact same fragile arrangement Robert Bell had signed on to back in 1951.
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Bell's was thriving on land it did not own inside a relationship where the landlord retained the power at any point for any reason to simply change its mind.
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And in the mid-2000s, after 55 years of that arrangement quietly holding together, that's precisely what happened.
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Here's where the story gets genuinely strange because on paper Bell's should have been completely untouchable.
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This wasn't a struggling attraction limping toward closure, the kind of amusement park story you'd expect to end with declining ticket sales and rusted empty rides nobody bothered to fix.
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Financial records later obtained through a local news investigation showed that in 2005 alone Bell's paid the fairgrounds over $147,000 in rent, more than the competing Big Splash Water Park and the Tulsa Drillers minor league baseball team combined.
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In 2006, that figure climbed even [music] higher, past $151,000. Bell's wasn't just popular with families driving in from across the state. It was, by a wide and undeniable margin, the single most financially valuable tenant occupying the entire Tulsa
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fairgrounds. And that fact alone is exactly what makes what happened next so difficult to explain away as simple, dispassionate business logic.
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On June 6th, 2006, a storm, later described by a local media as a microburst, tore through the fairgrounds and demolished the front facade of the Phantasmagoria dark ride, forcing the park to shut its gates for roughly 3 weeks that summer.
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It was a real setback coming right in the heart of peak season. But it wasn't fatal. Bell's rebuilt and reopened.
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And by the family's own account, 2006 turned into one of the strongest years in the park's entire 55-year history.
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They had just won an 11-year fight for approval to construct a brand new wooden coaster.
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One designed to be twice the size of Zingo itself. A project that had taken more than a decade of persistence to get greenlit.
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They had a manufacturer lined up ready to help finance a $700,000 super looper attraction.
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From the inside, looking at the actual numbers and the actual plans on the table, this looked like a park standing at the edge of a major new chapter, not one quietly heading toward closure.
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Then, in November of 2006, the Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority, the fair board controlling the land beneath Bell's entire operation, simply let the lease expire.
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There was no formal recorded vote anyone can point to. Just a quiet administrative decision that ended [music] 55 years of continuous operation.
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The Bell family was given 120 days, 4 months, to remove every ride, every concrete slab, every improvement they had built into that ground since 1951.
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The local paper's headline on November 14th said it about as bluntly as a headline can, "Game over." The fair board's stated reasoning shifted depending on who happened to be answering the question that particular week. Board chairman Randy Miller
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pointed to Bell's business plan, insisting she needed a clear road map before agreeing to renew, and claiming that what the family had submitted simply wasn't viable enough to justify continuing the lease any further.
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Other officials raised concerns about safety, and about the park becoming, in their words, a hangout for rowdy teenagers, an image that clashed sharply with the family-friendly reputation Bell's had spent decades building.
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But here's the detail that should genuinely stop you cold. Nobody, including Miller herself, could name a single other tenant at the fairgrounds who had ever been required to submit [music] a formal business plan at all.
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Not the water park, not the baseball team, not anyone. Bell's was suddenly being judged against a standard that appeared to exist only for Bell's, invented specifically to be applied to the one tenant paying the most rent.
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Miller later told a local news crew, almost defensively, that if anyone could have convinced her the business plan was something she could actually approve, she was willing to do that.
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It's a strange, almost circular thing to say about the fairgrounds highest paying tenant of 55 straight years, a tenant that had never once missed a payment.
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And that's when a much uglier question started circulating through Tulsa, one that turned this from a simple story about a bad lease decision into something with real political weight behind it. Bell's biggest competitor at the fairgrounds was a man named Jerry
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Murphy, who ran the traveling midway for the Tulsa State Fair through his company, Murphy Brothers Exposition, and who also owned the rival Big Splash waterpark sitting nearby on the same grounds.
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In that same critical year, 2006, Murphy signed a brand new 10-year contract with the fair board, a contract that happened to include a right of first refusal, meaning Murphy would get first crack at expanding onto Bell's own land if Bell's ever left.
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A later investigation by local station News On 6, anchored by reporter Terry Hood, dug into campaign finance records and found that Murphy's wife had donated $5,000 to Randy Miller's 2004 campaign, and that Murphy himself had personally donated another $5,000
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to a county commissioner just months after Bell's lease had expired. To be clear, nobody ever proved a direct exchange of favors here, no smoking gun, no confession, and Fair Grounds CEO Rick Bjorklund publicly and firmly rejected the implication, telling
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reporters that once you clear away the emotion, this was simply, in his exact words, a proper business decision.
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But you can understand why an entire city didn't quietly accept that explanation at face value.
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Complaints poured into county offices. [music] Miller floated the idea of bringing in independent auditors to review the whole decision-making process from the outside.
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None of it reversed anything. The rides still had to come out. And the fallout arrived almost immediately in cold, measurable [music] terms.
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The very next Tulsa State Fair, held without Bell's for the first time in 55 years, saw overall attendance drop 7% and midway ticket sales collapsed by nearly a third.
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Whatever problem the Fair Board believed it was solving by letting that lease expire, the numbers suggest it hadn't solved much of anything at all.
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It had simply removed the thing an enormous number of people showed up for in the first place.
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What followed the closure was almost a decade and a half of false starts. Each one dressed up, at least briefly, as the moment Bell's would finally come roaring back to life.
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The first attempt came almost immediately, even before the park had fully finished closing its gates for good.
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The Bell family began exploring a move to riverfront farmland in Jenks, right beside the developing Riverwalk Crossing shopping district, and a planned aquarium that was drawing its own wave of local excitement at the time.
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A local investment group called Twin Creeks had a tentative mutual agreement to sell them the land contingent on the family assembling somewhere between 11 and 12 million dollars in financing and a workable business plan.
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That sounds like the beginning of a genuine rescue. A fresh start on better terms this time.
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Land they might actually be able to purchase outright instead of leasing from a government body that could pull the rug out again.
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It wasn't. The financing never fully materialized and the deal quietly dissolved without much public explanation of exactly where it fell apart.
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[snorts] Meanwhile, the actual physical rides, decades of Tulsa childhood, packed into crates and disassembled steel, sat in two un-air-conditioned warehouses near downtown Tulsa baking through Oklahoma summers waiting for a destination that didn't yet exist [music] and in some cases never would.
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For a while, hope kept resurfacing anyway popping up in one town after another like a rumor that refused to die.
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Nearly every suburb ringing Tulsa took a swing at courting the Bell family at one point or another. Sand Springs, Owasso, Jenks again on a second pass.
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None of it solidified into anything real or lasting. Then in 2010 Wagoner County stepped forward with what looked like a genuinely concrete plan.
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Not just talk this time but an actual signed document. A full 50-year lease with a 25-year option built in on top of that to relocate Bell's to the small town of Coweta.
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Robbie Bell actually signed that lease on May 25th 2010. This wasn't vague talk anymore. It was a real signed agreement with real terms, real dates, a real path forward that fans could actually point to and believe in.
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But it carried one significant condition buried inside it. Local voters needed to approve a quarter-cent sales tax to help fund the project's infrastructure.
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Before that vote could even happen, before the people of Wagoner County ever got a chance to weigh in themselves, two of the county's three commissioners raised concerns about whether the underlying numbers actually worked, and in a two-to-one decision, they pulled
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the tax question off the ballot entirely. [music] Another signed deal, another dead end. Killed not by public rejection at the ballot box, but by officials who decided the public shouldn't even get the chance to decide for themselves.
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By 2012, the ambition had shrunk down to almost nothing tangible, a shadow of a shadow of what Bell's used to be.
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The Bell family began running a small handful of kiddie rides out of Swick's Flea Market on the west side of Tulsa.
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Not a park anymore in any meaningful sense, just a scattering of rides operating out of a parking lot on Saturdays, a far cry from 10 acres and 50 attractions and a hand-built wooden coaster climbing into the sky. That
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arrangement lasted until around 2015, and then it quietly faded away, too, with barely any public notice or fanfare, the kind of ending that doesn't even get a proper headline.
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And then, in November of 2021, came the moment that finally felt like the real comeback everyone had been waiting 15 years for.
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At a press conference held alongside Broken Arrow city officials, standing in front of cameras and local reporters.
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The Bell family announced they had acquired 102 acres of land near the Creek Turnpike in East Broken Arrow.
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And that they intended to build a park roughly 10 times the size of the original, Zingo included, Phantasmagoria included, along with a full water park, go-karts, and a dedicated kitty section.
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This was the biggest, boldest version of the dream the family had ever publicly floated, bigger than the Jinks plan, bigger than the Koala plan, bigger than anything that had come before it.
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For fans who had been holding on to this hope for a decade and a half, quietly wondering every summer if this might finally be the year, this felt like the headline they had been waiting an entire generation to
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finally read in the local paper. Almost none of it happened the way it was announced that day. It turned out the land in question wasn't actually owned by the Bell family at all, despite how the press conference had been
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framed. It belonged to a California-based company called Santa Cruz Seaside, operating locally through an entity called Broken Arrow Investments LLC.
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Neighbors near the proposed site organized against the project almost immediately, packing city council meetings week after [music] week and voicing real concerns over traffic, noise, and the sheer scale of what was being proposed for their part of town.
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By early 2022, city officials publicly admitted that the developer had quietly slowed down the entire process behind the scenes. At a February council meeting, city manager Michael Spurgeon relayed to the public that Santa Cruz Seaside's president, Carl Rice, was
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conducting a market analysis to determine the best possible use of the land. And that the company was, in Spurgeon's own words, nowhere near actually filing a development application with the city.
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Over a year of near total silence followed that update month after month with no news, no groundbreaking, nothing to point to.
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Then, in May of 2023, Broken Arrow officials confirmed what a lot of long-time fans had already quietly started to suspect.
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Rice had emailed the city stating that the landowner had made the decision to try to sell the entire 102-acre property instead of developing it.
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No application was ever filed. No shovel ever touched the ground. The biggest, most publicly celebrated comeback in Bell's entire history after 2006 simply evaporated, one quiet email at a time, without so much as a public farewell press conference to match the
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fanfare of the original announcement. So, what actually happened physically to the park itself in the years after 2006 while all of these relocation plans rose and fell?
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Zingo's dismantling began in February of 2007. The wooden framework came down piece by piece, board by board, the exact same structure that had taken teenagers scaling scaffolding by hand nearly 40 years earlier to build in the first place, now being taken apart by a
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different set of hands for entirely different reasons. In January of 2011, Robbie Bell listed what remained of the coaster on eBay for $400,000, splitting it into separate lots, the raw lumber in one listing, the mechanical components and hardware in another,
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while the family retained the trademarked Zingo name, the original engineering plans, and certain key parts for themselves in case a rebuild ever became possible somewhere down the line.
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As far as any public record shows, it never sold. Nobody bought it. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company train cars that once ran that track are now sitting in Plainview Texas at a facility connected to the National Roller Coaster Museum
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[music] and Archives. Robbie Bell himself described it in 2018 as essentially a kind of roller coaster car museum.
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Not running anywhere, not rebuilt anywhere. Just stored quietly in a Texas warehouse most Tulsans will never have any reason to visit. Sitting in the dark like an exhibit nobody comes to see.
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And here's a piece of the myth worth clearing up directly because it circulates constantly among coaster fans and nostalgic Tulsans online.
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Repeated so often, it's practically taken as fact. Zingo did not get sold off to Joyland or Wonderland, two other well-known regional parks people frequently mention in the same breath as Bell's whenever this story comes up.
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That confusion actually traces back [music] to an entirely different ride, one people tend to conflate with the coaster over time.
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Bell's original 1917 carousel was auctioned off in Texas back in February of 1988 alongside pieces sold from other closing parks around that same period.
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The individual carved horses ended up being worth significantly more sold off separately, one at a time to private collectors, than the entire carousel was worth kept intact as a single working machine.
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So, it was broken apart piece by piece and dispersed into private hands across the country.
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The carousel disappeared that way, quietly, into collections nobody can fully track down today. Zingo, meanwhile, simply sat in storage, then in pieces, then eventually in that Texas warehouse without the dramatic romantic afterlife that online rumors have assigned to it over the years.
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Sometimes, the real story is less exciting than the myth. Sometimes, it's just a warehouse.
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The Wildcat steel coaster carries its own darker chapter, one that actually predates the park's closure entirely and complicates any purely nostalgic version of this story that only remembers the good parts.
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In April of 1997, a car rolled backward on the ride's chain lift hill, [music] killing a 14-year-old rider and injuring six others in the process.
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It's a tragedy that Bells had to carry alongside all of of its summer memories, its first kisses and school field trips, and it's worth acknowledging honestly here rather than skipping past it in favor of a cleaner, purely sentimental
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story. The coaster was eventually disassembled and shipped out to Jolly Roger Amusement Park in Ocean City, Maryland, where it briefly ran again under a new name, Avalanche, for about a single season before fading out of operation entirely and disappearing from the historical
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record. Today, the exact ground where Bells Amusement Park once stood is a parking lot.
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That's it. No plaque. No sign marking where the entrance gates used to funnel families through every June morning.
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No indication whatsoever that a hand-built wooden coaster once rattled overhead against the Oklahoma sky, or that a dark ride once scared generations of Tulsa kids inside a building that a summer storm eventually tore the front off of in 2006.
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If you stood in that lot today, you'd have no way of knowing that anything had ever happened there at all.
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The fairgrounds surrounding that empty lot have moved on entirely, redeveloped over the years with new event buildings, and an equine facility funded through city bond money.
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None of it built around, or even acknowledging in any visible way, the institution that used to draw the actual crowds to this property in the first place.
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What's left of Bell's now mostly survives in other people's memories, and in the scattered physical fragments still sitting in storage somewhere far away.
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Local newspapers periodically run retrospective photo galleries, dusting off old brochures and archived commercial footage every few years around anniversaries of the opening or the closing.
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The Tulsa Historical Society holds on to surviving photographs of the Phantasmagoria and other long-gone attractions, preserved in folders most visitors never think to ask about.
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There's an active Facebook community the Bell family still personally runs, where former visitors and former employees trade memories, old photos, and stories about first dates and summer jobs that happened somewhere in that 10-acre stretch of ground.
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And the family itself keeps insisting, as they have for nearly two decades now, that the park is coming back, that this isn't over, that somewhere down the line the gates will open again. As of today, it hasn't happened. There's no funded
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site currently under contract, no signed non-contingent lease, no permits filed with any city, no shovel anywhere near any ground.
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What makes this story different from a typical business failure story is that Bell's didn't die from a lack of love or a lack of customers or even really from a lack of money. It died because it never controlled the one thing every
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long-running business eventually needs in order to survive a sudden change in circumstances, the ground underneath its own rides.
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It paid its rent faithfully and generously for 55 straight years, never missing a payment, never falling behind.
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It packed the fairgrounds every single summer, outperforming every other tenant on that property by a wide margin year after year.
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And none of that ultimately mattered once the people who actually own the land decided quietly and without much explanation that they wanted something else standing there instead.
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The rides are scattered now, spread across warehouses and storage lots in two different states.
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The coaster sits disassembled in a Texas warehouse that almost nobody visits, gathering dust next to other pieces of amusement park history nobody quite knows what to do with.
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The carousel was broken into pieces and sold off horse by horse more than three decades ago. Its individual pieces now hanging in private homes and collections scattered across the country, disconnected from each other and from the ride they used to belong to.
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The land where all of it once stood is now just a place where people park their cars before walking somewhere else entirely for a completely different event unaware of what used to be underneath the pavement.
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But every so often, someone driving past that stretch of the Tulsa Fairgrounds still slows down, glances over at that quiet, unremarkable parking lot, and remembers exactly where the entrance gates used to stand, exactly where the line for Zingo used to wrap around the
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fence on a hot July afternoon, exactly where a whole childhood used to live. A place that stopped selling tickets a long time ago, but never quite managed to stop belonging to the people who grew up inside it.
Topics:Bells Amusement ParkTulsa amusement parkZingo roller coasterRobert Kiwanis BellTulsa State Fairwooden roller coasteramusement park historypark lease issuesregional landmarksabandoned amusement parks
