Rocky Point Park

By David Bettencourt

In 1938, a tremendous hurricane devastated southern New England, including Rocky Point Park. The shore dining hall was washed away, and the roller coaster lay in ruins. Owners began to look into other options for this beautiful 80 acres of land along the coastline of Narragansett Bay. The park's future was in jeopardy until 1948, when Providence businessman Vincent Ferla bought it and brought it back to life. He revitalized the midway and brought in new and exciting rides, and on the park's first day back, more than 35,000 people visited. The park thrived for nearly 50 years until its eventual closure in 1995. Today, this scenic spot along the Atlantic Ocean has been returned to the people of Rhode Island as a nature preserve and is flourishing once again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jul 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439651025

David Bettencourt

Rhode Island native David Bettencourt has many fond memories of Rocky Point Park, where he spent many childhood summers. In 2007, he produced and directed a documentary about the park called You Must Be This Tall, and many of the images for this book are drawn from that film's extensive research and photograph archive. In 2009, Bettencourt coauthored Arcadia's Images of America: Rocky Point Park.

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INTRODUCTION

Before all of the rides and roller coasters, presidential visits, baseball games, and clambakes, there was just a beautiful place along the Narragansett Bay with rolling hills, interesting rock formations, and a gorgeous sea breeze that kept the beaches cool in the summer. This was Rocky Point, a stretch of over 80 acres along the ocean that has enthralled New Englanders since the early 19th century. It was William Winslow who started to make it an exclusive place for excursions with his boat trips there in 1847. Soon afterward, he bought the land for $2,400 (two equal payments to two sisters who owned the land) and built a dock and some attractions. He flipped it a short time later and retired, selling it to Byron Sprague for $60,000. The days of Rocky Point as a shore destination were now on the fast track. With the help of the steamship companies and a man named Randall A. Harrington, it would not be long before this peaceful strip of land had turned into a real playground for New England—complete with rides, attractions, and delicious shore dinners.

The modern era was ushered in after the park was destroyed by the hurricane of 1938. An ownership team of Frederick Hilton, Joseph Trillo, and Vincent Ferla purchased the park in 1947, and when it opened again in June 1948, more than 35,000 people crowded the midway, creating a massive traffic jam in Warwick and surrounding cities.

The 1950s saw more growth, as the third rendition of the World’s Largest Shore Dinner Hall was built (after the first two were destroyed by hurricanes) along with the Palladium and the Windjammer, and by the 1960s, Rocky Point Park was the only amusement park in the area. More and more rides were added through the years, including the Cyclone, the Wildcat, the Corkscrew, the Flume, and the FreeFall.

The FreeFall, a $2.6 million ride installed in 1987, would be the last new ride acquired prior to bankruptcy. Poor investments, bad management, and a cultural shift in Americans and vacations all hit around the same time, marking the beginning of the end for the park. Throughout the 1990s, Rocky Point Park struggled, having borrowed millions of dollars in 1991 to keep its gates open. Water service was terminated in 1993 over a dispute about a bill. The City of Warwick was owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes in 1994. Eventually, the debt was too much for the company that ran the park, and it closed its gates for good in 1996, auctioning off many of the popular rides.

For almost two decades, Rhode Islanders could not access this amazing stretch of land. But in March 2013, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management acquired 83 acres at the site of the former Rocky Point amusement park and integrated it with the 41 acres of shoreline purchased by the City of Warwick in 2007. Now this land just 10 miles from downtown Providence is back to the way it was when William Winslow first came ashore with passengers from his steamship Argo—beautiful, unspoiled, and open for all to enjoy.

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THE RIDES OF

ROCKY POINT

Throughout its long history, Rocky Point Park strived to have the best rides and attractions of any resort or amusement park in New England. The Corkscrew roller coaster, pictured here, was one of the first loop roller coasters on the East Coast, and it quickly brought excitement and popularity back to the park in the 1980s. (Courtesy of Peter Pelland.)

In the later years of Rocky Point Park, one could buy a POP bracelet,