Rocky Point was an area amusement park that helped shape the childhoods of so many Rhode Islanders for over 150 years before it closed down in 1996. I know that it is a place that held a lot of special memories for me, and this video brought back so many of them for me.

This film, which was produced and directed by Burrillvillian [the town I live in] David Bettancourt, takes viewers through the long history of the amusement park, highlighting famous people who visited their or performed in the theater there. It shared wonderful memories of the food served in its hall, and it highlighted many of the famous rides that so many people remember.

Bettancourt does a wonderful time of using historical footage and images and balanced them with interviews with locals, both everyday folks and local celebrities. Along the way, viewers get to see how the park grew and changed over the years, including its total destruction during the Hurricane of 1938.

A number of people shared stories of how they met and fell in love there either as workers or visitors. It was really interesting.

Some really interesting facts about the park include the following:
*President Rurtherfor B. Hayes visited the park and did an experiment with Alexander Graham Bell, who was in Providence, as he became the first President to speak on what would eventually become a wired phone line;
*President George H.W. Bush visited in order to campaign for a woman running for Senate, a gentleman running for the House of Representatives and a recently dishonored Governor;
*The Lizzie Borden investigation became more challenging than folks would have expected since 90% of the Fall River police force was on its annual picnic at Rocky Point on the day of the murders she was involved; and
*The park had weekly concerts on the weekends in the park with famous performers ranging from Frank Sinatra to many of the famous musicians of every decade.

The hardest part of watching the documentary was the final section, where Bettancourt focuses on the demise of the park. Many of the rides were auctioned off on a cold and rainy day. This led to the Cyclone (a wooden roller coaster) ending up in Canada, the Flume (a log water slide) ending up in the Philippines, and the Corskrew (the first rollercoaster with three 360 degree turns placing the riders upside in the country) ending up in Washington state.

The park also had one of the first freefall rides in the world. It was actually the 10th. It also had a really awesome house of horrors ride, which burned down before it and the rest of the park was torn down. It was actually one of a number of fires that has devastated the structures on the park grounds be fore it was decided to raze everything before someone was hurt in a fire.

It was definitely an unglorious end of the park. Ray and I were talking about it afterward. One of the saddest thing about the park was that it really struggled. It stayed open for at least a decade with the owners struggling to make a profit. It never really made sense because, except for the last couple of years, the place was always packed, which should have resulted in huge profits. We could only guess that it failed in the end from mismanagement.

This was actually shown at our new library as the first event in the summer's Riverwalk Times series. It took place on Saturday, May 31. Unfortunately, I forgot to go! That is really sad since I had been talking about it with Ray that morning. C'est la vie!

It was a big deal, and we packed the programming room. It was supposed be shown outside, but it proved to be a problem when the rain came. Dave Bettancourt was very generous. He donated a number of copies of the DVD to the library to add to the collection and to sell to raise money for the building.

For more information about the movie, check out the offical site for it.