Space City was an Amusement Park that was closed down soon after it opened. It was rumored that funds had been stolen,and the people that ran it were not nice people. I remember being inside a space ship vehicle and riding a fake elevator as a kid at Space City. It wasn't there very long. The rocket vehicle was visible from route 9 and it called allot of attention to everyone driving by.

Does anybody out there remember a short lived outer space theme park that was located somewhere close to the Jersey shore? I have been trying to track this down since the early days of the internet and so far I have come up with nothing. I know I am not imagining it. I have very clear memories of driving to it, going through it, and driving home from it. My visit must have been in either the summer of 1960 or 1961, I was either 7 1/2 or 8 1/2 years old. I know it had to been one of those years because my Mom's father was with us on the trip, and he died in February of 1962.

The theme park was located amidst sand dunes, and I'm guessing it was located in the Neptune area. It was sort of designed like a spaceport -- there was a quonset hut-like structure which was the main building of the park. Inside they put on a marionette show about these characters traveling to other planets. The gimmick was that there three marionette stages next to each other. Each puppet stage represented a different planet in the story. When in the story the marionette characters had to travel, they would exit off-stage, the curtain would close, a sound effect of a rocket ship taking off and whizzing by would be played, and the curtain would open on one of the other stages, and our characters would enter that setting.

I don't remember what the story was about. It must have been fairly melodramatic, because I remember after the show we were all exiting the theater and it took us past the puppet stages. Some of the puppeteers were standing there saying good-bye to us as we went by. My grandfather made a jocular remark regarding one of the very big moments in the story and he and the puppeteer shared a laugh about that.

Scattered about the relatively landscape where these life-sized 50s-style rocket ships. We went inside one. Our guide/pilot took us on a rocket trip to Mars (I guess). The 'view screen' was a movie screen (I realize now it was probably a motion picture rear-projection screen) depicting us rocketing away from earth, and going past the moon, and veering away from a deadly swarm of meteors. The rocket's body shook, and pitched, and rolled a bit in sync with the guide/pilot's manipulations of the control panel.

We landed on a some planet, ostensibly to look for a missing rocket ship, called X-1 or something like that. But then before we could leave the rocket ship to go out and investigate, some emergency came up, and we had to blast off and return to earth right away.

That's all I can remember about it. It must have had a very short life span, because I never heard anything more about it after that time. I have read with interest all the posts on this particular topic, and some of them have brought back many found memories.