Crystal City Amusement Park

Crystal City Amusement Park was on Route 66 (Sapulpa Road, now Southwest Blvd) between 41st Street and 33rd West Avenue. The site is now occupied by the Crystal City Shopping Center (whose name was the nemesis of radio announcers). Crystal City was home to a roller coaster named Zingo, which became the namesake for the wooden coaster at Bell's decades later. A Sanborn fire insurance map from June 1932 shows Zingo ("scenic railway") hugging the highway, a stream flowing through the property (with a monkey island in the middle of it), a massive dance hall, a giant pool with a large bath house, "amusement houses", Dodgem (bumper cars), a ride called "Bug," a few smaller rides, an octagonal refreshment building, ticket offices, and something called Hiram's Barn. TulsaGal has photos of Crystal City Amusement Park from the late 1920s that show many of these features. The image above, showing Hiram's Barn, a tall tower (possibly over the ticket offices), and part of the Zingo roller coaster, is from that entry.

(Click the picture to open a very large version of the map in a popup window.)

This north-up map provides some context, showing the park in relation to 33rd West Ave., 41st Street, Sapulpa Road (now Southwest Blvd), and the Frisco (now BNSF) tracks.

According to the County Assessor's records (parcel 31125-92-27-17380), the Crystal City Shopping Center was built in 1954 and sits on 442,060 sq. ft. of land, a bit more than 10 acres, about the same size as Bell's footprint at the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. Comparing the Sanborn map (Volume 3, Map 501) to the assessor's map, it appears that the highway department routed I-244 around the shopping center, taking homes to the east and moving the Tulsa-Sapulpa Union tracks further east as well. The site of the old amusement park is fully intact.

The shopping center was sold at auction in 2013 to Monticello Acquisitions LLC for $565,000. The new owners began to renovate the property and attract new tenants.

Most of the information above comes from an entry posted on September 26, 2011, but as the hopes expressed in that entry have been overtaken by events, I am reposting with updated information.