Visiting Winnipeg’s Happyland amusement park 120 years later

It was 120 years ago this weekend a massive amusement park opened its gates in Winnipeg.

It was 120 years ago this weekend that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people flooded a 30-acre parcel of land on Portage Avenue for the start of something magical.

No, they were not there to take in the leafy elms and stately character homes that sit there today on the sweeping site that’s now the Wolseley neighbourhood.

Instead, the crowds descended on the then-developing edge of Winnipeg for the opening of Happyland—a larger-than-life amusement park that came and went in a fit of fantastic, frenzied glory.

“It was made to be kind of a magical place in Winnipeg, but it had a very, very short shelf life,” explained Christian Cassidy, a Winnipeg historian who writes the excellent blog “West End Dumplings.”

The sprawling amusement park opened its doors on May 24, 1906, by an American company called the Ingersoll Group of Pittsburgh, Cassidy explained.

It was a time of great optimism.

Winnipeg was known then as the Chicago of the North thanks to an emerging reputation as a railway and financial hub and the booming population that that attracted.

Happyland was meant to entertain the growing metropolitan city for 10 cents a head, with a list of attractions as big as its circular swing ride—which was 80-feet, to be precise.

According to the Manitoba Historical Society, Happyland’s other offerings included a figure-eight roller coaster, a shooting gallery, a house of mirrors, a miniature steam railway, an Old Mill with boats “for lovers,” an open-air ice cream parlour, Japanese tea gardens, a baseball park to house the former Winnipeg Maroons Club and a bandstand.

The 300-foot Doric-style towers marking Happyland’s entrance along Portage Avenue, with the Ferris wheel and boardwalk facades peeking out from behind, made for a very different skyline than today’s, which mainly consists of brick strip malls, banks and billboards.

Newspapers at the time reported its opening day attendance as high as 44,000 – a figure that Cassidy is skeptical of, as only one streetcar served that area at the time, running all the way out to Headingley.

“Doing the math, I mean, it would take months, if not weeks solid, for a streetcar to get 40,000 people out there and back,” he said.

“Still, it really started out with a bang.”

An elephant stampede, a riot and lots of bad weather

As utopian as pictures of Happyland appear, its short tenure as Winnipeg’s premiere amusement park was not without many dystopian moments.

According to Heritage Winnipeg, several bad summer storms damaged the premises during the few summers it was open.

One such rager struck when a travelling circus and its exotic animals were in town, Cassidy recalled. A number of elephants got spooked by the lighting and escaped from their enclosures.

“They ripped down the tent that they were supposed to be performing in and sort of went crazy on the grounds,” he said.

“Luckily, it was big enough that by the time they got to where the gates were, their handlers were able to catch up with them and stop them from kind of breaking through, going into the residential neighbourhood.”

While that stampede was avoided, other hazards lurked on the horizons at Happyland.

There were rumours that the roller coaster was unsafe, Heritage Winnipeg reported, while the Winnipeg Maroons were forced to disband as their league failed.

There was also the riot of 1909, said to have erupted during a race between Alfred “Alfie” Shrubb and J.F. Fitzgerald.

The Manitoba Free Press reported at the time that 2,000 spectators packed the bleachers at Happyland’s grandstand to watch the runners hoof the 16-kilometre course.

When the electric lights didn’t come on at 9 p.m., the time when the race was set to begin, the masses started to get a bit restless in the darkness.

A half-hour later, as the night grew darker still, a single light came on. By 10 p.m., another light joined in.

All the while, Happyland’s manager kept announcing the race would begin momentarily, as some fed-up fans began to flee.

“Then, all of a sudden, the two lights went out, and in the darkness pandemonium broke out,” the Manitoba Free Press reported.

Pushed to the breaking point at Happyland, spectators reportedly broke Happyland.

Its grandstand was torn apart, its wooden pieces thrown into a pile and lit on fire in a bonfire that surely could have illuminated the long-delayed race.

“More wood was thrown on, a large table and a dozen chairs intended for the use of the officials and the flames leapt skyward considerably higher than the grandstand,” the Manitoba Free Press wrote.

Police, billy clubs in hand, eventually arrived on scene and broke up the mob, not before another fire had been set and several other structures damaged.

The manager apparently fled before the worst of the rioting began.

‘They weren’t getting the numbers through the gate’

Happyland’s misfortunes did not end there.

Winnipeg’s famously short summers and sometimes chaotic summer storms cut into the park’s profit-earning days considerably. Competition also popped up from rival amusement parks at Winnipeg Beach and River Park, Cassidy explained.

By 1908, the park had gone bankrupt.

“It was quite a shock to a lot of people, but again, they weren’t getting the numbers through the gate, and a few weeks later, a local company bought the bankrupt stock of what was being sold off at auction,” Cassidy said.

The price tag was a mere $6,000, compared to the reported $150,000 it cost to build.

The new owners did not have deep enough pockets to keep the ambitious amusement park going. Buildings fell into disrepair, Cassidy recalled, and rides broke down, too expensive to fix.

By 1914, the massive gates at Happyland closed for good.

Guy Maddin’s Happyland

Over a century later, Happyland is immortalized not only in eerie photographs and postcards, but in film fantasia.

Local film legend Guy Maddin brought Happyland back to life in his delightfully delirious 2007 documentary “My Winnipeg.”

The film was initially commissioned for the Documentary Channel, Maddin told CTV News.

He began researching his hometown’s particular oddities and mythologies when he learned about the short-lived attraction.

“No one had ever talked about Happyland. What a great name, too, and right in the middle of this miserable city, a place called Happyland,” he laughed.

As the film is more about Maddin’s wishful thinking than facts, he decided to dramatize a different fate for the fantastical park than a mere bankruptcy.

He used footage taken on a Super 8 camera during a trip to Coney Island, N.Y., and archival photographs of the real park to dramatize his vision of the decaying, decrepit Happyland.

“I was able to make it a place that didn’t just go out of business, but it was destroyed by a bison stampede,” he said.

“The city’s dispossessed then took the wreckage from it and moved the Happyland [sign] up out of sight, just where people would prefer the marginalized people to be - out of sight, and they could construct their own grim Happyland on rooftops.”

The distant dream of Happyland

Today, the long-gone attraction exists as a sort of reminder of the would-be promise of Winnipeg, Cassidy said.

“Everybody figured, ‘We’re going to have a million people. Give us 20 more years and we’ll have a million people in the city,’” Cassidy explained. “People thought big.”

For Maddin, Happyland represents a different kind of potential, one that is uniquely Winnipeg.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘Why couldn’t Winnipeg have a year-round playground?’” he said.

“My whole life has been spent in a reverie of ‘Why couldn’t Winnipeg just?’ or ‘What if?’ Every day is ‘If Day’ in Winnipeg. When I saw we did have a modest version of Coney Island, I jumped on it and realized it had to be immortalized.”