Philly Today: Saying Goodbye to Wonderland Pier, Ocean City’s Old-School Amusement Park

Listen to the Clown. This is the last season for Gillian’s Wonderland Pier in Ocean City. / Photograph by Patrick Rapa

As you’ve probably heard by now, Jay Gillian — whose family has owned and operated Gillian’s Wonderland Pier in Ocean City for nearly a century — says the business is “no longer viable.” Wonderland Pier will close at the end of summer.

Like a lot of folks around here, my childhood included day trips to O.C. with the family, and most of them ended with a few hours at Wonderland Pier trading tickets for a spin on the Tilt-A-Whirl. This was the ’80s. Back then, the Music Express was called the Zugspitze (probably an umlaut in there somewhere), and the roller coaster du jour was the City Jet.

I was especially fond of Wonderland Pier’s shooting game right on the boardwalk. There you could point realistic-ish-looking rifles at tiny light sensitive targets in a large Western saloon diorama. Aim right and a tin cup would spin, or a dog would howl, or a hunched over piano player would pound out a quick melody. The concept of using an invisible light beam to cause tiny moments of real-world mayhem was pretty rad at the time. At some point, we discovered my mom’s camera worked like a grenade, setting off lots of the sensors at once. Chaos.

More recent memories involve trying to snap a decent shot of my nephew as he circled the Wonderland Pier from above in the train-shaped monorail type thing.

But right now my mind is on this creepy goblin statue that stands watch over Wonderland Pier’s haunted house. Look up and there he is, half naked, hunched and fanged, bellowing into the night as the Ferris wheel spins overhead. What will become of this evil idol, and what will become of the workers who attempt to topple him from his perch?

Get down, goblin.

Area Man Goes to Riverdale

Chris Cummins, Philly writer and host of those comedy/pop culture Sci-Fi Explosion events at PhilaMOCA, is due to fulfill his destiny when he sets foot in Riverdale on Wednesday. Not only did he write a story due to appear in August 14th’s issue of World of Betty and Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #34, but he also makes a cameo alongside his pug Dumpling. (Chris has written for Den of Geek, and wrote for City Paper when I worked there back in the day.)

“The story was inspired by two things: My desire to use the comics as a springboard to talk about the importance of rescue animals, and to bring back a ridiculous throwaway villain character who appeared in one story decades ago,” he says.

Cummins is an expert on the world of Archie, Veronica, Jughead, et al. He made headlines back in 2021 when his comics collection — including thousands of Archies amassed over 40 years — was stolen from a storage facility in the Northeast. The comics were never recovered, but the outpouring of sympathy and support led to Cummins taking a job as the official social media manager for Archie Comics.

By The Numbers

8: As in eight gold medals in a row for the U.S. women’s basketball team, after they defeated host country France in a 67-66 nail-biter. Philly-born Kahleah Copper sank a pair of critical free throws with the clock winding down, causing her tournament MVP teammate A’ja Wilson to laugh and say “that bitch.” This was clearly meant as a term of endearment, but it slipped past the NBC panic button and got broadcast to the world, causing one or two uptight scolds to drop their monocles into their martinis, apparently. Wilson laughed it off.

10 a.m.: Did you see it? The Italian Air Force Frecce Tricolori, aka the Italian Air Force, flew 10 jets over our fair city spewing red, white and green smoke. These brazen displays of aerial intimidation will continue as long as local chefs keep sprinkling parmesan on their tomato pie like a bunch of jadrools. Bless you, sky paisans.

10th Street: Did you lose your parakeet in Chinatown? He’s fine. He lives under a car now.

400,000: Number of millennials currently living in Philadelphia, according to this Inky article. You may expect me to make a joke about generational differences and stereotypes, but what’s the point? We’re all living in the Slow-Burn End Times. Everybody Gen X and younger can probably agree on this.

75 percent: How much of UArts’s budget came from tuition, whereas other colleges rely more heavily on endowments. This means their situation was always a little more precarious than most of us knew. If you haven’t read David Murrell’s piece on why and how the Broad Street institution collapsed, you really oughta.

Wonderland Pier, Ocean City / Photograph by Mike Rapa