All my life, I’ve lived in the New York area – about 20 years in Westchester – and I’d never ridden the Dragon Coaster. Until today.
(I’ve also never been to the Statue of Liberty, but that’s another story.)
So when I was out covering the opening of Playland Amusement Park in Rye today, I gave it a shot.
It wasn’t bad at all.
It rumbled, it clattered, it whipped around curves and dropped. But for fear factor, I’d rate it about 7.5 on a scale in which 1 is standing still and 10 is a Manhattan taxi ride. And that’s saying something.
Thousands came to the park for opening day, and almost everyone I talked to said the Dragon Coaster was the favorite ride.
“I like how it went fast,” 9-year-old Chelsea Schwartz of Ridgefield, Conn. told me, when I interviewed her and her parents.
Her friend Anna Maiorino, also 9, was one of the few people I talked to who had another favorite. She preferred Catch a Wave which churns riders in a vertical spin.
“I like the feeling of it going up and down,” she said.
The park, by the way, will now be open on weekends in May (and some weekdays for school groups.) When schools let out, it will be open Tuesdays through Sundays until Sept. 9.
The Dragon Coaster is milder than many other wooden coasters, like the Cyclone at Coney Island. The Dragon Coaster does not start off by dropping you into a steep fall after the initial, clacking ascent, the way many others do. You whip around a curve, then drop. From there, the ride is lively, but not that frightening.
The signature feature is that dragon mouth at the end, that swallows you as you shoot up another hill. That puts you into a curving tunnel that ends when you plunge into another drop.
In all, it’s a fun ride. And people line up for it. Young people find it to be wild, and maybe riding it becomes almost a rite of passage.
Even County Executive Rob Astorino was taking his 7-year-old daughter Kiley on it for the first time, now that she’s reached the minimum height.
“She’s 48 inches (tall), so she just made it,” he told me. Two years ago, he took his 8-year-old son Sean on it.
“He screamed and yelled and said, ‘That was awesome!’” Astorino recalled.
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The Dragon Coaster, which debuted in 1929, for Playland’s second season was built as a milder counterpart to the it’s sister coaster, The Airplane Coaster. The Airplane Coaster was more on the level of a Coney Island Cyclone but much larger. The Dragon Coaster, originally billed as a scenic railway has 3400 feet of track and takes about a 1:30 to complete it’s course. The Airplane was much taller and had bone rattling drops and curves. Unfortunately the Airplane was not properly maintained and a new insurance company the county was using in the late 50’s required about $100,000 worth of upgrades to the ride in order to keep operating it. The county opted to have it removed in November of 1957. It is my hope, along with many other Playland enthusiasts that this ride will eventually be rebuilt on the same site in which it stood in Playland’s former life.