Restoring Keansburg Amusement Park

Keansburg Amusement Park is very much still a work in progress.

A day before its grand reopening, the quirky park, with its road carnival aesthetic and crooked midway, is still wearing the plywood-bandaged wounds of its near destruction at the hands of Hurricane Sandy.

On Saturday afternoon, public and park officials will meet to shake hands and signal the reopening of the park in this downtrodden seaside town. Some rides are open. More will be soon. The game and concession stalls mostly remain gutted and a restaurant, its picnic tables still adorned with last season's salt and pepper shakers, serves as a staging areas for ongoing construction projects.

Pre-Sandy condition isn't the immediate goal - that will come later. Now it's just about welcoming people back to town.

"It's all coming along," Park Operations Manager Bri Comer said. "It's incredible how far it's all come. People were telling me the boardwalk is gone, the rides are done, they're going to tear it all down, but piece by piece things were cleaned up.

"You look at it now and the only way you know there was a hurricane is because you know there was a hurricane."

The kiddie rides have been open for some time now, Comer said, standing behind her ticket booth, and the bigger rides, among them Moby Dick and the Loop-O-Plane, are reopening every day. Visitors come in sometimes - they're sparse right now - out of curiosity almost. They walk the grounds or watch their children ride on small planes and boats, but mostly they're here to see what's left.

The view changes every day. 

The carousel remains disassembled, its horses like carcasses laying side by side on top of pieces of cardboard around it, and the park's roller coaster, still in pieces, is being sanded of its rust to make way for a new coat of paint. But new concrete pads have been installed for new and exciting rides and the haunted house, though not yet open, is being worked on extensively to prepare it for visitors.

It's coming back. Piece by piece it will all come back. 

And people can't wait.

"It was a big part of my youth and its been part of my entire adult life," Butch Struszkiewicz, one of four generations of Struszkiewicz to enjoy the park, said.

Struszkiewicz and his wife, Kim, walked the park with their grandson Luke, not knowing if the place was open, what with its shuttered stalls and ongoing construction. It's coming along, the West Keansburg residents noted, and soon everyone else will realize it too.