One Lodge, Six Charters / Geba Lodge No. 954
Raised in Geba Lodge in June 1954, the co-owner of Fairyland welcomed children from three orphanages six weeks later, on the corner where Queens Center Mall now stands.
On June 3, 1954, Bernard Berkley was raised a Master Mason in Geba Lodge No. 954, becoming the lodge’s 660th member. He was a new brother, but he was hardly a stranger to Queens. For five years he had been one of the owners of Fairyland, the amusement park at Queens Boulevard and Woodhaven Boulevard whose Ferris wheel greeted every subway rider climbing up to the street. Six weeks after his raising, Geba Lodge brought about a hundred children from three orphanages to his park for a day of rides, clowns and lunch. Fairyland donated the use of the park, and their new brother provided the meal.
A Coliseum That Became a Kiddieland
Fairyland was something of an accident. In the years after World War II, Berkley and his associates had a much grander idea. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was haggling with Madison Square Garden over a new contract, and for a while it looked as though the circus might move to a new arena if someone built one. Berkley’s group seriously considered putting up a huge coliseum. The other big attractions they would have needed to fill it were interested, but they wanted too much say in a building they would not be paying for, and the plan was dropped.
What Berkley and his partner Al McKee built instead was a kiddieland. It opened in 1949 as a restaurant and small ride park on Horace Harding Boulevard, on land that later became Lefrak City. Within a year or two the city took the site to widen Horace Harding into what became the Long Island Expressway, and Fairyland moved a few blocks to a big lot at Queens Boulevard and 57th Avenue, near the Woodhaven Boulevard intersection, at 90-05 Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst.
It was a sizable gamble. The park occupied a plot about 250 feet by 600 feet and represented an investment of roughly $300,000. The partners’ background lay in outdoor show business, but a kiddieland on a city lot was a new kind of venture, and even they were surprised by how quickly it caught on.
Fourteen Cents a Ride
By 1953, trade reports ranked Fairyland among the most successful kiddielands in the country, with an estimated gross of about $250,000 a year. On a good summer Sunday as many as 15,000 people passed through the gates. Parking lots accommodated families arriving by car, while the subway station a block away delivered others straight to the Ferris wheel. Accounts disagree about the parking capacity, with the 1953 report giving a much larger figure than some later histories.
The park opened with fourteen rides, plus a restaurant and a penny arcade, and grew to twenty and eventually twenty-four. There was a big merry-go-round with thirty-two horses and a little one for toddlers, a Whip, a Sky Fighter, jeep and boat rides, a pony cart, a fire engine, a small Ferris wheel and a big No. 10 Ferris wheel, a baby Turtle, a miniature train and a roller coaster. An indoor amusement hall kept some of the fun going in bad weather.
A single ticket cost fourteen cents and was good on any ride, for a child or a grown-up. A $2.50 book of twenty-eight tickets would take a youngster around the whole park twice. Later advertising offered five rides of your choice for forty-nine cents at the bright yellow ticket booth, and coupon clippers could sometimes get five rides for a quarter. The park ran from ten in the morning until ten at night, and on especially hot nights the lights stayed on until eleven.
McKee had firm opinions about the business. The roller coaster was the most popular ride but carried only twelve passengers at a time; the forty-eight-seat train made the most money on busy days, and the merry-go-round led on ordinary ones. There was little shade and no lawn, only benches along one fence, so that families kept moving and riding. New York City law required every ride operator to be at least twenty-one and licensed, so instead of college students the park hired grown men looking for extra money, as many as thirty-four of them on a busy Sunday. Neighbors remember the Shoppers Field store next door, advertised as being right beside Fairyland, along with the Howard Johnson’s and the Boulevard nightclub that made that stretch of Queens Boulevard a destination.
Much of this picture of the park’s early business survives in the 1953 trade accounts reproduced in [“Return to Fairyland,” published by the Juniper Park Civic Association](Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association
Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association “Back in the Day,” as the saying goes, there was a magical place called Fairyland Kiddiepark, which was located where the mammoth, 1,000,000 square foot Queens Center Mall now stands. We plowed through the history of the 1950’s, as well as memories o
Brother Berkley’s Guests
Geba Lodge had deep roots in that same neighborhood. Chartered in 1919 and proposed by Mizpah Lodge, it had moved in its early years into Mizpah’s temple on Whitney Avenue in Elmhurst, a short ride from the Fairyland gates. By the 1950s it had a tradition of its own: a summer outing for children from local institutions.
The second annual outing was set for Tuesday, July 20, 1954. Members of the lodge’s children’s outing committee, headed by Leon D. Cornell of Forest Hills, arranged buses to bring about a hundred children between seven and twelve from the Ottilie Orphan Home in Jamaica, the Gustave Hartman Home for Children in Far Rockaway and the Brooklyn Home for Children. The Brooklyn Eagle noted that the children were chosen without regard to race, color or creed. The brothers planned to dress as clowns.
Fairyland donated the use of the whole park, and Bernard Berkley served lunch to the children free of charge. As the children left, the Masons handed out balloons, toys, candy and fruit. Both the Eagle and the Daily News carried the story that week. For a man who had been a Master Mason for barely six weeks, it was a remarkable first appearance in the lodge’s charitable life, and it took place in the park he had built.
The Last Ride
Fairyland stayed open through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, a birthday-party stop and summer treat for a generation of Queens children. Their memories survive in snapshots, home movies and [readers’ recollections published after “Return to Fairyland”](March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association
March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed the Return to Fairyland piece by Lorraine Sciulli. My Mother, who recently passed, used to tell me about Fairyland and I could only ever find minimal information (and pictures) about it on the Internet. When I saw
In 1968 the park closed. The land, together with the neighboring property where Shoppers Field and later a Food Parade supermarket had stood, was assembled into a single site, and 58th Avenue was closed between the two lots. Queens Center opened there in 1973. The corner’s transformation replaced a neighborhood amusement park with a major shopping destination, but Fairyland remained part of the place’s remembered history.
A Brother on the Boulevard
The newspaper notices of July 1954 are short, and they say little about Bernard Berkley himself beyond his name and his park. They do record what mattered to his lodge: that when Geba wanted to give a hundred children a day they would remember, a newly raised brother opened his gates and set the table. Geba Lodge’s line now runs into Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586, and the merry-go-round has given way to a shopping mall, but the lodge’s records still hold the moment when its 660th member made Fairyland, for one summer Tuesday, a gift from the brethren of Geba Lodge.
Endnotes and Sources
Lodge Records
- Geba Lodge No. 954, F. & A.M., membership record of Bernard Berkley: raised June 3, 1954, 660th member, as examined by Brete Murphy.
- Grand Lodge of New York records: Geba Lodge No. 954, chartered May 7, 1919.
Newspapers
- “Masons to Give Children Outing,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 15, 1954, p. 24.
- “Lodge to Be Host at Orphan Outing,” Daily News (New York), July 18, 1954, p. 289.
- Shoppers Field advertisements (“Next to Fairyland Amusement Park”), New York newspapers, 1950s.
Local Histories and Online Sources
- Lorraine Sciulli, [“Return to Fairyland”](Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association
Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association “Back in the Day,” as the saying goes, there was a magical place called Fairyland Kiddiepark, which was located where the mammoth, 1,000,000 square foot Queens Center Mall now stands. We plowed through the history of the 1950’s, as well as memories o
Juniper Berry, Juniper Park Civic Association, November 27, 2009. Draws on 1953 trade publications describing the park’s development, ownership, rides, prices and operation.
- [“March 2010 Letters to the Editor”](March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association
March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed the Return to Fairyland piece by Lorraine Sciulli. My Mother, who recently passed, used to tell me about Fairyland and I could only ever find minimal information (and pictures) about it on the Internet. When I saw
Juniper Berry, Juniper Park Civic Association. Includes readers’ responses and memories following “Return to Fairyland.”
- Ron Marzlock, “Fairyland Park, Elmhurst,” “I Have Often Walked,” Queens Chronicle, September 14, 2006.
- “NYC’s Lost Amusement Parks”, Untapped New York, section “Fairyland Park (1949–1968).”
- “There Was Once an Amusement Park Here, Part II: New York City’s Lost ’50s-Era Amusement Parks,” WanderWisdom.
- Fairyland photo compilations and home movies on YouTube and Instagram. Specific uploads should be identified before being cited as evidence for individual historical details.
A Note on the Sources
- The 1953 trade account dates the move to Queens Boulevard to 1950; the Queens Chronicle gives 1951.
- Prices changed over the years: the 1953 account gives fourteen-cent single tickets and a $2.50 book of twenty-eight, while later advertising offered five rides for forty-nine cents.
- Parking figures range from five hundred cars in one account to three or four thousand in the 1953 report. These may reflect different years, available lots or methods of counting; the discrepancy remains unresolved.
- The 1954 newspapers spell his name both Berkley and Berkely; this article follows the lodge record.
- The 1953 account calls Berkley and McKee newcomers to the business in one sentence and veterans of outdoor show business in another. Their experience may have been in outdoor entertainment generally rather than in operating a permanent kiddieland.
Continue the Story
Berkley’s outing belongs to a larger history of Masonic fellowship and community life in Queens.
- Mizpah’s Watchtower in Old Newtown: The Story of Mizpah Lodge No. 738 — Explore the lodge that proposed Geba and the Elmhurst temple that became part of its early history.
- Joseph H. Nadel of City Lodge No. 408: The New York Mason Who Kept Hollywood Running — Follow another brother whose working life connected entertainment, New York and service beyond the lodge room.
Remember Fairyland
[Read “Return to Fairyland”](Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association
Return to Fairyland - The Juniper Park Civic Association “Back in the Day,” as the saying goes, there was a magical place called Fairyland Kiddiepark, which was located where the mammoth, 1,000,000 square foot Queens Center Mall now stands. We plowed through the history of the 1950’s, as well as memories o
[Read former visitors’ memories of the park](March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association
March 2010 letters to the editor - The Juniper Park Civic Association To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed the Return to Fairyland piece by Lorraine Sciulli. My Mother, who recently passed, used to tell me about Fairyland and I could only ever find minimal information (and pictures) about it on the Internet. When I saw
