Christopher Febles's Reviews > Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

Here’s another reason why my parents demonstrated good judgement: I never visited Action Park. Of course, this could’ve been because they, like any sane person, simply didn’t want to pay seven admission tickets or supervise five children across a sprawling them park. And I didn’t help matters, having proven my affinity for daring/stupid stunts, including sledding down the entirety of the steepest street in our Yonkers neighborhood in a blizzard (and I’d have made it, too, if it weren’t for that darn stone wall). Call it frugality, call it overprotectiveness: I dodged a bullet, and I’m here to tell the tale.

Choose a nickname, but I like “Traction Park” best. We all knew about the accidents, and even deaths, of that lawless zoo in North Jersey, and those I’d known to have partaken did indeed have scars to prove it. Mulvihill, son of the park’s founder, tells the story through a journalist in a memoir style. He’d done it all, from digging ditches for the Alpine Slide, to head of the Wave (pool) Patrol, to general manager. It opens with his attempt to survive his father’s latest slide idea: the Cannonball Loop.



From that, I got the theme: Action Park was the wild, crazed dream of a guy who didn’t believe in limits. Safety wasn’t exciting, wouldn’t sell tickets. Besides, skiing philosophy of the time seemed to indicate that if you hit a tree and died, it was your fault for having poor skills. You assumed the risk. Problem was, as Mulvihill hints, his father pushed the risk barometer as high as it got. Much of the book focuses of the son fretting about injuries and death and being waved away by his dad.

The author also comments often about the culture fostered by the park: screw the rules. He indicates that guests were crazy and rarely abided the attendants’ and lifeguards’ admonishments. People would (and could) jump into the Wave Pool at any depth without knowing how to swim. They’d take the go-karts for a spin, and NOT stop when their allotted laps were up. They’d ram the speedboats into each other, capsize, and have to be dragged from the oil-streaked lake (because they couldn’t swim). I was a lifeguard at a public pool in college, and I know the feeling: something about the late eighties/early nineties inspired a sense of anarchy among park visitors. I suppose, then, that the carnage was partially THEIR fault, although the owner’s disregard for safety sure didn’t help.

I watched the HBO documentary just after reading, and there’s quite a difference. Mulvihill himself speaks, but only sporadically. That story is more driven by park visitors and people affected by the park’s problems. Among them are the aged parents of a guest who died on the Alpine Slide at age 19 in 1980. There’s also a sense from the interviewed guests that communicates “Hey, this is Jersey. S--- happens.” Where have I heard that before?



Might be worth it to look at both the book AND the doc and absorb the full view of the place. Mulvihill paints his dad in a sympathetic view near the end, and while he criticizes him for his reckless management, falls short of condemning him. Sometimes I wonder if another man might have walked away from the business, knowing what he knows about how his father managed it. But that IS an awful lot to ask of a son. It might also be true that in the seventies and eighties, there might have been less outrage about theme park violence: the place, and its style of “you control the action,” was a brand-new thing. There were no real, hard-and-fast rules to break. Sure, in 2024 even a few major accidents would close a theme park. But in 1980?

Either way, this book offers an interesting combination: heartfelt nostalgia and cringeworthy journalism. The reader can pine away from a lost era of wild rides and nutty behavior, and wipe their brow in relief, knowing there’ll never be another Action Park.