Thirteen thousand people showed up on opening day at Storyland in 1956, half a million in the first year, and the playground has barely slowed down since. Harry Batt Sr., who owned the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park, had been struggling to draw families to his kiddie rides in City Park when he encountered Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, California, and came home with a plan. He commissioned local Mardi Gras float builders, including members of the Blaine Kern family, to construct a collection of oversized, climbable storybook characters beneath the centenarian live oaks of City Park’s southwest corner.
The original 13 nursery rhyme scenes have since grown to 26 exhibits, each built in the same tradition as the parade floats that roll through the city each February, and that connection is not incidental.
The fiberglass fabrication techniques, the scale, the bold colors, and the physical durability of the sculptures all come directly from carnival float-building craft, which means Storyland functions as a kind of permanent, walk-through float den where Captain Hook’s pirate ship floats in real water, the Old Woman’s shoe has a tiny doorway that served as the original kids-only entrance, Old King Cole’s castle offers a stairway to its battlements, and Pinocchio’s whale is large enough to walk inside…