The pace has slowed, but each week he continues to get inquiries. In the beginning, “I was getting over 30 emails a day,” he says. The sale began last November, and Baker was shocked with the level of interest. He cataloged the items, helped set prices, and listed them on his website. He was tasked with finding buyers for all of the pieces in the Magic Forest’s diverse collection. “It was an amazing collection of original pieces-the largest I knew to exist.” “I was impressed by the amount of original International Fiberglass figures there,” Baker says. Baker first visited the park in 2012 while he was researching Muffler Men (the park had four). | Photos: Alexandra CharitanĪfter Ellsworth decided to take the park in a different direction, Gillette contacted Joel Baker, owner of the Muffler Man restoration company American Giants, to help facilitate the sale of all of those fiberglass figures. Ellsworth plans to reopen the space as Lake George Expedition Park with all-new attractions, including dinosaurs. The magic finally ran out last year when longtime owner Jack Gillette sold the park to a local contractor, Ruben Ellsworth. It’s a miracle that the Magic Forest, which opened in 1963, outlived its expiration date by several years-maybe even decades-but nothing lasts forever. Fairies were missing fingers, buttons used to activate animatronics were broken, and, when I put a quarter into a prize machine, I received nothing in return. Hundreds of fiberglass figures strewn about the heavily-wooded park were faded by decades of sun and exposure to the elements, covered in spider webs and other forest detritus. The Magic Forest, a storybook amusement park located in Lake George, New York, looked abandoned for years before it officially closed.
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