for Old Town Newhall Weekend Winter Wonderland Dec. 5-6 for SCVTV.com • Local Television for Santa Clarita
for Old Town Newhall Weekend Winter Wonderland Dec. 5-6 for SCVTV.com • Local Television for Santa Clarita
Magic Mountain Sky Tower
Valencia, California
Magic Mountain was an ambitious entertainment project that opened over Memorial Day weekend in 1971 and promptly wrote itself into America's vibrant theme park history. In this photograph, the Magic Mountain Sky Tower overlooks the not-yet-opened park and the rest of Valencia from a height of 384 feet.In 1968, executives of Sea World, Inc., were looking for a place in Los Angeles County to build a new theme park. Knowing that The Newhall Land and Farming Company had enough undeveloped land and that the company wanted to attract attention to its New Town of Valencia, a county planner asked company president James F. Dickason if he was interested. He was. After intense negotiations, Sea World and Newhall Land formed a partnership and began to build a 200-acre amusement park at the western edge of Valencia. Seventy acres would be used for the park itself -- rides, theaters, games, food, landscaping -- and the rest for parking and ancillary services. Ground was broken in January, 1970.
When Magic Mountain's wrought-iron gates swung open for the first time on May 29, 1971, Southern California's most exciting "white knuckler" experience was the Gold Rusher roller coaster, which careened over the hillsides on its distinctive gold-colored track at a breathtaking 35 miles per hour. Highlights of the day were El Bumpo, a bumper boat ride where riders navigated skimmer craft over a lagoon; Galaxy, a giant, double-armed tilting ferris wheel; Billy the Squid, a brightly colored ride with huge, revolving tentacles; and the Grand Centennial Excursion, an old-fashioned narrow gague passeneger train.
As technology improved, so did the tastes of park patrons. The thrills of the 1970s gave way to even bigger, faster rides. With Magic Mountain and, subsequently, Valencia, now firmly on the map, The Newhall Land and Farming Company was ready to divest.
Newhall Land's final venture into theme park history was the Colossus roller coaster, which opened at the end of the 1978 season. Newhall Land sold the park in 1979 for $51 million -- a profit of only $250,000 -- to Six Flags, a nationally-renowed theme park company which owned and operated five other amusement parks across the nation at the time.
Under Six Flags' ownership, the park blossomed into one of the biggest amusement parks in the world. Annual attendance quadrupled in the park's first quarter-century of operation, from 1 million in 1971 to roughly 4 million in 1996. Even after the 1987 incorporation of the nearby City of Santa Clarita, whenever Santa Claritans are asked by outsiders where they live, the most common reply is, "near Magic Mountain." Information from Six Flags California and "A California Legend: The Newhall Land and Farming Company" by Ruth Waldo Newhall (1992).
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