One of the most famous sites in a New Jersey shore town is coming down, taking with it decades of fun childhood memories for locals and tourists.
The Ferris wheel that was a focal point of the shuttered Gillian’s Wonderland Pier in Ocean City will soon be demolished.
"Right now, we have a decrepit and decaying site, and we have to do something. You know, time is not on our side,” real estate developer Eustace Mita, who purchased the site in 2021, told news outlet WPVI.
Gillian’s Wonderland Pier opened in 1965 and closed in 2024 — a week before its 94-year-old founder, Roy Gillian, died, CBS News Philadelphia previously reported. Now the iconic Ferris wheel, weathered by years of salt air, will soon be cut apart.
Mita explained that the Ferris wheel’s bolts and major components have been fused due to corrosion, meaning it cannot simply be disassembled and preserved.
"It would make it impossible to reassemble in place anywhere," he told WPVI.
Locals are grieving the loss of the beloved Ferris wheel, with Andrew Boylan calling it “a big staple of Wonderland.”
"It feels like a lot of memories are being taken away,” Boylan, who spent 13 years working at Gillian’s Wonderland Pier, told CBS News Philadelphia.
Stu Newman, who would go to the pier as a child, said, "I'm an engineer, so I understand that aspect of it, but from a personal side it's going to have a lot of attachment to a lot of people that have ridden that thing decades ago."
"I'm upset because it is a cornerstone of Ocean City and we all have wonderful memories of it,” said Mary Anne Munning, who stopped by the site to take a photo of the Ferris wheel Tuesday before it gets demolished.
In June, the Ocean City Council voted to designate the former Gillian’s Wonderland Pier as an area “in need of rehabilitation,” bringing Mita one step closer to creating a 252-room oceanfront hotel. The developer initially planned to keep the Ferris wheel part of the property.
"Our thought was we will rehab it, keep it, and actually raise it by 10 feet. That will be a $1.5 million project," Mita told WPVI in 2024.
But Mita’s proposal has yet to be approved, and the city council’s designation has been challenged in court.
Several community groups filed a lawsuit to reverse the council’s decision to designate the site as “in need of rehabilitation,” WPVI reported in August.
