Colorado’s Lakeside Amusement Park in Glorious Monochrome

I visited the famous Lakeside Amusement Park (the last surviving amusement park to have been named White City) outside of Denver, Colo., to check out the amazing collection of Art Deco, Googie, and Streamline Moderne signage and architecture. Behold, Raygun Gothic in stunning monochrome!

Lakeside fills about half of the city of Lakeside, Colorado — the state’s smallest town in both geographic size and population (8, I think). The historic Tower of Jewels still stands as it looked when the park opened in 1908.

Colorado brewer Adolph Zang and his partners built the park on the shores of Lake Rhoda outside the bounds of the City of Denver to avoid the city’s restrictive liquor laws, and incorporated the tiny town to protect it from being annexed by Denver and bound by its blue laws in the future.

When it opened in 1908, the park was covered in over 100,000 lights, and in the 1930s it was renovated as a new group of investors took it over. The renovations in the 1930s included the art deco elements and thousands of feet of neon tubing that adorn the rides and buildings to this day. Some of the oldest buildings still have hundreds or thousands of individual bulbs on them to this day.