Memories of Healey’s Park in Perth

By Bob Cudmore

   One of the first local amusement parks built to cater to automobiles and buses on day trips was Healey’s Park on what is now Route 30 in Perth, north of county highway 107. 

   In 1924 Amsterdam barber Thomas A. Healey and his wife Edith bought land in Perth where silver foxes had been raised for fur.  P. Sefton’s Web site Lost Landmarks reported that the Healeys then “hired a farmer to dig out a mill pond and rebuild a sawmill dam, hauled in some sand” and opened the entertainment facility that year.

   The refreshment stand burned down during the first season.  Otherwise it was a great opening year for swimmers and dancers according to a Recorder story from April 1925.  Healey ran a shuttle bus to the park from Amsterdam and was considering a similar bus run to Broadalbin. 

   According to town historian Sylvia Zierak's book “Perth, Memories and Reflections,” the dance pavilion was a top attraction at Healey’s.  A newspaper story said the pavilion featured a “mammoth ten piece orchestrion piano,” a machine that could sound like an orchestra.  Sunday concerts were held with musicians seated on a floating raft in the small lake.

   The Healeys lived on Shuler Street in Amsterdam for many years where his barber shop was located. 

   In 1917, according to a newspaper story, a man named Thomas Healey was fined fifty dollars for putting a slot machine in a candy store owned by Clarence Koch on Ann Street in Amsterdam.  The story did not specifically say the arrested man was the barber Thomas Healey.  The newspaper account did report the incident was the first slot machine arrest in the city and maybe even the state. 

   In 1927 Healey, Albert Cesaretti and Anthony Cavalieri were each fined fifty dollars after the sheriff found three slot machines in a store operated by Cesaretti and Cavalieri at Healey’s Park.  Over one hundred dollars was confiscated and turned over to “the poor fund of the town of Perth.”.   

   When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Healey’s opened a bar at the dance hall.  Some neighbors complained about noise.

   In May 1934 several men were charged with attempted arson for trying to burn down Healey’s dance pavilion.  Gasoline was poured around the pavilion and a lighted flare was thrown, but the flare failed to ignite the gasoline.  The men were frightened away by the approach of Healey and his night watchman. 

   Seven men faced charges, including Max Brown, who was described as an official of Jollyland, an amusement park in Amsterdam that is now a baseball stadium called Shuttleworth Park.  The main suspect, Frank Isola of Gloversville, was sentenced to up to three years in prison.  No motive was reported for the attempted arson.

   The dance pavilion became a roller skating rink in the 1940s.  Edith Healey died at age 59 at her home, then in Perth Center, in 1942.  In 1946 E. Pickrell was listed as the manager at Healey’s, about the year that Thomas Healey retired.

   Healey's Park closed in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  Sefton’s Web site speculated that with post-war prosperity, people were traveling farther on vacation.  More people had weeklong vacations and were not as interested in day trips. 

   Sefton wrote, “Healey's is probably better remembered as a ruin than as a going concern. Cattails had long infiltrated the pond's shallows and surrounded the red spiral slide by the time the dam was breached in the 1970s.”                           

   Thomas Healey died in 1966 at age 88.  Historian Zierak said the park site eventually was bulldozed and its large pine trees were cut down for lumber.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 27, 2022-From the Archives-Episode 117, June 24. 2016-Bob Cudmore covers the 2016 American Revolution in the Mohawk Valley Conference.  Edward Lengel is author of “First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His and the Nation’s Prosperity,” J. L. Bell is author of “The Road to Concord, How Four Stolen Cannons Ignited the Revolutionary War” and Don Hagist explains the online Journal of the American Revolution.

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