"All the kings horses..."

... and all the king's men, couldn't figure out how to open the Gingerbread Castle again.

Sometimes I have to decide between some technically pleasing photos and one that ... isn't. It's not always clear to me what the right way to go is. In the past I've erred on the side of aesthetics. Today, I'm going to go with a little bit of historical interest. So, no golf course photo for you. It's a pretty good one too. Oh well.

Gingerbread Castle was a children's fairy tale theme park. It's located located in Hamburg, NJ, about 90 minutes or so from New York City. Both the theme park and the adjacent stone mill ("Weathsworth"), whose owner commissioned the castle, are abandoned and in various states of disrepair. The state and size of the mill lends the castle an even more erie feeling than it might have just standing there on its own.

A barbed wire fence prevents access to both the mill and the castle, though it appears that there was better access to these structures not too long ago. In truth, there is a section of fence that is not barbed, but with a large yard sale going on nearby, and some fear of breaking my camera (read: neck), I opted not to try. I was however, pretty tempted. As I did for the Red Hook Grain Terminal, I am going to let others have the glory as far as that's concerned (1, 2, 3).

The park closed its doors in the late 70s, and there's been at least 1 failed restoration attempt, 1 failed ebay auction (starting price was $649,000), 1 fire, and a brief stint as a halloween haunted house.

I find it interesting that a fairly tale about an egg that falls is almost always depicted before the fall. The paint chips here are like egg shell chips in poor Humpty's weak armor, but he hasn't yet fallen and he hasn't yet cracked. And given the way things are going, it seems likely that he will not in fact fall; that all the king's horses and all the king's men will not come and that, instead, in a not too distant future, he'll be completely enveloped by the inevitable course of nature and eventually forgotten.