One of them was out in East Manitou Springs, Colorado. How do I know about it? Because my parents saved a tourist guide from our family trip to Colorado back in the summer of 1970. Here’s the proof (below).
The guide is a lot of fun to look at, and I pull it out every once in a while to examine the ads for the many long-gone attractions – such as Pixieland.
As you can tell from its sign, Pixieland boasted two attractions: the Mystery Hill-like Miracle House, as well as a miniature golf course.
(I’m not sure that ‘Miracle House’ is such a good name for an attraction like this. It seems more suitable for a place where people come to be healed, not watch to water flow uphill.)
Here are the two ads that appeared in the Pike’s Peak Regionnaire Complete Information and Visitors Guide for the week ending July 31, 1970. I like the Pixieland logo type. (But where is the obligatory pixie advertising mascot?)
I wonder why the shacks in these gravity-gone-wild attractions always seem to have knotty pine walls?
Anway, here is a vintage postcard giving you a glimpse of the Pixieland golf links. Maybe the pro shop was located in the Miracle House.
And here are a few images of Pixieland’s advertising brochure.
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| Courtesy Frank Brusca’s Route40.net website |
So what became of Pixieland? It lasted into the early 1980s at least, with a mention of it in the August 20, 1983 Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. By that time, the whole complex was called Wet ’N Wild Waterslide and Amusement Park.
By the end of the 1990s, however, according to the Society for Commercial Archeology, the sites for both the Miracle House and Pixieland Miniature Golf were “weeds and rubble.”
Today a variety of office buildings and parking lots make up the former Pixieland property at 327 Manitou Avenue.
It’s hard not to feel a little melancholy about the passing of the era in which tourists were amused and entertained by quaint little attractions like Pixieland.
3 comments:
This was kind of a funky, little place. I remember our family visiting there shortly after we moved to Denver in September, 1968
I gave tours as a high school kid circa 68. Steady tourist flow in summer. Had a speil about geomagnetic anomalies for the gullible.
Went there as a young boy, mostly to play miniature golf. It was one of the family’s favorite trips before the mid-60s. Went through the Miracle House one time. I had ear problems and had problems standing up in there, which prompted the guide to yell at me, and then my sister yelled at him in my defense! I miss that miniature golf course, though, it was always great fun!
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