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Other business sponsorships included the Fisher Scone concession building, its roof made of a colossal plaid-painted fiberglass replica of a Scottish tam, and the piece de resistance — the Franz Bread Rest Hut, shaped like a great hollow log with a huge fiberglass loaf of balloon bread jutting incongruously out of its top. Inside this, guests could watch their kids enjoy the park’s only real thrill ride: the log flume. There was an opera house (sponsored by Blue Bell Potato Chips), a big two-story structure built like a 1910s Grange hall, in which live Vaudeville melodramas ran daily — with noble, manly heroes saving fair young maidens from mustache-twirling villains, and other turn-of-the-century theatrical tropes. And everywhere there were murals and sculptures and plywood cut-outs of the ubiquitous pixies, flashing winning smiles with a hint of mischief behind them.
That slight air of seediness may have contributed to the park’s demise. It’s more likely, though, that its primary challenge was the short operating season — there’s a reason Disneyland is located in a place that gets 15 inches of rain a year. Almost all of Pixieland was outdoors, and even in the summertime things can get drizzly and chilly in Lincoln City. How many families chose a different destination for their beach vacation out of fear that the weather would ruin it? It’s impossible to say. In any case, by 1974 Pixieland was no more. The log flume ride and Little Toot were sold to the Lagoon Amusement Park in Utah, where they are still in service today. And by the late 1970s, the park was essentially a 57-acre blackberry bramble. The Pixie Kitchen soldiered on for another dozen or two years, but it seemed as if the magic had been drawn out of it and infused into the failure of Pixieland. It changed hands several times, and finished its run as a nightclub. Sometime in the 1990s, a fire damaged the structure, and although the best part of the building was still OK, there apparently was no reason to keep it going. It was demolished, and today is just a level place beside the road. Today, the site that once held Pixieland has been restored as part of the Salmon River estuary. The tides have been allowed to flow freely back in and mix with river water, providing cover for all sorts of wildlife — especially salmon smolts. As of five years ago there was still a building on the grounds — a little tide-gate shack, built in the classic cartoon-pixie style. But by now, likely that’s even gone, and, a mere 50 years later, Nature has reclaimed its own.
And there’s another point, which Portland Oregonian writer Inara Verzemnieks makes. “It's hard not to wonder whether if by disappearing, Pixieland became an even better place in the end,” she wrote, in her 2008 article about the park. “If Pixieland had stuck around, we would might have been forced to see those things that photos reveal and memories don't: Children bundled up against the bracing cold in Nordic sweaters and wool shirts; the pathetic descent of the log flume ride; the way the pixies in the background actually look kind of menacing. The Pixieland we see now in our minds is more fantastical and impossible than the one that actually existed, which seems right somehow.”
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