Rye Playland

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Another location that fellow stalker Owen visited a few weeks back while spending the day in Rye, New York was the amusement park featured at the very end of the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big.  Rye Playland, which is also called Playland Amusement Park or just simply Playland and is run by Westchester County, New York, is the only government-owned and operated amusement park in the entire United States.  In the early 1900s, Westchester County Park Association purchased two beachside theme parks after local citizens became upset over the unruly patrons fraternizing there.  The Association tore down the existing parks and built Rye Playland in their place.  The Art Deco style park opened on May 26, 1928 after a scant six months of construction.  The new park featured an ice skating rink, a boardwalk, a fine dining restaurant, a swimming pool, two beaches, and numerous rides, including the Grand Carousel, which was built by Mangels-Carmel in 1915.  In 1987, Playland was declared a National Historic Landmark and it is still in operation to this day, looking much the same as it did when it first opened over 81 years ago.  

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Due to its quaint, beachside charm, movie producers have made much use of Playland over the years.  It is at the Rye amusement park that Tom Hanks finally locates the elusive Zoltar machine and makes his wish to be a kid again in fave movie Big.  As you can see in the above screen capture and photograph, the entrance to the park looks a bit different today than it did in 1988 when Big  was filmed.  The two white pillars flanking the front gates have long since been removed, as has the pine tree that used to stand in the center island.

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Also, at the time the movie was filmed, the large fountain at the front of the park was not in operation.  That fountain was in full swing, though, when Owen visited Playland a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, due to all of the spouting water, he couldn’t match up his photograph perfectly to the screen shot, but the two pictures you see above were taken from the exact same vantage point.

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Most of the scene from Big took place on Playland’s curved boardwalk, which is located just around the corner from the park’s main entrance and, which, amazingly enough, still looks almost exactly the same today as it did twenty-one years ago when the movie was filmed.

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The only thing missing, of course, is the Zoltar machine.  🙁  But notice how the payphone in the above photograph is still in the EXACT same place that it was when the movie was filmed!!

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Owen, of course, wasn’t expecting to find a magic fortune telling machine on the pier during his stalk, so imagine his surprise when he discovered that a Pepsi machine was standing just a few feet to the left of where Zoltar was situated in the movie.

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So, of course, he just HAD to pretend to kick the machine, like Tom Hanks did in the movie.  LOVE IT!  🙂

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Rye Playland also showed up in Fatal Attraction, as the spot where Glenn Close took Michael Douglas’ daughter for the day after kidnapping her from school.  In the movie, the two are shown riding Playland’s iconic Dragon Coaster, which was built in 1929 and was designed by Frederick A. Church.  The Dragon Coaster is 3,400 feet long, rises to 85 feet at its highest point, and is one of only about a hundred wooden roller coasters still in operation in the United States.

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Mariah Carey also rode the Dragon Coaster in the 1995 video for her song “Fantasy”, which was filmed in its entirety on location at Playland.  The video also made use of the park’s boardwalk and parking lot area.

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Other productions filmed at Playland include Pieta, Sweet and Lowdown, Tenderness, The Muppets Take Manhattan and several episodes of BET Now.

A big THANK YOU to Owen for stalking this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: Rye Playland is located at the end of Playland Parkway in Rye, New York.  You can visit their website here.  Park admission fees range between $20 to $30, but you can access the boardwalk area, where Big was filmed, for free. Parking costs an average of $5, depending on the day.  The boardwalk area is located just around the corner from the park’s main entrance.  The Who’s the Boss? house is located just a mile North of Playland at 13 Onondaga Street, also in Rye.

The Who’s the Boss House

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One location that I will, sadly, not be able to stalk during this year’s New York vacation for the simple fact that it is located too far from the island of Manhattan is the home belonging to the Bower Family in the 1984 television sitcom Who’s the Boss?  But thankfully, fellow stalker Owen visited this location a few weeks back and was kind enough to allow me to share his story and his photographs on my blog.  And while I usually don’t like to blog about locations that I haven’t personally stalked myself, this one was honestly just too good to pass up!!  Hopefully someday I will be able to visit the Who’s the Boss house in person, but until then, a big THANK YOU goes out to Owen for letting me stalk vicariously through him!  🙂

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On Who’s the Boss?, the house where Angela, Tony, Jonathan, Samantha, and Mona live is supposedly located at 3344 Oak Hills Drive in the New England town of Fairfield, Connecticut.  In reality, though, the house used in the opening credits and for establishing shots throughout the series eight year run is actually located about thirty miles away from Fairfield, in Rye, New York.  It’s quite ironic that a real Fairfield house wasn’t used in the series, being that according to this 1989 Fairfield Citizen-News  article, Who’s the Boss? producers chose to set their show in the New England town after “falling in love with” its “quaint charm and picturesque scenery”.  But, for some odd reason, when scouting locations for the Bower Family residence, producers looked not to Fairfield, but to Westchester County, New York.    Even more ironic to me is the fact that while the house was featured in the opening credits of each week’s show, for some reason, only a very small portion of it was ever shown, as you can see in the above screen capture.  It’s such a pretty house that I am really surprised more of it wasn’t shown on the series.

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And in a Who’s The Boss  side note – for the better part of a year I attended an acting class with Jonathan Halyalkar, who played the character of “Billy” in 21 episodes of the show’s 7th Season.  🙂  I kept mentioning how familiar Jonathan looked when someone finally told me about his childhood acting stint on Who’s the Boss?, which I thought was just about the coolest thing ever!  So, I, of course, had to ask him all about it.  Jonathan, who was an insanely talented triple threat (as those who can sing, dance, and act are often called) and an all around nice guy, told me all sorts of stories about his time on the show and was even a good sport about the fact that most people say the series “jumped the shark” when they cast him.  LOL Jonathan told me to Google the terms “Who’s the Boss” and “jump the shark” and that I’d see his name pop up all over the place.  Too funny.  Sadly, in all our time together in acting class I somehow never thought to get a photograph with him.  🙁

Big THANK YOU to Owen for not only finding this location, but for stalking it as well.  🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Who’s the Boss? house is located in Westchester County at 13 Onandaga Street in Rye, New York.