I took a couple of trips this past month to the locations where two of Northeast Ohio’s classic kiddie parks once operated! Westlake Kiddie Park and Kiddie Playland are among the parks I hear about least often, but they were undoubtedly fun for youngsters who lived nearby in the 1950s and 60s! Here’s what I’ve recently learned about these two parks, and seen at their original locations:

Westlake Kiddie Park

A few weeks ago, while I was researching some historical amusement parks outside of the Greater Cleveland area, I stumbled upon a mention of a small park just a bit west of Cleveland that I’d never heard of before: Westlake Kiddie Park. It seems to be an extremely obscure park today, at least among all of the resources I could find online, but after several hours of searching, I was finally able to find one 1950s map on which it is shown (included in the image gallery below)!

After discovering the location of this small park, I was very interested to see what the area looks like today. It turns out that the majority of the property is currently a small, open field, with an office building on one side and Sperry Creek on the other. By my best estimate, the park was, at most, probably slightly larger than Memphis Kiddie Park (the historic kiddie park which still operates today in Brooklyn, Ohio). There isn’t much to see there today, but I did observe some residents making use of the open field: a few geese were casually enjoying the spring weather, which felt kind of like a poetic parallel to the children who enjoyed the rides there about 70 years ago!

Kiddie Playland

A couple of weeks after my excursion to Westlake, I felt inspired to research and visit the site of a second defunct kiddie park. This location was doubly significant, in a way, because Randall Park Mall once stood just across Northfield Road! A drive-in theater also once operated near this small amusement park.

Today, the area where the park once stood is occupied by an assortment of small restaurants and stores, but I personally found it fascinating to imagine how it might have looked and sounded in the 1950s with excited kids enjoying the rides. Thankfully, this can still be experienced not too far away at Memphis Kiddie Park, which, according to their website, is the oldest remaining kiddie park in the United States, and home to the oldest continuously-operating steel roller coaster in North America!