Corridor of Diversion : One-Mile Stretch in Buena Park Is a Sprawl of Entertainment and Glitter

The knights are jousting on Beach Boulevard this summer. Charlie Chaplin and Michael Jackson are hanging out in air-conditioned rooms. And across the street, the world’s only shrunken head of a Chinese person is competing for attention with the bust of a four-pupiled man. “It’s real cool,” Ken Kisner, a 13-year-old visitor from Phoenix, said of the bust. “I thought this would be boring, but it’s better than a regular museum.”

Charlotte Stehr, 54, of La Mirada had a decidedly dour view of the bizarre displays. All things considered, she said, “I’d rather be at Knott’s Berry Farm riding the Ferris wheel.”

It is the famous and venerable amusement park down the street that gave rise to this sprawl of activity in its shadow along the one-mile stretch of Beach Boulevard from the Artesia Freeway to La Palma Avenue.

Called the Beach Boulevard Entertainment Corridor, the area bears a resemblance to the Las Vegas strip, complete with four major tourist attractions featuring, among other things, knights in shining armor on Andalusian stallions, wax figures of movie and rock stars, gut-wrenching oddities from around the world and a cowboy juggler fond of telling jokes while balancing buzzing chain saws. The corridor also contains 12 hotels, 10 restaurants and enough glittering marquees to light up the evening sky.

“You would be hard-pressed to find such a critical mass of attractions anywhere else in Southern California,” said Pattie Davidson, interim executive director of the Buena Park Convention and Visitors Office, which reports more than 5 million visitors a year to Knott’s Berry Farm, Medieval Times, Movieland Wax Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and Wild Bill’s Wild West Dinner Extravaganza.

The migration generates millions of dollars in income for the city and local businesses. “I would say that tourism is one of the major employers in Buena Park,” Davidson said, “something that’s really put the city in the limelight.”

Back in 1920 when Walter and Cordelia Knott began farming 20 acres of rented land along what later became Beach Boulevard, it would have been difficult for them to predict the eventual outcome their arrival would have. The next year, the Knotts opened the now-legendary roadside berry stand from which they sold raspberries, loganberries--and later a new product called boysenberries--to passersby en route to the seashore on what was already a major road. And in 1934 Cordelia Knott’s family chicken dinners began attracting hordes of mid-route vacationers, some of whom had to wait as long as two hours for service.

“People were lining up,” says Knott’s Berry Farm publicist Bob Ochsner. “Walter started realizing that he needed some amusements to keep them entertained while they waited for their meals.”

A longtime fan of Western history, the entrepreneur decided to create an authentic ghost town. In 1940, he purchased the Old Trails Hotel in Prescott, Ariz., and had it moved to Buena Park. Over the years, the ghost town grew, eventually overtaking the restaurant as an attraction unto itself which, by 1968, had a separate admission price. Today the park covers 150 acres, includes more than 60 shops and five themed sections and serves as many as 10,000 chicken dinners a day.

From the beginning there were nearby businesses that benefited from the Knotts’ presence. For years, the California Alligator Farm--housing more than 1,000 crocodiles, alligators and snakes--was a fixture across the street. Other Knotts’ customers stopped at the old Cottage Pottery shop whose shelves were perennially lined with dinnerware, pots, pottery and souvenirs. And in 1962, the Movieland Wax Museum opened for business a few doors down on Beach.

In the early to mid-1980s, however, several things occurred which, taken collectively, began to change the landscape.

In 1983 Knott’s introduced Camp Snoopy, a special themed area for children. In a sense, Ochsner said, the event marked the emergence of the park as a modern competitive attraction in a new age of aggressive entertainment marketing.

The next year, the alligator farm, beset by dwindling attendance and an expired lease, closed and moved its animals to a private preserve in Florida. And in 1986, in a move seen by many as the beginning of the “new wave” of entertainment outlets along Beach Boulevard, Medieval Times opened its doors to rave reviews and very large audiences.

The brainchild of a Spanish family, the medieval-style “castle” features nightly re-creations of an actual jousting tournament that took place in 1093. Mounted atop majestic Spanish war horses, six handsome knights decked in brightly colored costumes of the era battle it out with swords, lances and mace cheered on by 1,120 paying guests seated in a coliseum.

To add spice, the castle also features a sword shop where visitors can purchase authentic blades for $75 to $700; genuine suits of armor for $5,000 to $25,000; and a Museum of Torture displaying various instruments of pain designed to make ancient prisoners offers that they just couldn’t refuse.

“Ten ninety three is a fun year to represent because of the Spanish Inquisition,” says Celeste Clark, the company’s public relations manager. Their goal is “to give people the impression that they really are entering the Middle Ages; we want them to check their 1990s identity at the door and become nobility from the year 1093.”

In the year 1990, another new attraction opened up on Beach Boulevard: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum, owned by the same company that operates the Movieland Wax Museum. Based on the drawings and writings of Robert Ripley, a newspaper cartoonist who spent 30 years searching the world for oddities, the museum is the largest of 14 such establishments worldwide with exhibits ranging from a depiction of the “Last Supper,” created from 280 slices of burned toast, to jewelry made out of maggots in Africa.

A year later, a separate group down the street began operating Wild Bill’s Wild West Dinner Extravaganza, a Las Vegas-style western musical revue which, besides the chain saw juggler, features a female lariat twirler and a cowgirl chorus line.

It hasn’t all been a success.

The Kingdom of the Dancing Stallions, a horse show located at the current site of Medieval Times, went bankrupt after less than two years in business in the mid-1980s because of what some later described as high overhead combined with insufficient marketing. And more recently, Movieland Wax Museum, Ripley’s and Wild Bill’s have all reported significant drops in attendance because of the bad economy, Los Angeles earthquake and last year’s L.A. riots.

Most entrepreneurs along the corridor, however, say they expect a bright future.

Next week, the wax museum will inaugurate the latest of its 292 exhibits: a scene from “Green Acres,” a 1960s television show starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor. Included on the star-studded guest list is Bob Hope, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Sinatra, Merv Griffin, Bob Newhart, Johnny Carson, Joan Collins, Gregory Peck, Robert Wagner, Sidney Poitier, Dinah Shore, Carol Burnett, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor.

Next month, the only McDonald’s restaurant in the corridor--already equipped with its own giant water tower and operating 60-foot train layout--will open what may be the country’s first attraction of its kind: a 14-seat video-and-motion theater designed so customers can experiences downhill skiing, road racing, helicopter flying and water sliding. According to planners, the ride will be called the McThriller.

And the luster of Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum hadn’t dimmed a bit during the recent visit of a family from Bieber, Calif., a rural town about 100 miles northeast of Redding.

“This is great,” exclaimed Todd Kelly, 17, adding that his favorite exhibit was the one containing the Chinese shrunken head. “We never get this kind of culture where I come from.”