When Seventh Street Park Was Jurassic Park

More the sixty years ago, nine replica dinosaurs were created at Jonas Studios in Claverack for Dinoland, Sinclair Oil Corporation's exhibition at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. 

Before the dinosaurs were loaded onto a barge and floated down the river to their destination in Flushing Meadows, they were exhibited in Seventh Street Park, the public square here in Hudson. 

Photo by Gibson

Photo by Gibson

The History Room at the Hudson Area Library is currently working on an exhibition about the the dinosaurs of Dinoland and their time in Hudson which will be mounted sometime next year. Organizers of the exhibition are seeking images, documents, models, and other memorabilia relating the dinosaurs for inclusion in the exhibition. Anyone with materials they are willing to contribute or loan should contact Brenda Shufelt at brenda.shufelt@hudsonarealibrary.org. 

The organizers of the exhibit are also looking to confirm that the stories about the brontosaurus breaking the barge and ending up in the river are actually true. The incident is mentioned in The Spirit of the Place, a book written by native son Stephen Bergman, a.k.a. Samuel Shem, set in a thinly fictionalized Hudson called Columbia. The mishap of the brontosaurus is referenced at the end of this paragraph from the book, which tells how Columbia, a.k.a. Hudson, is a "town of breakage."

At public events things would unerringly break. School microphones would consistently give out just after someone said, "Testing, testing." On Memorial Days in Columbian cemeteries, just as the Gettysburg began, viewing stands would collapse. In deep summer at public tennis courts, water fountains were always going dry so that if, after a hot game of tennis on the asphalt courts, when your feet felt like grill-side-down burgers and your tongue like a bun, you went to the water fountain and turned the handle, the one thing you could be sure would not come out was water. Columbians learned to talk affectionately about past breakages, such as "the Great Breakage of '37," when, in the Thanksgiving Day parade, a massive five-axle Universal Atlas cement truck disguised as a turkey exploded in front of the Niagara Mohawk power station, knocking out lights and heat for weeks. Or "the Dinosaur Breakage of '52," when the Paul Jonas life-sized sculpture of the brontosaurus bound for the New York World's Fair broke the back of its barge and sank, its neck poking out of the Hudson River in the most lifelike way.

Any evidence or recollection that this in fact happened should also be shared at brenda.shufelt@hudsonarealibrary.org.  

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