Rising like a princess’ castle on the shores of Oakland’s Lake Merritt, Children’s Fairyland occupies a special place not just in locals’ hearts but also in American history.
Opened in 1950 for 9 cents a ticket, it was the first-ever storybook amusement park geared toward children in the United States. It beat Disneyland by five years.
And if you look at a map of Northern California, you can see the ripple effect it had on children’s entertainment. Fairyland inspired a multitude of smaller, midcentury theme parks seeking to emulate its tropes and philosophy. Some are lost to history, but families can still visit others, like Pixieland Amusement Park in Concord, Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose and Children’s Wonderland in Vallejo.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong, center left, celebrates cutting the ribbon with her daughter Harper Duong, 8, and San Jose Councilmember Bien Doan, right, for the reopening of the Danny the Dragon ride at Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
“When it was built and started taking off, it was in Life magazine and was a very nationally recognized piece of culture. And they quickly replicated that across the country,” says Kymberly Miller, the CEO of Children’s Fairyland. “The Willie the Whale that you might see at a park in New Jersey is based on the Willie the Whale that’s at our park. But Fairyland – it was the first one of its kind.”
Walking into Fairyland for the first time can be disorienting. That’s if you’re an adult; for a child, nothing might seem more natural. Originally, the park was supposed to mimic an Old World pastoral landscape, with English cottage scenes and a mill wheel.
But the superintendent of Oakland parks at the time, William Penn Mott Jr. – who would go on to establish national parks under Ronald Reagan – had a different idea. He believed that “fairy-tale scenes should be depicted as he imagined children might see the adult world, a little nonsensical and out of kilter,” according to the 2011 book, “Creating a Fairyland.”
Families ride the brightly colored Jolly Trolley at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland on Thursday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Legend has it this imperative caused the park’s architect, William Russell Everitt, to smash the original model to splinters with a baseball bat. Everitt came back with a starkly different aesthetic, one where right angles don’t seem to exist and Modernist colors are as varied and vivid as a melted box of Crayola crayons.
Also, everything is tiny – literally built for a child’s perspective. Adults must crawl through doorways, buildings look like dollhouses and dwarf goats and donkeys hunker in the animal section. And the park once held a record for the country’s smallest functioning post office, a groovy dome hiding a real postal employee.
“Everything that we have here at Fairyland is very small, so the little kids can run around and play on things while the parents can’t. But the parents can join in on the adventures along the way, so that makes it a family experience,” says Randal Metz, co-author of “Creating a Fairyland” and the director of the park’s Open Storybook Puppet Theater.
Children’s Fairyland puppet theater director Randal Metz prepares for a puppet show backstage at the park’s Open Storybook Puppet Theater in Oakland on Thursday, June 27, 2026. Metz says he’s been a puppeteer for 57 years, starting at age 10. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
On a recent afternoon, visitors streamed through the Fairyland entrance adorned with a boot from “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” into a funky kingdom of askew skylines, flower sculptures broadcasting trombone blasts through internal speakers and toadstools as swollen as tractor tires. Willie the Whale is a sculptural cetacean that invites guests to climb into its gullet to watch a show. There’s a darkened rabbit hole to explore from “Alice in Wonderland,” and an Old West town has a half-painted fence with a sign, “To rent brush and whitewash, see Tom Sawyer.”
A girl wearing a duckie-patterned yellow hat led her adult past a stoic lizard in an aquarium – “Puff the Bearded Dragon” — to press up against a pond enclosure. “I look at the ducks for five minutes!” she announced, beginning to count “one, two, three….” Her chaperone asked: “Do you want to call momma to tell her you’re looking at the ducks? This is the spot where you usually call her.”
At the puppet theater – the oldest continually running one of its kind in the U.S. — Metz and an assistant staged a show about a shape-shifting Japanese tea kettle. Kids hunched close to the stage, enraptured, while adults checked their phones on the sidelines. When the show ended, the pint-size audience erupted into a communal “Yaaaay!”
Kids visiting Oakland’s Children’s Fairyland watch a show at Open Storybook Puppet Theater by director Randal Metz on Thursday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Metz has worked as a puppeteer at the park for decades, joining the Storybook Theater’s ranks of greats like Frank Oz of “Muppets” fame (who also voiced and controlled Yoda) and Tony Urbano, who controlled the robot Johnny 5 in “Short Circuit.” Many of the puppets and marionettes are fabricated in-house, while others come from well-known puppeteers like Ralph Chesse from the 1920s golden age of puppetry.
“This should be like children seeing their first Broadway show,” Metz says. “The music, the scenery, the acting – it should all blend together to give kids a taste of what’s to come.”
It’s fitting that today’s show is about a magical teapot, as Metz is convinced the park itself has powers.
“I can tell you it’s magical, because you remember the big earthquake we had in California in ’89? I was living on the grounds at the time with my wife, and everything around us shook. The buildings across from us, the bricks were falling out, and downtown Oakland had problems. Fairyland — no damage whatsoever. It was protected.”
Visitors enjoy a peaceful moment at the Chapel at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland on Thursday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
No less a figure than Walt Disney was lured in by the park’s magic. He was scouting America for ideas for a grand park, but had found that “most were indeed dirty, unsafe and had hostile employees,” according to Metz’s book. Fairyland was “clean, friendly, staffed by enthusiastic employees and enjoyed excellent theming. … Disney felt these aspects would be integral to creating a pleasurable guest experience.”
Disney wound up hiring some of Fairyland’s employees when he opened Disneyland in the 1950s. The star of Fairyland kept rising; it appeared on 1960s Bay Area TV shows like “Romper Room” and “Captain Cosmic,” and was name-dropped in “Dennis the Menace” comic strips through the 1970s.
Fairyland’s influence reached far beyond the immediate Bay Area. As early as the mid-1950s, eerily similar parks started appearing across America and even Canada, Europe and Australia, all using fairy-tale themes and catering to a child’s unique viewpoint.
Visitors wait at the entrance to Pixieland Amusement Park in Concord on Saturday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
“All of these parks came in and looked to Fairyland, asked about our blueprints, talked with us in detail,” says Metz. “Many of them were opening up with big shoes (at the front gates), giant whales that swallow the kids. There was a fairytale castle for Rapunzel that they copycatted and put up. I’ve seen postcards where I could swear those were our sets, just copied over.”
The Northern California amusement parks that exist today include Children’s Wonderland in Vallejo, where children enter through castle doors guarded by crocodiles to clamber on a teapot, pirate ship and pumpkin carriage. There is Happy Hollow in San Jose, home to a Danny the Dragon train ride and fun animals like an Eclectus parrot and a lesser Madagascar hedgehog tenrec.
There is Fairytale Town in Sacramento, Storyland in Fresno and Pixie Woods with its enchanted forest in Stockton, and also Storybook Woods Park in Elk Grove (which is more of a playground).
Parkgoers enjoy a ride on the Dragon Roller Coaster at Pixieland Amusement Park in Concord on Saturday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Then there’s Pixieland in Concord, which opened in 1955 as King Norman’s Wonderland and later moved and expanded to feature a rideable scale-model train and coin-operated rides. At one point, there were also miniature cars that required a special driver’s license issued by the park — though it’s uncertain whether these were for adults or kids to have fun in.
On a recent weekend, tot-sized patrons were enjoying Pixieland’s rides, dressed in birthday garb — scooting around in moving teacups, getting lifted on the Frog Hopper.
“What we hear often from our guests is that they remember having memories there themselves as children, or bringing their children there many years ago,” says Cindy Brumley, Pixieland’s co-owner. “Now they’re bringing their own children or grandchildren. What’s popular is the nostalgia of the fair-like feeling they get when walking through the gates that they remember from years ago.”
And, Brumley adds, the “corn dogs are the legendary staple!”
Children’s Fairyland puppet theater director Randal Metz operates a bear puppet backstage at the Oakland park’s Open Storybook Puppet Theater on Thursday, June 27, 2026. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Many of Fairyland’s sister parks rely heavily on rides, leaving the time-honored aspects of storytelling and puppetry to the original in Oakland. And it seems a winning formula – one that’s been updated over its 76 years of existence with bilingual puppet shows, gamified scavenger hunts and cocktail-and-dance parties for adults but remains true to its first principles.
“For Fairyland, we want to make sure we are staying up to snuff and moving with the pace of Bay Area families,” explains Miller, the CEO.
“We are pulling these threads of its mission from the 1950s all the way forward to 2026 and beyond. We want to make sure they’re firm and strong, but also held by what is happening in the modern day. That calls for nimbleness — but it also calls for remembering why Fairyland has endured this long.”
Storybook theme parks in the Bay Area (and beyond)
Sharee Acosta lifts her 19-month-old son Jibril out of a teacup in front of the iconic teapot at Children’s Wonderland park in Vallejo in 2021. (Chris Riley/Times-Herald)
Children’s Fairyland, Oakland: fairyland.org
Pixieland Amusement Park, Concord: pixieland.com
Happy Hollow, San Jose: happyhollow.org
Children’s Wonderland, Vallejo: gvrd.org/children-s-wonderland
Fairytale Town, Sacramento: fairytaletown.org
Storyland, Fresno: storylandfresno.com
Pixie Woods, Stockton: visitpixiewoods.com
Children’s shows are regularly performed on this stage with a painted set at Pixie Woods in Stockton. The Fairyland-inspired park opened in 1954 and features kids’ play areas, amusement rides and a dragon-themed water-play area. (Doug Duran/Bay Area News Group)