Ralph Lopez sits in the living room of his Roscoe Village apartment watching a video about the old Riverview amusement park that he and his partner Derek Gee produced five years ago. The 35-minute video, Laugh Your Troubles Away: The Complete History of Riverview Park, includes footage Lopez shot with a Super-8 camera while riding in the front car of the Bobs, the park’s wooden roller coaster. The film was shot in 1967, the year Riverview closed. “If I had known it would be the last year,” he says, “I would have shot a lot more footage.”
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Riverview opened near Belmont and Western in 1904, eventually calling itself the “World’s Largest Amusement Park.” It included attractions like the Bobs and a sideshow billed as “The Only Negro Siamese Twins Alive Today.” But when the site’s property value soared in the 1960s, the park’s investors shut it down and sold the land. Today it’s home to a Dominick’s and a Toys “R” Us.
After Riverview closed, Lopez briefly worked as a machine adjuster for an envelope manufacturing company on the north side. But he soon quit, preferring to work outdoors. He drove a truck for 14 years and remodeled homes. Meanwhile he had begun amassing Riverview memorabilia. In 1972 he bought 4,000 tickets from a Wisconsin park operator who had purchased some of the Riverview rides. Neighbors gave him their pictures of the park, and he began collecting blueprints of the attractions. By the mid-70s he was selling ticket displays and pictures to taverns and hobby shops. Recently a friend in the Wisconsin Dells who used to run an amusement park lent him and Gee glass-plate negatives and architectural plans from Riverview. This fall they’ll publish a book about the park. Lopez dreams about opening an amusement park museum.
