Jay Gillian sits inside a 12-foot-tall, overalls-clad bear and surveys his empire.
From his vantage point on the Bear Affair ride, Gillian can see the Ferris wheel, log flume, glass house, bumper cars, and more than 30 other rides at Gillian’s Wonderland Pier, a thriving seasonal business and boardwalk landmark in Ocean City—a Cape May County town about ten miles south of Atlantic City.
As the third-generation owner and operator of the Ocean City amusement empire, Gillian has the business in his blood. His grandfather, former vaudeville musician David Gillian, started an amusement park on the Ocean City boardwalk 81 years ago, at the dawn of the Great Depression. That park, Gillian’s Fun Deck, remained in operation until the late 1980s.
In 1965, David’s son Roy built Wonderland Pier at its current location, opening with just ten rides on a large parcel of boardwalk real estate that had sat empty for a decade after a fire had destroyed Stainton’s Playland, a previous entertainment complex. Roy Gillian barely broke even his first year, but the business grew steadily after that.
The youngest of Roy’s four sons, Jay Gillian, now 45, has been working at Wonderland since he was a child. He began by cleaning bicycles at the park’s bike-rental shop in the early 1970s. In 2005, Jay and his wife, Michele, even lived there as newlyweds, occupying a small, third-floor apartment over the park’s narrow offices with three of their seven children from previous marriages. Since Wonderland has a castle-like facade, Michele’s young nieces thought she was living a fairy-tale life. The cramped reality was anything but. “It was very tight quarters,” Jay recalls. “It was like camping with sleeping bags everywhere.” In the winter months, when no one was around, Michele and Jay would drive their car into the park to unload groceries into their walk-up flat.
In some ways, Wonderland seems frozen in time, a family-friendly relic where successive generations of beachgoers have happily entertained their children. It has expanded through the years, and the rides are periodically updated. But little else changes. Small children still clang the bells on the wet boat ride, sno-cones and cotton candy are still dispensed at the concessions, riders on the carousel still grasp for the brass ring, and at 6 every night, all of the Wonderland employees change from polo shirts into starched, white button-downs and ties. That’s a policy implemented by David Gillian that his grandson is reluctant to change despite frequent objections from his seasonal staff, which can be as large as 200, most of whom are students.
Some of the park’s 38 rides, including the 1926 hand-carved carousel and the 1940s fire engines, have been there for generations. Others, like the log flume, are newer. But every summer night—when the weather cooperates—the park is gridlocked with strollers, laughing children, and patient parents giving the rides a spin. Park attendance averages a million people a year, and Gillian says despite last year being “an erratic season,” the numbers were actually up over 2008.
Wonderland is so much a part of Ocean City (population, 14,756) that it’s hard to think of one without the other. The park’s 140-foot Ferris wheel is impossible to miss as you enter the island via the busy Ninth Street Bridge, and it’s deliberately lit with clear bulbs to give the town’s skyline a classy, retro look.
Not everything about Gillian’s is stuck in time. Last summer, the business expanded into nearby Sea Isle City with Gillian’s Funland, a small park of seventeen new kiddie rides that Jay Gillian hopes has growth potential. He coined the name to pay tribute to his father and grandfather by combining the names of the parks each had started—Fun Deck and Wonderland.
Jay’s oldest brother, Jimmy, is also immersed in the family business, albeit independently. He owns and operates Gillian’s Island Water Park and the miniature golf course Adventure Golf. Both were built at the old Fun Deck site on the Ocean City boardwalk, just a few blocks south of Wonderland. The brothers share a storefront toy shop and ticket office downtown.
Roy Gillian is retired, but that does not stop him from popping in regularly to check on his sons. When Jay was being interviewed for this article, Roy stuck his head in to complain that one of the rides was not operating efficiently enough. “It’s embarrassing,” he told his son. How often do such visits occur? “More than I would like,” Jay says. But it’s clear there’s more affection than frustration behind the comment, and Jay is eager to make his father proud.
Jay Gillian has a deeper frustration with increasingly strict state regulations requiring that replacement parts for rides must come from the original factory, not be independently fabricated. “That is becoming more and more of a challenge in the state of New Jersey,” he says. “Before, if a part would break, we could just manufacture one to all the standards. Now, the state has…made it almost impossible. I’ve had to literally throw three rides away because the factory went out of business….That’s why in New Jersey you’ll rarely see any older rides.”
His other foe is the weather. “Regulations and weather are the two things I can’t control,” Gillian says. Last summer, the Sea Isle property opened more than a month behind schedule because June brought 28 days of rain.
Gillian’s office at Wonderland looks out on the Wacky Worm Coaster, which rolls by full of shrieking customers every few minutes as he attends to park business. But Gillian is out of the office as often as he’s in it. What he likes about his job, he says, is that some days he’s a mechanic, other days a carpenter or a painter, and other days he’s in the office paying the bills. And if running two parks did not keep him busy enough, he’s also chairman of Shore Memorial Hospital’s board of trustees and the local school board president—a post from which he’ll resign on July 1, when he takes office for a four-year term as mayor of Ocean City.
Roy Gillian, who was the city commissioner in the 1960s and the town’s mayor for four years in the late 1980s, instilled in his son the importance of public service. “Our philosophy is, take care of Ocean City and it’ll take care of you,” Jay says. “It might sound a little corny, but it works. The more I do for the city, it seems the better we end up here.” He’s not the only one to serve; his wife, Michele, is executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.
Gillian also has the respect of his peers in the amusement business. “As you can imagine, this is not an easy business, subject to weather and outside forces,” says industry veteran Bill Alter of Franklin Lakes-based W.A. Alter Inc. “Jay deals with the problems and moves to the next. He is going to be a good mayor, showing all of the concern for all of the citizens of Ocean City that he does to be sure his patrons have a fun-filled and safe holiday.”
In a 1993 interview with the New York Times, Roy Gillian predicted that Jay would be the one with the passion to carry the business past the 100-year mark. That seems likely. “God willing,” Jay says, “as long as Ocean City stays Ocean City.”
With seven children between them, Jay and Michele have no shortage of candidates for their succession plans. Several of their offspring already work in the family business, and Jay hopes one or more will develop the same passion for it he’s had his whole life.
He notes that there’s a key difference between running a family-owned park and a corporate business like Six Flags. “They look at each quarter,” he says of his big-name rivals. “We’re looking to the next generation.”
Phyllis Stark is a freelance writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. A Philadelphia native, she has vacationed in Ocean City every summer since she was 12 years old.