Monday, October 21, 2013

Astrojets and Snow Hill, 1958



This 1958 image shows the Astrojets at the back of Tomorrowland. Its' hard to believe this is Disneyland; virtually no crowds and there is plenty of undeveloped space. In the background you can see the Skyway Buckets. But where's The Matterhorn? Too early; it is about a year away from its appearance in the park. Instead, Snow Hill is what guests floated over in their Skyway Buckets.

Zooming in, we see this little girl who doesn't seem to want to listen to whatever instructions her father is attempting to give her.



I missed this one, but sharp-eyed reader PsySocDisney noted that the Viewliner is also visible in this shot:



To see a better look of what Snow Hill/Holiday Hill/Lookout Mountain looked like, here are two previously published photos from December 1956 from a Skyway bucket.



Plenty of room for a Matterhorn or a House of the Future here.



This black and white shot is an even better one showing Snow Hill, aka Lover's Lane.



Imagine this amount of real estate at Disneyland completely empty. Just trees. No moneymaking opportunity, and no attraction. Hard to fathom.

See more vintage Disneyland Astro Jets photos on my Astro Jets web page.

7 comments:

K. Martinez said...

Once I made it a game to try and find photos of the Astrojets showing the various names of all 12 Astrojet vehicles. I never succeeded. Here Sirius and Altair can clearly be seen.

PsySocDisney said...

I love the lack of crowds in certain early DIsneyland photos. Makes it seem even harder to conceptualize to a youngster like me. And I spy the Viewliner in the background! Score!

Major Pepperidge said...

Photos from the first few years are always awesome, and these are definitely great.

Anonymous said...

I would recommend if you’re trying to find photos from Disney, yesterworld is a YouTube channel that does history about Disney and there are plenty of good photos shown in his videos. Also articles, maybe taking a picture at Disney of the ride, and editing it to make it black and white then put it through reverse image search or a similar picture to what you are looking for and doing that. These have always worked for me personally. Have a good day ;)

Anonymous said...

I love the pictures where it shows all the old mascots because fun fact- Disney didn’t own the rights to certain characters including Mickey, so they changed the mascots looks to make them different enough to not get into trouble. I just think the old mascot pictures are so intriguing especially if you compare some from different years in 50s, 60s, 70s, etc.

Anonymous said...

I once found a picture of the mascots possible from each year from opening to when Walt passed and it’s crazy how much they change. Some years are very creepy to be honest. The human mascots are always great. I always thought that the fact- which in this article there’s a picture with the white rabbit- that the white rabbit was a mask in some years with white shirt and pants was just awesome lol.

Anonymous said...

For sure!!!