We are carrying over the theme of sweet treats from our last post and if you’ve been an avid reader of the Never a Dull Moment blog, you will be familiar with this month’s guest author. Ted Whiting III is popping in to regale us with the history of a much loved Boardwalk treat. Take it away, Ted…
From the earliest days of the Boardwalk’s Casino, hard-scooped ice cream has been a crowd-pleasing favorite. The confection could be found in the 1907 Casino arcade and in beach concessions through the 1960s. It was scooped onto cones, served in individual “Dixie Cups” or in novelty bars on a stick.
One cool, yummy, smooth, new confection appeared on the Boardwalk in the early 1930s to compete with ice cream: frozen custard.
The origin of frozen custard in America is culturally attributed to the Kohr Brothers on Coney Island, New York in 1919. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 established its solid presence in the mid-west. Frozen custard and ice cream have much in common, but there is a significant difference. Custard must have a butterfat content of 10% or greater and contain 1.4% pasteurized egg yolks. Its distinct creaminess comes from custard machines that introduce air–known as “overrun”–and reduce ice crystal formation, resulting in a smoother, richer texture. Ice cream, on the other hand, has similar butterfat content, but no egg yolk and contains more ice crystals. Ice cream is “flash frozen” after production and served by scooping from its hard consistency. Back in the 1930s, custard was customarily made daily and not stored at as low a temperature as ice cream. It was a creamier product overall.
In 1932, concessionaire Harry Taylor declared his confidence to a news reporter that his Boardwalk frozen custard would prove one of that summer’s taste sensations. Rumor has it, he was using a patented custard machine in his stand located on the colonnade. When Taylor left to sell his frozen treat at the Capitola beach, Wade Hawkins, a relative of Boardwalk mega-concessionaire of the 1920s and 1930s Adolph Goldstein, began operating the Boardwalk stand.
Seaside Company maintenance superintendent Joe Lane left his employment with the company in 1935 to take over operation of the frozen custard stand. Lane spruced up the colonnade location and opened an additional black-and-white stand next to Laff Land, our dark ride at that time. The product’s popularity was undeniable–one customer reportedly purchased 37 cones in a single day during the following summer.
Lane did not limit his expansion of his business to the Boardwalk. In 1939, he was plying his custard wares at the Treasure Island World’s Fair in San Francisco. A small news clipping states he even operated two custard concessions at the Texas State Fair in Houston, TX.
Archival documents confirm the presence of a “custard stand” in the Fun House building in 1945. I am intimately familiar with this location, as its red-and-white tile front stood apart from the other two black-and-white tiled stores.
This location served as Lane’s main store for sales and production. A hallway led from the Boardwalk to a rear loading dock on the trackside of the park. Deliveries of all kinds appeared on this dock, including ten-gallon re-useable cans of sweet cream mix to manufacture the custard concoction. Sufficient walk-in refrigerators and freezers stored a considerable volume of product. The space also contained storage for dry goods and an employee break area.
At the time my family took over those units from Joe Lane’s son, Dick, in 1954, the black-and-white concession in the colonnade specialized in vanilla custard. The red-and-white concession in the Fun House building sold chocolate malt custard. Both had monstrous and noisy 1930s era custard-churning barrel machines that prepared their product. The black-and-white concession next to the Haunted House ride sold an orange sherbet concoction called “tropical freeze,” made in a vintage batch ice cream maker.
All three locations served an ice cream sandwich called a “sandae”. It is a tasty concoction of chocolate malt ice cream between two graham crackers, dipped in chocolate and rolled in walnut dust that looked like sand. I don’t know the origin of this item. I suspect it was motivated by the success of San Francisco Playland’s “It’s It” ice cream bar that originated in 1929. Chocolate dipped bananas became popular in the 1940s, and were added to the menus at these locations.
In the early 1960s, the old custard machines gave way to new soft serve machines that dispensed its yummy, popular product direct from machine to cone. This concoction contained less butterfat and no egg yolk and was prepared with more overrun, or whipped air, that resulted in its super creamy taste.
In 1968, the black-and-white concession in the Boardwalk colonnade was demolished to make way for new uses of that space. Soft serve was moved to a new snack stand at the entrance of the mini-golf location in the former plunge building. The red-and-white store in the Fun House building was razed in the course of the demolition of that building in 1971. A small soft serve stand, dubbed the “Cone Shop” opened the next season as part of a bank of concessions recessed into the Giant Dipper structure near Boardwalk entrance 5, known today as “Little Dipper.” Soft serve replaced less popular ice cream at the Merry-Go-Round Fountain when my family renovated it in 1975 into Carousel Cones.
The original black-and-white concession next to the Haunted House ride was demolished in 2009 when that space was renovated to include the Haunted Castle ride, Guest Services, and Boardwalk operation’s offices. Today, Freeze, a replica black-and-white ice cream concession in the Boardwalk’s Haunted Castle building, takes us back in time when three such tiled-front ice cream stores dotted the Boardwalk. With its black-and-white tile and sandae on the menu, Freeze pays homage to the history of these original Frozen custard stands.
‘Til next time
-Ted
