Fairy-tale ending long overdue at Point Defiance

The Gingerbread House is toast.

On Wednesday, a Metro Parks crew ventured deep into Point Defiance’s forbidding woods. Crew members tramped along winding paths, by a crushed picnic table and past felled trees.

When they finally came to a lonely cottage, they observed that even the gingerbread boys that had once been attached to its facade had fled. The roof was rotted, the walls covered with unpleasant messages.

So the hearty workmen knocked the place down. While they were at it, they put Simple Simon’s Pieman shop out of business.

Ditto the Hickory Dickory Dock house, where larger, fiercer rodents had long ago chased the mouse away.

The demolition of the next-to-last fairy-tale residences in Never Never Land was way past due. All that’s left standing of the original attraction are the Old Woman’s Shoe and a pile of giant concrete books.

If I had a dozer, I’d put them out of their misery.

But then, I didn’t grow up here.

This is how you tell the difference between a Tacoma native and a newcomer with only, say, 25 years of residence: You ask them to describe Never Never Land.

Your born-in-the-grit Tacoman will recall happy times with Miss Muffett, Jack and Jill when the place opened in 1964. That person will take on a sentimental glow and remember tramping down a pine-needle path to visit the Gingerbread House.

Your newcomer will ask, “Isn’t that the place where kids kept stealing Humpty Dumpty? Yeah, and they had these shabby little play houses in the woods. It was depressing.”

By 1985, Humpty, aka Felony Maker the Attractive Nuisance, and his fiberglass character friends had long since lost the ability to turn a profit as a park concession.

Their profitability had, in fact, been short-lived.

In 1964, when Alfred Peterson of Victoria, B.C., opened Never Never Land, families lined up, and paid up, to frolic among the painted figures and slide through the giant shoe.

Peterson pulled out when his lease expired in 1985. The park district bought the attraction and took over responsibility for maintaining and protecting the figures. It was no picnic.

Bo Peep and the gang were too fragile to live outside in the winter, when wind and tall trees made the site perilous. They had to be removed from their stands and toted inside, said Melissa McGinnis, Metro Parks manager of historic assets. In late spring, they got baths and touch-ups before they were trundled back to the woods.

Even then, they were not safe.

After darkness fell, intruders would beak into Never Never Land and abduct hapless characters. Humpty Dumpty had a fatal attraction to the thieves. Perhaps it was his size, or the challenge of removing him from the archway of books on which he sat. Perhaps, unbeknownst to the authorities, a high school student could letter in raiding Never Never Land.

Humpty’s gone from public view now, though the casts from which he and all his fairy-tale pals were made are in storage, McGinnis said.

They make excellent artifacts, evidence of what went on in that one spot of Point Defiance.

But the park is a living thing.

It’s high time to rethink those winding paths, and to find a space for a safe playground. Over the next few years, Metro Parks will be asking people what they’d like, and where.

McGinnis thinks the spot, adjacent Fort Nisqually, would make an excellent interpretive trail.

The trees make the space too dangerous, cool and buggy for a good playground, though that’s where the remains of Never Never Land will remain for a while, with a relatively new pirate ship, a bouncy bunny and that tired, resoled shoe.

If you’ve got the nostalgic urge for one last fairy-tale visit, make it this summer. While you’re there, imagine a fresh future and new magic for the forlorn spot.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com