Seaside Heights carousel is back! You can start riding it this coming week

SEASIIDE HEIGHTS - Dr. Floyd L. Moreland wondered if he'd ever ride his beloved carousel again.

Yet there he was on Friday, among the first group of riders to spin along on the refurbished merry-go-round in Seaside Heights that bears his name: the 1910 Dr. Floyd L. Moreland Carousel.

Moreland, 81, who lives in nearby Ortley Beach, uses a walker these days, so he stood next to the prancing carousel horse emblazoned with his name, as Borough Administrator Christopher Vaz operated the ride.

As the carousel spun and its organ played, people snapped photos, took videos, smiled and waved at those onboard.

"The organ sounds great," an emotional Moreland said after getting off after the first ride, which he shared with Mayor Anthony Vaz, borough council members, Seaside Heights public works department employees, members of Ocean County's Board of Commissioners and Seaside Heights' Historical Society trustees, and New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Jacquelyn A. Suarez. Of the ride's opening, Moreland said, "it's a dream come true."

"It's exciting," Mayor Vaz said. "I feel like a lot of pressure has been lifted. The end result is, history is here, and history has been made."

Vaz and Suarez cut the blue ribbon to "open" the ride with a pair of silver ceremonial scissors lent to Seaside Heights by neighboring Seaside Park. Afterwards, they draped the ribbon around Moreland's shoulders.

The ride will open to the public at 6 p.m. July 3.

"It's not just an amusement ride, it's something iconic," Administrator Vaz said of the ride. Many in attendance June 28 remembered riding it when they were children, including county Commissioners Gary Quinn and Frank Sadeghi. "When I was a young kid, I came over and road on the carousel," Quinn said.

Seaside Heights Historical Society President Joe Verderosa said his vision is "that it can be enjoyed by people for another 100 years." Before taking a spin on the carousel during the first ride, Verderosa and other members of the historical society presented Christopher Vaz with an an award for his hard work making sure the carousel was acquired and then refurbished.

"The word that describes Chris most is sacrifice," Verderosa said. The carousel house will also house of museum of Seaside Heights history, which Mayor Vaz said he hopes can also include some Ocean County history. A wall in the carousel house is adorned with post cards and other visual displays of the borough's history; the rest of the museum is expected to open at a future date.

Verderosa said the ride will be open all year round, and added that he hoped it can be an attraction to draw visitors to the boardwalk's northern end.

"Thank you for your vision that this actually came true today," Suarez said. "I want to thank the residents as well. It was your voices that were heard."

It's been 10 years since Casino Pier's owners, the Storino family, announced that they were closing down the carousel and planned to sell the historic ride. Ridership had declined and maintenance costs were high.

The public was galvanized by the thought that the historic ride would no longer grace the boardwalk, and Seaside Heights officials acted. The borough was able to preserve the ride through a land swap that allowed Casino Pier, badly damaged by 2012's Superstorm Sandy, to rebuild part its structure on the beach.

The borough received the merry-go-round, and a parking lot on the northern end of the boardwalk — between Sampson and Carteret avenues — where the carousel house was built.

"I celebrated my tenth year working for Seaside Heights last week, and it has been nine years working on this," Administrator Vaz said.

"Good things take a long time," said Ocean County Republican Chairman George R. Gilmore, who, along with his wife, Joanne, were among the first riders on the carousel.

Gilmore, then borough attorney, and former Mayor William Akers came up with the idea for the land swap with Casino Pier. Gilmore helped the borough obtain state approval for the swap, and then defended Seaside Heights from a lawsuit that challenged it. Ocean County agreed in 2016 to donate a large parcel of wooded Toms River wetlands in the "compensation" land that Seaside Heights proposed to preserve to compensate for the development of a portion of the beach.

The carousel was still at Casino Pier when patrons could last ride it, in early April 2019. It was then dismantled for a lengthy restoration. Volunteers restored its Wurlitzer organ and a specialized company, Carousels & Carvings, refurbished its mechanics. Christopher Vaz traveled to Ohio three times to check on the ride, and Verderosa accompanied him twice.

The borough received its state permit to operate the ride in mid-June, following an inspection.

Seaside Heights acquired the ride in 2017 after agreeing to swap the 1.36 acres of beach with Casino Pier.

The carousel is named after Moreland, who oversaw the restoration of the badly deteriorated ride in the 1980s. His friends and family members spent countless weekends inside the then-unheated carousel building in the offseason, painstakingly repairing the historic structure. Moreland and his late partner, Elaine Egues, also operated the Magical Carousel Shoppe, a boardwalk business, for nearly 30 years.

Built in 1910, the ride was originally located at Burlington Island Park near the Delaware River. A 1928 fire destroyed most of that amusement park but only damaged the carousel. It was fixed, disassembled and moved to Seaside Heights during the Great Depression.

G.A. Dentzel and Charles I.D. Looff were pioneer carousel manufacturers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least 18 figures — more than a dozen horses, a lion and a tiger — on the Seaside carousel were made by Dentzel between the 1890s and 1910 in Philadelphia, according to a carousel history compiled by the Seaside Park Historical Society. Other figures on the ride were made by Looff.

If the borough had not acted, it is likely the ride's animals would have been auctioned off individually. Seaside Heights paid over $1 million for restoration of the machine, and another $2.3 million for the new pavilion to house it (in both cases, assisted by grants — $750,000 from Green Acres for the building, and $750,000 in matching grants from the New Jersey Historic Trust for the carousel itself).

Local artist Marie deSaules sanded and then repainted several of the horses that had sustained damage over the years.

Moreland has an image of a colorful carousel horse embedded in the sidewalk in front of his Ortley Beach home. He said neighborhood children have been asking him for years if the carousel would ever return.

"I kept telling them, 'It's going to open again.' Now I have an opening date," he said with a smile.

Jean Mikle covers Toms River, Seaside Heights and several other Ocean County towns. She's also passionate about the Shore's storied music scene. Contact her: @jeanmikle, jmikle@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Seaside Heights carousel opens to the public July 3