For more than 50 years a giant orange dinosaur has overlooked a miniature golf course on Route 1 in Saugus, Massachusetts, providing a kitschy splash of color on a normally grey road.
Memorial Day is one of the most popular weekends of the year for the country’s miniature golf courses, but this one will be the last for Route 1 Miniature Golf Course and its giant dinosaur. In an increasingly difficult business climate for old-school miniature golf courses, Route 1 decided to cash-in on its property and now will close its doors for good, leaving many local community members distraught at the idea of losing the beloved dinosaur.
“It’s been there for so long,” Joe Attubato, Saugus’ retired public works director, said following the sale. “It’s hard to picture Route 1 without the dinosaur.”
(Save Our Dinosaur/Facebook)
Miniature golf as we know it didn’t begin to take shape until the 1950s. In 1954 Don Clayton and his Putt-Putt Golf Corporation opened a course in Fayetteville, North Carolina that featured two unique innovations: Each hole was encased by an aluminum barrier, and the carpet players putted on was more expensive, designed specifically to endure the conditions.
It sounds simple now, but Clayton had just built the only course in town that players could play somewhat consistently, and his course’s popularity exploded because of it. Within 20 years the Putt-Putt Golf Corporation had franchised out dozens of locations across the southeastern United States.
It wasn’t until the 90s, following the rise of at-home technology, that its popularity began to slow down.
Although there’s only scattered empirical data to explain this downturn, prominent figures within the miniature golf industry point to the rise of technology as the biggest problem. Kids — customers — simply seek more interactive pastimes nowadays. It’s a phenomenon that has negatively impacted industries similar to miniature golf, like paintball and roller skating, which reported downturns of -6.8 and -9.7 percent in its participation between 2008 and 2013, according to a recent Sport & Fitness Industry Association study.
(Royal Caribbean International)
“In the age of computers, children aren’t as interested in outdoor activities,” said David M. Callahan, the current CEO of the Putt-Putt Corporation. “Fifteen years ago we used to only be a skill-based miniature golf brand.”
The Putt-Putt Corporation has survived by moving past its name. The company arrives at most of its profits through its “fun centers,” which include some combination of laser tag arenas, restaurants, arcades, bumper cars, go karts and batting cages. Miniature golf has become a smaller slice of a much larger pie, and while golf-only sites used to be the norm within the Putt-Putt Corporation, today they’re few-and-far between.
“We’ve had to become more forward-thinking.” Callahan said. “Fun centers will generate significantly more revenue than just generic miniature golf. We have to offer people more than just golf.”
Miniature golf in itself simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Courses survive nowadays by getting weird, and while that may be sordid news to the sentimentalists, it’s given rise to an unprecedented wave of creativity within the industry.
D&D Miniature Golf in Tennessee sits in complete darkness and is lit only by black lights reflecting off giant statues of giant mythical creatures. A pop-up miniature golf course in Portland forced players to putt through a series of laser beams. A recent turf exhibit in Los Angeles saw architects design a variety of different miniature golf holes, including one that suspended the hole in mid-air with the help of a giant, secured balloon. A miniature golf course in Illinois asks users to putt their ball through a functioning roller coaster. The Toledo Mud Hens converted their AAA baseball stadium into a miniature golf course during the off-season. A pub called Swingers recently opened in London and features a miniature golf course inside an underground World War II bunker.
(Swingers)
“It was all a naive idea at first, something I did with my friends for fun” said Steve Fox, who raised more than $53,000 on Kickstarter for Urban Putt, a restaurant/miniature golf course in downtown San Francisco. Each golf hole is handmade and crafted to look like an art exhibit as if it were a gallery, and it has become so popular in the area that he routinely boasts up to 400 customers on an average weekend.
“It’s unique, something different,” he said.
Go to a new miniature golf today and you’ll find it has been relegated to the fringes; one part of a larger experience. Mini golf in the age of computers needs to be tricked-up to work, so designers keep pushing it in every direction, trying to offer something so zany that people might actually want to try.
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Over time, courses like Route 1 Miniature Golf Course in Saugus simply found themselves on the wrong side of that equation.
“That label probably stuck for a while — that we were old, and we were kitschy and nobody liked it,” Diana Fay, the course’s owner, told a local radio station last year. “But now that we’re leaving everybody’s upset, so I guess the town was pretty happy that we stayed.”
But while the golf course will soon go, the orange dinosaur won’t suffer the same fate.
Tim Shea grew up in Saugus and when he heard that Route 1 miniature golf course’s orange dinosaur might disappear he was so upset that he formed a Facebook group to try to save it.
His movement caught traction, so much so that the new developer announced he would find a spot for the orange dinosaur in the series of hotels and apartments he’s developing on the land.
Even Shea chalks that up as a success. He hasn’t been to Route 1 in years. He knows business isn’t as nostalgic as he is, but it still hurts.
“This used to be a place where all the neighborhood kids would go,” said Shea, who’s in his mid-50s now. “Every little kid in town. Generations of them. There was the ice cream store next door and the dinosaur … It’s iconic.”
He continued:
“Keeping the dinosaur there will help ease the pain,” he said. “Still, it’s like losing a little piece of your heart.”
