It's much smaller, but Bill Capell faces many of the same challenges running the kid-friendly rides at Encanto Park as he did when he operated Legend City, Phoenix's fabled amusement park that closed in 1983. The main one is this: People don't show up on afternoons in the summer, the busy season for amusement parks.

"It's hot to get on rides in the summertime," Capell said during a tour of his 6-acre Enchanted Island park in central Phoenix. His nine rides are testament to that. Most are covered by a rainbow-colored canopy. Even during the summer, with kids freed from school, the park doesn't open until nighttime.

The brutal summer heat has always been given as the quick reason why Phoenix has no major amusement park. Longtime residents will tell the story of Legend City, the massive park built between Phoenix and Tempe in the 1960s - back when there was actual space between Phoenix and Tempe. They will say how it was a financial blunder because it wasn't fun standing around on asphalt waiting to get on metal rides in 100-degree heat.

But Capell said the truth is more complicated. "Our best time (for business) was nights during the summer," he said. "If they brought back Legend City now, I think it would work."

A group of investors is trying to have another go at filling the roller coaster and midway void in Arizona. It wants the Legislature to create a special taxing district that will generate $1 billion in bonds to help create two parks. The first would be a large one near Williams, serving as a lure for Grand Canyon tourists. The other would be near Cricket Pavilion on the west side of Phoenix. It would have an outdoor amusement park and an indoor water park. All total, it would sit on 60 acres. That size, oddly enough, was exactly the size of Legend City.

Those two words bring instant nostalgia for those who grew up with the park. Those words, though, also conjure up the failed grandiose dream of sticking an amusement park in the middle of the desert. That stigma could be why, despite Arizona's massive population growth in the past 20 years, an amusement park hasn't gotten past the tentative planning stages.

But Capell said the park didn't close because it was bankrupt. On the contrary, it was grossing good money, more than $1 million a year, during the eight years his family owned it.

But the land underneath the park promised to bring more money on the real estate market. The site is now home to the corporate offices of Salt River Project.

"Now could be the time for this," Capell said, looking over old pictures of Legend City in his office. "Maybe this was ahead of its time."

The concept for Legend City was visionary. It was supposed to be a park on the scale of Disneyland, with attractions featuring the state's history. Louis Crandall, who grew up in Mesa, sketched out the idea for it at the age of 29. "I was young and didn't know what I was doing," Crandall said. The native of Florence is 74 now and living in Provo, Utah.

It was supposed to be a can't-miss idea. At least that's what Crandall was hearing from friends who were executives at Disneyland and Six Flags in Texas. Of course, one of them was living in Southern California and didn't consider the heat. The other had a successful amusement park between Dallas and Fort Worth and didn't think about the small population in Phoenix.

Legend City was built as a true theme park. The roller coaster took riders on a trip through the Lost Dutchman's Mine. There were staged gunfights along an Old West street. Performers took the stage in an authentic-looking saloon. A printing press churned out the day's program in newspaper form.

"Where the exciting history of old Arizona is re-created in fact and fantasy," Crandall said, reading from an old Legend City brochure.

Of course, creating that theme cost money. Much more than Crandall had to invest, much more than was coming in through sales of Legend City stock, which sold for $1 a share if memory serves.

Legend City opened in 1963. It was bankrupt within six months.

Two other owners tried and failed after Crandall.

The Capell family bought it from a Japanese ride manufacturer in 1974 after seeing an ad that promised a "gold mine" in Phoenix.

The Capells had been in the carnival business and figured Legend City needed to be more like that to succeed. They brought in more "iron rides," industry parlance for roller coasters and Ferris wheels. No themes attached.

Of course, there was still lots of "theme" left around from the original Legend City. Those Western buildings provided enough of a unique experience to keep people coming back to what was essentially a permanent carnival.

The scaled-down park could get by with steady nights from locals. Capell said most of Legend City's customers in those last years came from east Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe.

That would be a problem for the new park, which would need to at least get customers from all over Maricopa County, Capell said.

"There's no exact science to it," Capell said, when asked what advice he'd give to the latest amusement park dreamers. "Just don't shoot for the moon."

Crandall, the original architect of Legend City, said he is sure that present-day Phoenix is ready for a park on the scale of what he had envisioned.

"I just built it 40 years too soon, that's what I did," he said. "I just built it in a little bitty burg that couldn't handle it."

Now, though, with a metropolitan population of 3.5 million, Crandall said it's a can't-miss. "There's so many people. You'd get enough to say, 'To heck with the heat,' " he said. "I think it would go."

He paused.

"But then again, I missed the first time."

Originally published here: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0321ruelas21.html