About Belmont Park
Belmont Park is an amusement park located right on the boardwalk in Mission Beach. It is small enough to be digestible in one afternoon, but big enough to keep kids (and adults) entertained for hours. There are rides for kids and adults of all ages, including an arthritic, old wooden roller coaster called The Giant Dipper that definitely does not take the turns as smoothly as it used to. There is an arcade, a laser tag area, a mini-golf course, a rock climbing wall, a zip line, a rope course, and a 7D theater called Xanadu which we have yet to visit, but seven dimensions does sound intriguing. The whole park is well maintained, clean, and easy to navigate.
Belmont Park has a few stalls serving beer, canned cocktails, and frozen margaritas among the rides. There are also a few food vendors within the park, including a Pizza Port, as well as three sit-down restaurants attached to the amusement park that serve drinks and full food menus right on the boardwalk with a view of the ocean. These are Cannonball, Draft House, and Beach House.
So spend the morning riding rides and discovering what the 7th dimension has in store for you (and the 6th, 5th and 4th), then get lunch at one of the restaurants.
Great For
• Kids
• Quintessential Californian things
• Getting whiplash
A Closer Look
Belmont Park first opened in 1925, developed by sugar magnate and local-San-Diego-big-deal John Spreckels. The Giant Dipper has been a fixture of the amusement park since that year, throughout the parks ups and downs. In the 1960s and 70s the whole place was almost torn down because it was just an unused blight on the boardwalk, but it has seen several rounds of rejuvenation since then. Most recently, in 2013, a real estate company called Pacifica Enterprises leased the whole complex and fixed it up.
Ahem, what follows is a bit of a manifesto on capitalism.
While technically the people at Pacifica Enterprises are local to San Diego (Dario De Luca, the Pacifica CEO and primary purchaser of Belmont lives in a $16 million home in Rancho Santa Fe), we would not label this place as “locally-owned” in the way a small brewery is. But also it is locally owned. And the reality is it takes ass loads of money to lease and rejuvenate places like this, and these folks want to earn a profit like the rest of us and can’t just do everything out of the good of their heart, and even though their profits are insane to us… we appreciate the work they did. Belmont is a San Diego landmark at this point and it takes someone with that kind of capital to spruce it up. Belmont Park is in a hopefully sustainable age of stability and success now. So kudos to our rich corporate overlords for restoring a local landmark so us peons can enjoy some rides and forget our nine to five slog. No, we’re kidding. Mostly. We don’t actually know.
Location
Feature image by chrisinphilly
