My son Japhy, 5, still spontaneously falls off his chair from time to time, and is shaky on his pedal bike, but at Diggerland USA, a construction-themed amusement park in southern New Jersey, we have given him control of a 7,092-pound JCB excavator. He is sitting high in the cab on his father’s lap, moving the enormous boom arm of the digger to scoop earth and dump it out.
This was the founding ideal of Diggerland: For families to experience the thrill of operating real construction machinery.
The park was opened in 2014 by Ilya and Yan Girlya, Moldovan American brothers who worked for their father’s construction firm and opened Sahara Sam’s Oasis Indoor & Outdoor Water Park in the 2000s in a lot adjoining what became Diggerland. At Diggerland, the owners have worked with construction equipment manufacturers like JCB and Ventrac to modify dozens of models for safe use by children starting at 36 inches tall (some rides require children to be 48 inches tall, but all children can be lap passengers).
The engines have an auto shut-off, the cabs have rollover protection, the machines’ tracks are fixed in place, and the turn adjustment on the diggers is limited, so the pint-size operators can’t drive off or go rogue. It is a playground of yellow and black where dumper trucks, tractors, backhoes, rollers and, of course, diggers crawl around set courses or paw through their designated spot in the ground. By design, the park looks half-finished, a 21-acre arena of concrete bollards, storm fencing and site offices selling neon pink, yellow or orange safety vests, matching construction helmets and hot dogs.
There are also rides grafted together from various hydraulics, like the Dig-a-Round, a carousel of dangling yellow claws; the Sky Shuttle, in which guests are lifted 50 feet toward the sun in seats welded onto the scoop of a telehandler (a giant version of a forklift); and a ropes course fashioned to look like high-rise scaffolding. At the rear of the park, the Water Main offers a wave pool and various slides and splash pads in homage to plumbing infrastructure. For the Girlya brothers, the park embodies the possibility their parents saw leaving the U.S.S.R. in 1979 to “create a life for the family with the freedom to be anything you want and enjoy all the opportunities America can offer without any fear of persecution,” said Ilya Girlya in an email.
The appeal for children is obvious. Like Tony Stark inside his Iron Man suit, they gain superpowers…
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