A theme park with a difference has attracted more than 100,000 guests since it opened in Texas, US, last year. The carousel has chariots for wheelchairs, braille games decorate side panels on the jungle gym and table-high sandboxes allow just about any child to build a castle.
Morgan’s Wonderland aims to offer everything a special-needs guest might enjoy at a theme park, while appealing to non-disabled visitors too. "If it wasn’t for searching Google," founder Gordon Hartman said, "It would’ve taken me a lot longer to put this together."
The result is a 10-hectare, $34m park catering for people with physical or mental disabilities, down to jungle gyms wide enough to fit two wheelchairs side by side, a "Sensory Village" - an indoor mall of touch-and-hear activities and daily attendance limits so the park never gets too loud or lines too long.
Morgan’s Wonderland is a non-profit park, with admission for people with special needs free and accompanying adults priced at $10.
The park is the first of its kind in the US, according to Hartman, who named the place after his 17-year-old daughter, who suffers from cognitive disabilities. A map in the lobby entrance, where adults with special needs volunteer as greeters, offers a more visual way to gauge the park’s early popularity, with the 49 states and 16 countries visitors have come from marked in purple.
People with autism, orthopedic impairments, mental handicap or seizure disorders are among the most regular visitors to the theme park, which is built on the site of an abandoned quarry. It is one-tenth the size of SeaWorld, the destination mega-attraction on the other side of San Antonio. But spending an afternoon at Morgan’s Wonderland is deliberately designed not to be an exhausting, endless trudge from one overcrowded ride to the next.
Despite being completely designed for individuals with special needs, the park is playful enough to be enjoyed by any child, which was important to creator Hartman, who on a family trip a few years ago saw his daughter Morgan wanting to play with three children tossing a ball in a pool but couldn’t interact. The children, just as unsure how to interact with Morgan, stopped playing.
Five years later, Morgan’s Wonderland opened, putting regular playground swings and swings for wheelchairs in the same park.
