The Gingerbread Castle, Hamburg’s Fairy Tale That Refused to Crumble

The Gingerbread Castle, Hamburg NJ’s Concrete Fairy Tale

In 1928, biscuit magnate F.H. Bennett sat through Joseph Urban’s stage design for Hansel and Gretel at the Metropolitan Opera and decided Hamburg needed one built in concrete. Bennett had two reasons. The first was pure sentiment: the sets brought back the Brothers Grimm stories of his childhood, and he wanted children to walk through that world rather than just read about it. The second was good business. Bennett owned the F.H. Bennett Biscuit Company and the Wheatsworth Mill next door, and a fairy tale castle at the factory gates would draw families to Hamburg and put his Wheatsworth name in front of every one of them. He hired Urban, the Austrian architect behind the Ziegfeld Follies sets, and the Gingerbread Castle opened in 1930: pink and cream towers, candy-striped columns, a witch on the parapet, and figures from the Grimm tales scattered across the grounds.

Fifty Years of Hansel and Gretel

For nearly half a century this was one of northwestern New Jersey’s beloved family stops. Local kids dressed as Hansel and Gretel led the tours, walking visitors past the witch’s oven and up the winding stair. Busloads came from across North Jersey and beyond. The park faded in the early 1980s, and the castle later did stints as a nightclub and a haunted house before going quiet.

Its most fitting owner arrived decades later: Don Oriolo, the artist and songwriter who has kept Felix the Cat alive for the modern era. Cartoons run in the family. His father, animator Joe Oriolo, co-created Casper the Friendly Ghost and made the classic 1959 Felix the Cat television cartoons, the ones that gave Felix his Magic Bag of Tricks. Oriolo announced a full restoration, most publicly in 2019, but the castle has yet to reopen.

Seeing the Castle Today

The castle still stands right along Gingerbread Castle Road, fenced, posted, and monitored, with the massive Wheatsworth Mill looming behind it. You cannot go inside, and you should not try: the property is alarmed and regularly patrolled. What you can see from the road is worth the detour, a Metropolitan Opera set designer’s work rendered in weathered concrete, visible from your car window. Traffic moves fast on this stretch, so pull fully off the roadway before you stop.

Fans of Sussex County oddities can make a loop of it: the castle sits minutes from the Backwards Tunnel in Ogdensburg, the Sterling Hill Mining Museum, and the Franklin Mineral Museum. For more sites like this one, browse more Sussex County landmarks.