Everyone wants to bring home a souvenir of their visit to a park, and Great Adventure has offered a plethora of merchandise locations over the years featuring a wide variety of gifts and trinkets.
		In the 1970's and the 1980's many theme parks offered tissue paper flowers as a unique and inexpensive souvenir of a visit to the park. Great Adventure sold thousands of these tissue paper flowers at a stand located just inside the park's front gate in the Avenue of the States, just behind the Emporium. The large, colorful tissue paper flowers were displayed in special racks designed to show off the bright colors and massive size of these unique souvenir.
	The flower selling crew would start the morning with a large empty rack that over the course of the day would get filled with the handmade creations. The process of making the tissue paper flowers was fairly simple with a thin wooden dowel serving as the flower's stem, and then folded sheets of tissue paper in bright colors being attached to the top. The flower sellers then carefully spread out the flower "petals" into the giant blooms. A "deluxe" version of the flowers was also offered at Great Adventure where a large butterfly was attached to the bloom (for an additional fee of course!). The stand also offered customized parasols where personalized designs could be added with fabric markers.
	Even Donny Osmond was presented with one of the park's signature flowers while in concert at the Great Arena.  His sister, Marie Osmond, gave it to him while plugging her hit song Paper Roses. Weather was always a challenge for the Flower Market with employees often scrambling to gather them all up and take them into the shed as thunderstorms approached, The flowers being so light also was a challenge when winds would pick up and blow them out of the rack and across the walkways. Quite often the flowers were snapped up by the guests leaving the park as a last minute souvenir of their day in the park. Kids would often want to bring one home for their mothers as a gift. The park generally sold hundreds of them each day, leaving few or none the next morning when the process would start all over again.
	During the park's Great Adventure History Museum display in 2014, a Paper Flowers sign resurfaced showing the blooms had a $2.75 price tag.  The park's staff was able to brush off their skills and provide a couple samples of these much loved souvenirs complete with butterflies.
Original Spotlight:  August 23, 2021.  GAH Reference#:  SHOP-1978-002