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.
After Great Adventure was acquired by Six Flags, small merchandise kiosks were added all around the park. As part of Six Flags' expansion of the park they realized there was a lack of food stands and merchandise locations and they wanted to quickly remedy this with a series of small locations. Starting as the Encyclopedia Britannica Information Center in 1979, for one year the Liberty Square Novelties kiosk originally was a sponsored information stand offering subscriptions to purchase the renowned set of books of knowledge. Even though the encyclopedias were delivered to your home and guests didn't have to carry them around in the park, the stand was located near the front gate for its first season in one of the most high-traffic areas of Great Adventure.
	For 1980, the stand was relocated next to the Flying Wave ride and became a place to buy maps and park souvenirs as Liberty Square Novelties until the end of 1983. For 1984, the stand was moved to make room for the construction of the Fotozines shop, taking up a new location next to the mini golf course along the pathway into the Goodtime Alley games area. With the new location came the new name Gifts & Souvenirs from 1984 to 1992. The small shop nearly became a "pick your own oyster" stand operated by the contractor that ran the Bird Factory sand art stand next door, but eventually it was turned into a Sand Art stand itself in 1993 as the Bird Factory became a sign shop a few years prior.
	The kiosk remained a Sand Art stand for six seasons from 1993 to 1998.  The low open countertop on three sides of the structure allowed for guests to create their own personalize sand art creation and pick it up later before leaving for the day.
		When Time Warner purchased the Six Flags chain in the early 1990's they made great efforts to bring theming back to the parks. Quite often as parks like Great Adventure grew, little effort was put into maintaining thematic integrity and many generic structures and rides were built. Great Adventure's games area was unthemed and the decision was made to turn it and the surrounding area into the Boardwalk. To create this theme, like many other improvements made, they took a page out of Universal Studios Orlando's theming and made it a vaguely Fourth of July themed Boardwalk much in the style of the Jaws area.
	The unthemed structures included in the Boardwalk now were painted in red, white, and blue making them much more colorful and cohesive with the rest of the area. The stand now became a personalized hat stand known as Captivations for the 1999 and 2000 seasons before it was removed to expand the games towards the Carousel for 2001.
Original Spotlight:  September 12, 2023.  GAH Reference#:  SHOP-1979-004