Way back in 1972, when I was just a kid, my family lived in Rapid City SD for a year and a half. And one of my favorite spots to visit there was Dinosaur Park.
South Dakota has long been a tourist hotspot. The Black Hills, in the western part of the state, are the home of Mount Rushmore, one of the most-visited monuments in the US, and also attractions like Custer State Park, Wind Cave, Needles Highway, the historic town of Deadwood, and the Crazy Horse Memorial. In the central part of the state lie the Badlands National Park and Wall Drug, and in the east is Sioux Falls with its parks and museums.
Many of these attractions date to the 1930s. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge vacationed in the Black Hills for a time, staying at Custer State Park and Hot Springs. His visit put the area on the map for well-to-do Eastern tourists. Rapid City, a small railroad town on the edge of the Black Hills, swelled with hotels and tourist traps.
The big boost came in 1924, when sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had just finished his work on the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial on a mountainside in Georgia, was invited to carve another monument in the Black Hills as a tourist attraction. Borglum chose a mountain known locally as “Cougar Mountain” and which was now renamed “Mount Rushmore” after a wealthy businessman who often visited the area.
City officials in Rapid City, meanwhile, led by RL Bronson of the Chamber of Commerce, decided that they also wanted to celebrate the area’s natural heritage as well. South Dakota, particularly the Badlands, was a rich source of fossils, and many of the immense skeletons which were fascinating crowds in natural history museums like the Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian had come from South Dakota. Bronson had seen a statue of a dinosaur in Chicago during the Century of Progress Exposition and now proposed doing something similar.
So in 1934, the municipal government approached sculptor Emmet Sullivan, who had worked on Mount Rushmore, with an idea for a public park which would feature life-sized recreations of famous dinosaurs. In consultation with Barnum Brown, the New York paleontologist who had discovered Tyrannosaurus rex, Sullivan designed five huge statues, featuring Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Trachodon, and Brontosaurus. Some of those names were changed later by paleontologists as new discoveries appeared, and many of the anatomical details (such as the dragging tails) are now known to be wrong, but at the time they were made the sculptures represented the best scientific knowledge we had about dinosaurs.
Two other statues, representing Dimetrodon and Protoceratops, were added by Sullivan in 1968 as part of the Gift Shop and Visitors Center. All but Protoceratops represent species that have been found in South Dakota. Protoceratops was added because it was already famous—the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews had found fossilized Protoceratops eggs in Mongolia in 1923.
The construction of the park was begun in February 1936 with funding from the Works Progress Administration, a Federal jobs program that was an important part of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression. The statues were made with a frame of 2-inch iron pipes and a skin of wire mesh that was covered with a thin layer of concrete. It took twenty-five workers. The largest of the sculptures, the Brontosaurus, is eighty feet long and weighs around 42 tons. Originally the statues were all painted a dull elephant grey, but were later re-done in bright green to make them more visible.
The park was officially dedicated in May 1936. The Rapid City Journal declared: “Reincarnated in steel and concrete on ground they once trod in quest of plant food, five giants of a past age will soon look down from Hangmans Hill on some of the wonders of the present age—a ten story building, the automobile, and the airplane.” The park quickly became famous and was a major tourist attraction.
Sullivan would later go on to do another giant dinosaur sculpture when he designed the Apatosaurus that stands at Wall Drug, near the Badlands. His wife Lorraine would stay in Rapid City and run the Dinosaur Park’s gift shop for the next thirty years.
In 1990, Dinosaur Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Hidden History 
I loved this place when I was a kid. I must have been there a hundred times.