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In less than an hour, the customers can cross the Rockies in an ore bucket, cruise the Great Lakes in a sternwheeler, crouch in a bunker at Cape Canaveral and watch the missile gap narrow with a perfect shot every six minutes. On the northern outskirts of New York City (the real one), where big, white-ribbon highways trellis over swampy wastes, Freedomland opens next week. Billed as "the world's largest outdoor entertainment center," it rises out of a former garbage dump, is nothing less than a replica of the continental U.S.A., 833 yds. from parkway to shining parkway, with coconuts in Florida, corn in Iowa, and cash registers from Oregon to Maine.

Ranking Redskin. Expecting at least 5,000,000 visitors a year, Freedomland will ring with coin. However elaborate, roadside shows are as old as roads, but from Massachusetts' Pleasure Island to California's Disneyland, they are boffo as never before--perhaps because restless audiences, tired of passively watching so much canned and channeled entertainment, are eager for such tangible Freedomland features as an electromagnetic dragon, real buffalo grazing the prairies, honest Indians taking passengers for rides in birchbark Chippewa war canoes (the birch bark is actually Fiberglas, and the Chippewas are mainly Cherokees, recruited by Manhattan Cherokee Arthur Junaluska, the ranking redskin in New York). Freedomland's immigration fee is $1 (less for children), and 50^ is the top price for the individual attractions, which include:

P: THE CHICAGO FIRE. Half the West Side bursts into flame every 20 minutes, and who is it but Mrs. O'Leary there, coming out of the heat with an actual cow--trained to moo at crowds. Spectators are called upon to help firemen squirt the blaze from a hand-pump engine. Meanwhile, a cool operator in a fireproof booth turns up the hidden gas jets, then slowly turns them down as the fire subsides, leaving on view the pre-charred timbers of skeleton buildings.

P: THE CIVIL WAR. Like newsmen in the 1860's passengers ride to the battle lines in white, horse-drawn correspondents' wagons, get caught in a blistering crossfire. Plastic corpses--eight in grey, eight in blue--litter the battlefield; farmhouses burn; cannon balls seem to plop within inches of the customers. Crossfire is Freedomland's favorite device: the "Buccaneers" concession sends paying guests on a port tack between two fiercely battling pirate ships; and throughout the Wild West, Indians are forever blazing away at anything that moves, usually past the noses of tourists.

P: THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE. In an elaborately built, indoor San Francisco, passengers ride cable cars through quiet, hilly streets. Suddenly the earth rumbles, hinged buildings sway and shake, a house--built like a Venetian blind--crumbles while-u-wait, a tall monument topples, is stopped just short of clobbering the spectators.

P: NORTHWEST FUR TRAPPER. Riding a trapper's bullboat through boiling rapids (on an underwater track), tourists are woofed at by bears, screamed at by wildcats, bellowed at by a bull moose that was shot in British Columbia, stuffed in Denver and wired in The Bronx for a total cost of $5,000. The boat passes a ghost town where skeleton miners are strewn around on the ground, a skeleton outlaw swings from a tree, and a skeleton fisherman sits on the river bank with a fish skeleton on the end of his line.

P: THE TORNADO RIDE. A peaceful drive through farmland suddenly turns into a daymare as the customer gets what he's paid for. Caught in the core of a twister, he looks up to see barn doors, bodies, toilet seats, privy doors, cows, etc., whirling about his head in the howl and whoosh of a wind machine. The illusion is complete, as the tourist car actually moves slowly across the interior of a huge drum that spins at 75 revolutions per minute.

Pioneer Republic. Built at a cost of $65 million by 47-year-old Chicago Entrepreneur Peter De Met, who owns a chain of bowling alleys and produces such TV shows as Championship Bowling and All-Star Golf, Freedomland has a 10,000-car parking lot (50-c-), expects 85,000 visitors on good days, an average of 37,000 (v. 60,000 tops at Disneyland). Many of the park's features are undisguised advertisements : ye olde brewery is built and operated by Schaefer beer; Elsie the Borden cow is the most conspicuous resident of a Midwestern farm; the Bank of New York operates regular banking facilities (the building is ancient, but the interest is modern); the clocks in the Chicago and San Francisco railway stations bear the monogram of the Hamilton Watch Co. Nonetheless, three staunchly anticapitalist preview visitors were impressed; they were reporters from the Soviet Union's Tass news agency. Last week the Kremlin announced plans for a Moscow amusement park--to be called either Wonderland or Pioneer Republic--built on a huge relief map of Russia. Of course it will feature rocket models and a space ship.

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