Abandoned Amusement/Fun Parks

I'm sort of obsessed with them.

Let's start off this this one in the village of Pripyat, Ukraine. It never even opened because of the disaster at Chernobyl.

http://i41.tinypic.com/2wbruxd.jpg

http://i42.tinypic.com/1zvhg3.jpg

Glen Echo Park, Maryland

http://i44.tinypic.com/jttn2u.jpg

Somewhere in S. Korea

http://i40.tinypic.com/2vwz9e8.jpg

What remains of the Little Dipper roller coaster ride at Chippewa Lake Park in Chippewa Lake, Ohio:

http://i44.tinypic.com/51a5na.jpg

this is awesome

wow, how old is the little dipper? that's some pretty solid regrowth!

"Chippewa Lake Park was basically just abandoned with many of the rides still standing. The park was home to 3 roller coasters - A Wild Mouse, A steel kiddie coaster named the Little Dipper and a larger wooden coaster. The wood coaster was earlier named the Big Dipper but was referred to as just "Coaster" in the later years. The ride was built about 1924 or 1925 by Fred Pearce."

Park closed in 1978 so regrowth since then I guess.

i wish i had a car so i could go to chippewa lake park!

Okpo Land in South Korea

http://i43.tinypic.com/25kgzo5.jpg

x-post Yeah! I have this dream of driving across the country and visiting all the abandoned amusement parks and taking pics. I'll do it one day!

i love these

Benson's Wild Animal Park - Hudson, NH closed in 1987

http://i44.tinypic.com/2ilh5ix.jpg

Lots of them here:

http://weburbanist.com/2009/03/13/abandoned-amusement-parks/

http://www.defunctparks.com/parks/parks.htm

Lots of them at Weird NJ too I think (at least they used to show up in the magazine a lot):

http://www.weirdnj.com/

And here are abandoned malls, while we're at it:

http://deadmalls.com/

Fairy Tale Forest Oak Ridge, NJ closed in 2003.

http://i41.tinypic.com/51pm2v.jpg

x-post Yep - a lot of these are from those sites. Just thought a pic thread could be fun.

Spreepark, Berlin

http://i40.tinypic.com/2ujr3tx.jpg

This used to be a lake with mechanical swan boats in it when I was about 13 or 14 (so, the early-mid 80s)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xole/345159587/

Sorry the guys's got a lock on the images so you'll have to look at his flickr.

Awesome. I love this stuff.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cVF2LlOx6Zc/SV2DcpqpvLI/AAAAAAAAHic/vc77VVeA6M8/s1600/GL3

Geauga Lake Aurora, Ohio. Bought out by Six Flags in the mid-nineties who proceeded to totally ruin it. Closed in 2007. Oh how I loved it when I was a kid.

Whalom Park, Lunenberg, Mass. closed in 2000 after 100+ years of operation, when its handlers went into deep deep debt. o how I loved it as a wee one, etc.

this is what it looked like in 2005 (most of the rides were demolished a year or two later):

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/4318/whal2.jpg

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/8020/whal1.jpg

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/4223/whal3.jpg

Whalom's carousel, before & after:

http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/1754/whal4.png

http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/1754/whal4.png

http://www.undergroundozarks.com/gallery/dogpatch

I was married across the lake from Chippewa Lake Park!

i knew this thread was going to be good.

Fairy Tale Forest Oak Ridge, NJ closed in 2003.

the cheap (mostly German) fairy forest parks i visited looked sort of abandoned, even when still open. there's some very melancholic about small-time amusement parks.

http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark5.jpg
http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark4.jpg
http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark3.jpg
http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark2.jpg
http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark1.jpg
http://www.pushback.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ampark.jpg

There's loads more here

Also, a bumper car ride in Pripyat, near Chernobyl:

http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/2/18/218f91f0a9c6e2ef081f02c6e3ed4976-orig

The Defunct Parks website is a goldmine!

i always love threads like this.

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Fantasy/ffmap.jpg

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Fantasy/fftracks.jpg

here's the former petting zoo

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Fantasy/ffbarnroof.jpg

"tom sawyer's cabin" ride

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Fantasy/fftunnelentry.jpg

this was the 1st amusement park I ever visited. RIP

i am having trouble finding the right superlative for that "all day family fun" poster. it is a joy.

DISNEY-TYPE PLAYGROUND

i wanna go to the three bears' house

This thread is like the definition of the word "poignant."

Geauga Lake Aurora, Ohio. Bought out by Six Flags in the mid-nineties who proceeded to totally ruin it. Closed in 2007. Oh how I loved it when I was a kid.

Yeah, and it was great how they announced the closing right after the end of the season, so if you didn't happen to go that year, tough crap for you. Blargh. In high school I think I once rode the Big Dipper like 12 times in a row.

Heritage USA which was apparantly built by Jim Bakker as a Christian themed park. It closed in 1989.

http://i40.tinypic.com/ncghvn.jpg

I went to the Alice Cooper Haunted House for halloween one year at Geauga Lake. I rode my first and only rollercoaster there.

Monorail from Santa's Village in Skyforest, CA.

http://i43.tinypic.com/ohoeht.jpg

Also from Santa's Village:

http://i43.tinypic.com/2cgexco.jpg

This thread is beautiful and very creepy and almost unbearably poignant all at once.

U_U

Six Flags New Orleans, in the Ninth Ward. The pictures of the flooded park after Katrina are astonishing, but these are more recent:

http://www.terrastories.com/bearings/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/main-st-six-flags-orleans.jpg

http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/six-flags-cool-zone-new-orleans.jpg

http://www.terrastories.com/bearings/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/six-flags-joker.jpg

I went to the Santa's Village outside of Chicago all the time when I was growing up!

Apparently Santa's Villages were the first franchised theme parks in the US.

I think that my interest in this sort of thing started when I went to Asbury Park for the first time.

http://i44.tinypic.com/nn9obl.jpg

Also from the Asbury Park, NJ boardwalk:

http://i42.tinypic.com/2nasdaq.jpg

One in Japan called Utopia

http://i42.tinypic.com/2vulxlv.jpg

I love it! That particular bathtub makes me want to barf so hard though. Tile squicks me out. I love those cabins though.

Reminds me of this resort:

http://gothamist.com/2014/05/21/kutshers_photos.php#photo-1

These cabins:

http://galleries.gothamistllc.com/asset/52c1f9e107fa4e681b780e4f/mobile/PennHills-25.jpg

Would totally shack up there.

ENBB -- my friends and I are going to explore P3nn H1lls this Saturday!!!!

OMG JEALOUS

fyi:

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/t1.0-9/10299955_10103998523398939_2462202189485741174_n.jpg
https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/t1.0-9/10487370_10103998524077579_2905247398861987058_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/t1.0-9/10421355_10103998523154429_4157596356634219506_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t1.0-9/10440750_10103998523229279_7991780633974082438_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/t1.0-9/10458638_10103998524257219_8083044456667964812_n.jpg

Mirrored ceiling? Yes!

Did the bed rotate? Tell me that the bed rotated, Matt Helm style.
I don't get the big room full of furniture. Was it so worthless that the owners didn't even bother having a clearance sale?

Dude, shit was just ABANDONED, incl like hundreds and hundreds of receipts and applications w/ CC#'s and SSN's and the like...

and no bed did not rotate :(

Ironically, a heart is just about the worst tub shape for a couple that likes to bathe together - the point between the two lobes gets in the way if you each lean against one side, and your legs and feet get squashed at the other end. (facing the opposite direction works even worse). You usually wind up cuddling on one side of the heart, which just wastes a ton of water on the other side. A simple rectangle or oval is much more comfortable.

I'm intrigued at that player piano though - i've never seen one with a mechanism so small it fits into a spinet. Usually player pianos are very tall with the roll stretched out vertically in the center.

http://galleries.gothamistllc.com/asset/52c1f9e107fa4e681b780e4f/mobile/PenHils-21.jpg

This thread is the best

Ironically, a heart is just about the worst tub shape for a couple that likes to bathe together - the point between the two lobes gets in the way if you each lean against one side, and your legs and feet get squashed at the other end. (facing the opposite direction works even worse). You usually wind up cuddling on one side of the heart, which just wastes a ton of water on the other side. A simple rectangle or oval is much more comfortable.

TBH, I am a little concerned about your level of familiarity with the heart-shaped tub.

x-post :D

I've only once stayed at a hotel with a heart-shaped tub, when we were somewhere in New England for a few days and the only room they had available was the honeymoon suite, with a big red heart-shaped Jacuzzi right in the bedroom. But i've tried out a few others in bathroom-renovation showrooms and never liked them. And if you think they look tacky in a '70s motel, imagine how they'd look in your home.

I have to go to this thing!

http://roadtrippers.kinja.com/americas-creepiest-abandoned-amusement-park-to-open-fo-1448819785/

OH MAN

I found out recently that the PRC government spent $100 million to build a China theme park in Florida that closed in 2003:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendid_China_(Florida)

http://i.imgur.com/FeV0KUG.jpg

I have read about this. Heading to Florida tonight. I wonder where it is . . . hmmmmmm.

They've demolished / are in the process of demolishing it apparently

https://roadtrippers.com/blog/drone-discovers-abandoned-renaissance-faire-deep-virginia-woods

http://i.imgur.com/98oRQYV.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYWe0DO4oNk

:-(

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/09/03/arson_at_the_abandoned_spreepark_theme_park_in_berlin.html

Terrible. Also: some amazing details in that article.

Mit Bilder und Video: http://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/treptow-koepenick/feuer-wuetete-im-spreepark-es-war-brandstiftung

Abandoned Italian Discotheques

http://www.antoniolagrotta.eu/Works___Paradise_Discotheque_divina_files/Divina_01.jpg

http://www.antoniolagrotta.eu/Works___Paradise_Discotheque.html

omg!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJtiVxG6Ig

Also on this thread, but I think there's a fair amount of crossover between them: Desolation Photography Thread (aka Ruins Porn)

I suppose kayak slalom courses, baseball parks, and beach volleyball venues constitute fun parks, certainly there was plenty of fun here for participants and spectators of the 2004 Athens Olympics, but ten years later the facilities built for them lay in ruin. It seems canoeing or baseball don't draw thousands of paying spectators in Greece.

http://cdn2.wi.gcs.trstatic.net/y0vXY7s8VDjjyQpkHbBpRWTVGm-vpvi3JrB0m0-DYR5jyJepF6MccgolPwCm6qG7b8FNiAZlKS7ihHlhMYNftw

http://www.businessinsider.com/abandoned-athens-olympics-venues-2014-8

Just felt a chill when I realized that the roller coaster I almost fell off of as a child looks like this

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/68e7193ca64a6b7f75a4b98d38bf1136d6aab7ba/c=0-0-1024-768&r=x513&c=680x510/local/-/media/WKYC/WKYC/2014/05/15//1400164857012-8466065735-1679dcdcb5-b.jpg

and my favorite childhood mall looks like this

http://media2.newsnet5.com/photo/2015/02/09/mall5_1423518321994_13202276_ver1.0_640_480.jpg

what's next, a tree growing straight through the center of my parents' house? full rat infestation of my elementary school? i didn't know where else to put this so i put it here.

I can see why you felt a chill.

My poor grandmother, I remember one Christmas taking her shopping. She said, let's head for the mall up on Austin Peay. We pull into the surprisingly empty parking lot and the mall looked pretty much like this:

http://i.imgur.com/GyOTa48.jpg

Oh, she said. I guess I hadn't seen that in the paper.

i still haven't gotten a satisfying answer to why someone doesn't just raze these places and use the land for something else. why are these structures still there? i've heard "tax shelter" as an excuse/reason but I don't have any details about the financial benefits that provides. Esp compared with the blight of a large structure whose innards are covered in SNOW. when i was in hs kids used to hang out at the abandoned factories around town (RIP rust belt) but i doubt they're hanging out in the snow mall.

idk, my assumption would be it costs less to just leave it decay than it does to try to demolish and redevelop? but who knows rly

I'm not a real estate head at all, but a few open-ended guesses:

For amusement parks, there is a history of redeveloping them, discussed a bit by Judith Adams in her history of the genre. The first-generation fun parks (Progressive era, Coney Island era) were often very attractive redevelopment opportunities in the postwar era. Since they'd been built by trolley companies (to draw people onto the lines on the weekends) they were almost by definition well-located for developing commuter suburbs: within the sphere of the city, but out at the edge (the end of the line, that is). Whether there was good or bad automobile infrastructure was probably a factor. Meanwhile they'd become totally unprofitable as parks (competing with TV, the movies, other diversions) and were, in any case, pretty easy to demolish. Some of them included a lot of "park-like" land (attractive for subdivision settings), as well, since, Coney aside, the typical pre-Disney amusement park was as much about wholesome picnics and concerts at the bandshell as anything else. More recent (post-Disneyland) parks, I don't know about... the only ones I've thought much about are still going concerns. Why something similar couldn't happen at Geauga Lake, I don't know. Looking at the site from space, it doesn't seem like there's just tons of development pressure in the area - there's still active farmland, for example. So maybe if you're a developer it just seems easier to look elsewhere.

Malls might be a little more complicated. Again, just speculating, but if you're looking to build anything other than a mall (which has already proven to be a failure on the very spot), mall sites might really be an albatross. They're enormous and covered with asphalt and concrete, which you'll have to rip out unless you're going with something very similar to a mall. The mall building itself is going to be expensive to demolish. They're zoned for a certain density of commercial, which again has failed, so you have to think about some other use. They're typically located at the intersections of big roads (let's say six lanes-ish) or even completely surrounded by them, and are probably near lots of other parking-lot commercial retail, in general not super attractive for residential subdivision, not to mention the possible difficulties of platting them out and laying infrastructure. They are not near transit, which is unfortunate since otherwise they could be prime opportunities for some kind of transit-oriented mixed-use scheme (assuming you could get it rezoned). My best guess would be "office park" but maybe that's not remunerative enough to justify dealing with any of this. If you're the owner, you're probably undercapitalized since you are someone who owns dead malls, so doing any of this out of pocket is impossible and getting it financed might be tricky since the bank/investors might basically think "why don't we put our money in some other guy who has land not burdened with all these added costs?"

Different things would apply in the case of the rare downtown mall obviously. Columbus OH tore theirs down just a few years back (having built it in the 80s to compete with the suburban malls). Not as unattractive of a parcel of land, but also the downtown is already kind of saturated with office space and is only in its first years of becoming attractive to yuppies and building new housing and so on. The city bought it back in the 2000s after basically threatening to evict the current management/ownership on the grounds that they were incompetent to the point of negligence (by this point it was a definitively dead mall). They kept the well-used parking garage and tore down the mall to make a "commons," which at the time appeared to be basically a holding action: develop it in a low-impact way, leaving it open for the machinations of the next smooth talker to sail into town with a strawboater and a song.

Kind of amazingly, some (admittedly undistinguished) new buildings have gone up on the flanking, street-side parcels, though they don't use their park frontage as effectively as they might. They suggest that the property might in fact remain a viable "central park" as downtown continues to yuppify and fill in its many, many parking lots and missing teeth. (There are bigger, arguably better parks not far away, but the density goes way down and the parking lot quantity goes way up thataway). Who knows, in twenty years the mall dying might prove to be the best thing to ever happen to the city.

I was at the light this morning looking at this very worn-out Pizza Hut, wondering how they stay in business.

http://i.imgur.com/vXFLma1.png

And like the Waffle House next door that got turned into a Chinese restaurant, Pizza Huts are notorious for being transformed into other places of business. In 2035, will we be driving past "the old Chipotle that's now an insurance office" or saying "You can tell that it was a Chik-fil-A, the waiting room is where the playground used to be."

http://notfoolinganybody.com/?indexPost=1058 glad to see this site is still going (I think)?

We have a KFC turned into an independent Mexican sit-down restaurant up the street. It looks a ton better, but was probably the worst Mexican food I've ever eaten.

it's going to take me a while to digest all that but in the meantime if you're into malls you gotta know about this guy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._DeBartolo,_Sr.

I think the best idea for redeveloping a mall would be a school. You've got rooms, wiring, parking, food prep areas, communal areas. Why not turn it into a small college? Oh right because no one wants to build a college ;_;
The one where I work is a Frankenstein's monster of a building, part of which used to be a movie studio. We have large meetings there now.

Bunch of good stuff here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2015/07/04/seph_lawless_photographs_abandoned_theme_parks_in_his_book_bizarro_photos.html

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abandoned-santa-parks

Not amusement parks, but modernist/brutalist housing estates. In Paris. These are LUSH.

http://www.creativeboom.com/photography/neglected-utopia-photographer-explores-the-forgotten-modernist-estates-of-paris/

http://www.creativeboom.com/uploads/articles/da/dad030a0709cce1d65eae4ffe7ec9b123d0cee5a_860.jpg

http://www.creativeboom.com/uploads/articles/dc/dc2fd89e36972344f5ddf01e3e472ffc0df25742_860.jpg

http://www.creativeboom.com/uploads/articles/3a/3a196ade3e5f12b0c35609fb6c536b615b68ac95_860.jpg

Jean Renaudie/Studio Montrouge at the top - he did a lot of stuff in that vein, in some very industrial/Red neighborhoods; I've poked around the ones in Ivry-sur-Seine, pictured above, and Saint-Denis. Some apects strike me as very livable and fabulous, others very bleak and challenging, and others just kinda "there." The Cité des Etoiles, outside Lyon in a much greener setting, looks spectacular. Renaudie was IIRC an unreformed old commie and really 100% believed in what he was doing as a project for a better and more humane life for the working class. There was a monograph a few years ago which I remember enjoying even if I don't think it 100% clarified the payoff of all those triangular layouts beyond maximizing light/views/connection to the terraces. Wonder how the hell you occupy/furnish some of those spaces.

Having a very hard time seeing "modernist" next to Ricardo Bofill's 1980s work (the other two). They are almost textbook post-modernist, with the in-your-face classical allusions and general interest in playing with semiotic meaning (or telling "jokes") not to mention the framing of legible exterior space (courtyards) rather than objects sitting in a field. Some of the latter part certainly overlaps with late modernism but lumping them together with Émile Aillaud's towers in Nanterre (which are of similar date but a totally different 'generation' design-wise), as this article does, is a bit annoying. /architecturalhistorian

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/boblo-island-abandoned-amusement-park?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page

http://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvcGxhY2VfaW1hZ2VzLzk0MThmZWI5OTZjMTI2MDFlNl83MTE0NDU1OTkzXzFlYzFmYmVjZDVfay5qcGciXSxbInAiLCJ0aHVtYiIsIngzOTA-Il0sWyJwIiwiY29udmVydCIsIi1xdWFsaXR5IDkxIC1hdXRvLW9yaWVudCJdXQ/7114455993_1ec1fbecd5_k.jpg

http://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvcGxhY2VfaW1hZ2VzLzk0MThmZWI5OTZjMTI2MDFlNl8xMDc5MDk2NDc4Nl9kYWM5NDE4YWY5X2suanBnIl0sWyJwIiwidGh1bWIiLCJ4MzkwPiJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcXVhbGl0eSA5MSAtYXV0by1vcmllbnQiXV0/10790964786_dac9418af9_k.jpg

not quite an amusement park tbf but holy shit check out burj al abas, this abandoned castle-themed housing development in turkey

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c3f4be1b492cb1ad35e4af5-1920-1280.jpg
https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c3f602f7196711e1a38f736-750-500.jpg
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Findigodergisi.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2Fburj-al-babas-projesi-mudurnu-villa-sato-1.jpg&f=1
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn-pro.elsalvador.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2FBurj-Al-Babas.jpg&f=1
https://tele1.com.tr/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/burj-al-babas.jpg

!!!!

amazing that these clone-stamped mcmansioncastles somehow failed to set the turkish housing market alight

The proportions are so strange.

Reminds me of those Chinese imitation euro towns no one would actually live in.

Appropriately, this thread is filled with dead links and abandoned websites.