Abandoned Amusement/Fun Parks

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

More Utopia:

http://i42.tinypic.com/w2mu52.jpg

Again in Japan Gulliver in the front and Mt. Fuji in the back

http://i43.tinypic.com/w1u1io.jpg

Wow - this one is awesome. Russian themed park in Japan that was only open for 6 moths.

http://i40.tinypic.com/25p3492.jpg

http://i42.tinypic.com/10wmulu.jpg

that gulliver/mount fuji thing is crazy.

6 moths.

The people who financed the park started out thinking it was a good idea, but soon they saw the light.

Waterpark in Barcelona

http://i40.tinypic.com/53wmly.jpghttp://i44.tinypic.com/vgjzw2.jpg

Yeah, isn't the Gulliver one amazing?!

S. Korea again

http://i40.tinypic.com/wb8l92.jpghttp://i42.tinypic.com/ejvajd.jpg

In China:

http://i41.tinypic.com/2wr166s.jpg

I may actually have nightmares about this thing in Japan

http://i39.tinypic.com/qzgj8h.jpg

great thread

Ok, this may or may not be abandoned but I couldn't resist posting this slide from a children's playground in Poland

http://i44.tinypic.com/2ur5z7t.jpg

I mean, really?!

Jack Rabbit roller coaster Station - Idora Park, Ohio

http://i43.tinypic.com/30cc8iu.jpg

It always amazes me how these things just close down and just get... left there to rot and grow over. Surely the land is valuable or something, at least in some cases?

I just started a thread about Dadipark without realising you started this thread yesterday. I heard about Dadipark through work. Koinkydink. I'll post some pictures here now.

http://silentuk.com/dadipark/images/img_0981.jpg

http://www.lost-places.nl/01/015%20dadipark/images/05.jpg

http://www.lost-places.nl/01/015%20dadipark/images/09.jpg

http://www.lost-places.nl/01/015%20dadipark/images/23.jpg

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.