I forgot that place. It was actually kinda cool in it’s heyday.
Goats playing guitars- imagine that! 
Just remeambered, as a mid range school child our class went to Reader, AR, on a field trip.
Rode the Reader RR. Went to the gift shop..ate box lunch..played on the playground and rode back to the station.
It’s famous for being used in the film Boxcar Bertha.
And a couple other films about the civil war. I’m seeing Johnny Cash playing John Brown. It escapes me.
It’s long gone now. Sad, that was the best field trip ever!
Cool cite. I got to SoFL much too late to experience that place.
Just a mile-ish from that location a different and later sorta amusement park-lite was built in Dania Beach:
Right next door was this cool wooden roller coaster:
When I moved to SoFL in 2014 the Boomers! in Dania was breathing its last, while the coaster next door was long dead but still standing and readily visible to all the traffic passing on I-95. Made a good landmark.
It was torn down in 2016 to make way for Dania Pointe. A large midmarket outdoor shopping complex mixed with midrise apartment buildings.
More housing, more stores, less fun. The entire story of US commerce in my lifetime. Sigh.
I visited the World of Sid & Marty Krofft at the Atlanta Omni Center in 1976. It was on several floors; you entered it by sitting in a giant pinball and getting shot to the top floor.
It was there for only a couple years.
The first thing to come to mind is kind of the opposite of what is wanted.
I was a poor student and went on vacation to Cancun, Mexico. I got a cheap flight but did not book a hotel, thinking the prices in person might be cheaper.
The usual fancy resorts were way too expensive for my budget, but there were cheap hotels in the dusty village too far from the water. When I explained my problem to a waiter at a seafood restaurant, he suggested taking the bus to Playa del Carmen.
So I did. At the time, it was a few hundred people, one single road along a truly beautiful beach with sand which did not heat up in the sun and gorgeous ocean views. At the bus station, some tout was advertising a beach cabin owned by some local doctor renting for five dollars a day. So I stayed there. A shack on the beach served cheap but delectably grilled fresh seafood and beer. A woman selling coconut water for a few pesos would wander down the beach a few times a day. The sunsets were beautiful, the locals friendly. You could rent a jet ski or scuba dive or go to the one shop selling souvenirs. It was half a paradise.
And of course this is long gone. It disappeared within five years of my visit. Playa del Carmen is now another Cancun, all hotels and tourists but less individual character - a place like others. But I haven’t been back. I am sentimental about these things and do not wish to see what it has become.
Oh! Closed. My family went there several times. I liked ordering just the “toppings” as my meal (until I found out my family ate most of my meal, as toppings on their own meals).
I haven’t caught up with the whole thread so apologies if someone has posted this, but: The Disneyland Carousel of Progress was rebuilt in Orlando’s Magic Kingdom. And the America Sings replacement attraction supplied many animatronics for the new 1989 ride Splash Mountain (since rethemed to the 2009 animated movie “The Princess and the Frog” in both D-land and WDW).
Does the 1964/5 New York worlds fair count?
Arent those designed to be temporary?
I saw the Grateful Dead there… April 1&2 1995.
When I was young I enjoyed The Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
It was focused the Great Plains history: mostly from the settler’s perspective, but also a good bit from the Native American side. nice gardens, and good bit of western art - and many exhibits were kid friendly.
The building is now branded as National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Some small bits are still along the original lines; but predominantly it has become a high end western art gallery, with the majority of ‘exhibits’ for salle.
So it kinds of exists, but the character and focus are vastly different.
CNN used to have public tours in the old CNN Center, and I took my children there in spring 2020, just before Covid hit America.
My kids and I were back in Georgia in April, and they wanted to go on the tour again, but they are no more.
The tours were suspended during Covid, then closed permanently now.
There was a tourist area in Yokohama that opened around 2000, and it’s now closed as they are building something else. I’m getting to be the age that I was excited as an adult to see something build, and then it got old.
That was a frequent destination for my family. One restaurant specialized in Belgian Waffles, and that’s what we’d always get. (And all restrooms were in little buildings out in the parking lot, which was dashed inconvenient.)
My family visited this during my childhood and I was thrilled. Disneyland featured ‘environments’ but NOT a recreation of a full TV series, as Bedrock Village offered. On some level maybe I wondered if every TV show had a theme park recreation…
I can identify with all that. Though it doesn’t seem to me as though there’s any ‘night and day’ difference between the original JP dinos and those appearing in the more recently-made movies; maybe your kids were just being kid-like.
Very cool about Boston; I’d love to see it again. Mathematica certainly has (deservedly) had a long life.
I came to post this this. Real Low-Rent theme park, but we loved it as kids.
For the fair, sure but Unca Walt built four attractions for the 1964 fair and all four are at least partially active today.
- It’s a Small World – relocated to Disneyland and duplicated in other parks.
- Carousel of Progress – Relocated to Disneyland then moved again to WDW.
- Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln – Relocated to Disneyland.
- Ford’s Magic Skyway – Not moved intact but the dinosaur figures were moved to the primeval world diorama on the Disneyland railroad. Plus the ride technology was the basis for the People Mover.
Bless your title-dropping heart!
Lots of places I would have brought up are listed here, particularly Philadelphia’s Aquarama (which I went to several times, both on school trips and on our own) and Freedomland (which I visited three times). Freedomland was:
1.) Located inside New York City, in the Bronx
2.) Was built in the shape of the United States, with distinct regions like Disneyland
3.) Was actually BIGGER than Disneyland
4,) Was built by the same guy who built Disneyland. Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood. He had a falling out with Walt, and so he’s been erased from Disney History, the same way Stalinist histories “unremember” people.
Wood also built a number of other defunct parks, including Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Massachusetts, which I never saw, but which lasted a full ten years.
Petrified Creatures in Warren, NY. At least that’s the location on the pennant I had as a kid. Apparently it was really in Richfield Springs, NY. It was a collection of incredibly bad life-sized plaster-and-chicken wire dinosaur figures that dated from the 1930s. They were painted in unlikely garish colors. There was a glimmer of reason for their being there – a rock shelf inside the property had footprints. When our daughter was very young we vacationed up that way and , to my astonishment, the place was still open. The dinosaurs were in an even worse state of decay, with stacked pallets holding up the T. Rex and the brontosaurus’ absurdly thin and long neck. Everything in the gift shop had a thick coating of dust on it, but I bought a copy of the Nature Golden Guide on Fossils, just to say that I did. The place finally did close for good in 2015
Wait a minute…your kids think the FX in the first Jurassic Park are WORSE than the in the sequels? My mind wobbles.
I had no idea about Freedomland. I’m a geographer who grew up in the NY metro area, so my first thought was, “where could they have possibly fit something that big in the Bronx? The land must have transformed into something else after it closed…I’m gonna guess Co-op City, that circa-1970 public housing apartment towers complex off of I-95 and the Hutch…”
(Checks Wikipedia)…Yup, I guessed correctly.
I don’t think they ever saw the sequels.
That’s one I was going to mention. We took the kids there a few times, and our son would go with his friends when they were home from college.
There was an amusement park called Lakeside in Salem, VA outside Roanoke. Their roller coaster was billed as the world’s fastest at one time. I’m not a huge amusement park person, but we went a couple of times when I was a kid.
Someone mentioned Carowinds; I wasn’t aware it was still open. The last time I went there was to see Bob Dylan and Steve Earle in 1988.