My brother-in-law is from New Jersey and used to work there when he was in high school. But he’s not a Doper. I’m not sure if he ever visited the park as a customer.
The best I can come up with is that many of the rides I rode at Carowinds in the 1980s and 90s are no longer there, the Thunder Road roller coaster, for example. But the park itself is very much still there.
Oh, I visited the Folsom Prison Museum when family came to visit years ago. I’m pretty sure that shut down during COVID and never reopened. I guess that probably counts.
I went with my family to Opryland back in the day, though I don’t remember much about it.
Also back in the day, my family would go to Bagnell Dam and other attractions in the Lake of the Ozarks region in Missouri. I’m told that “The Strip” (Business 54 south and west of Bagnell Dam) is still a popular tourist spot. A quick look at Google Maps confirms that it is indeed filled with restaurants, tchotchke shops, etc. just as it was when I was a tween in the early 80s. However, I can guarantee you that it is not the same as it was when I was a kid. Video arcades just aren’t where it’s at anymore. Also, in those days, you couldn’t drive a mile without a waterslide (a single, concrete chute going down the Ozark Mountain slope) in someone’s back yard. Before water parks, we’d just go down the road and go slide to slide to slide. Those days are long gone, too.
There was a restaurant in Vacaville, California, called The Nut Tree that I loved as a kid. “Restaurant” doesn’t do it justice; there was a toy store, small train, and airport that were part of the grounds. Last time I was in the area it was all gone, except for a couple small reminders of what had once been. I think it was one of those businesses that was in a family for years, until the next generation didn’t want to run it anymore.
I went to the revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle a time or two. I think that was removed during a recent remodel.
Went to the observation deck at the World Trade Center twice. On one visit, the roof was open; fended walkway about twenty feet back from the edge of the building. First time I was ever afraid of heights.
For those who miss duck boats, we still have them in Boston.
Somewhere in the family archives there’s a Kodak instamatic print of 4yo me & 2yo bro sitting on that poor long-suffering tortoise.
And more …
Right near the Deer Garden was a museum: Cars of Stars & Planes of Fame. There was also a studio backlot kinda museum not too far from there.
Many car or plane museums came & went. Briggs Cunningham, Tallmantz, …
Whether museums quite qualify as tourist attractions depends on what somebody likes to do while touristing.
Both Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm still exist on more or less the same land they occupied in the 1960s. Beyond that, little inside their perimeter is still as it then was. KBF has mutated far more than DL has.
Marineland out on Palos Verde peninsula is long, long gone.
All the dragstrips: Irwindale, OCIR, Long Beach. The racetracks Ascot, Ontario Motor Speedway, Riverside, and a couple I can pucture but not name.
The list of what’s gone from 1960s SoCal is nearly endless.
I’ve never been to Disneyland, but it’s my understanding that it is still open there. The one at the Magic Kingdom in Florida, however, has been re-themed to Winnie the Pooh, while the general way the ride operates remains largely the same.
The “4-D” movie attraction “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” is long gone from EPCOT. (The gimmick was that you were attending an Inventors’ Awards ceremony and were accidentally shrunk along with the rest of the audience by Wayne Szalinski’s shrinking ray.)
Every summer without fail. And I still live within 10 minutes of it. It’s technically still there. It’s called Mountain Creek now and a lot of the infamous water attractions are still in operation: H2-Oh No!, River tubing, Wave pool, Tarzan swing, and a couple others I remember riding as a teenager. The infamous Alpine Slide is long gone, replaced by a lame roller coaster-like ride. Alpine Slide wasn’t really as dangerous as they say - most of the injuries came from people not understanding how the sleds worked. You pulled up to go faster and pushed down (or let go) to slow down - which I admit is a bit counterintuitive, but it only took me one mistake to figure it out.
Places I went to that are no longer there:
Jungle Habitat in West Milford, NJ
Catskill Game Farm in NY
Tuxedo Park in NY (it’s been the location of the NY Ren Faire for decades - the amusement park closed in the 90s I think)
As a kid a visit to the Detroit Zoo was not complete without catching a chimp show-- they would ride unicycles and do all sorts of other circus-like tricks while wearing funny clown-like outfits. Where the chimp ampitheater used to be, now stands a plaque that memorializes the sad and cruel exploitation of the chimps to get them to do all that stuff.
Went to Bob-Lo several times as a kid-- it was an amusement park on an island on the Detroit River, downriver from the city of Detroit. The park itself was not much compared to Cedar Point, but the real attraction was taking one of the giant steamships to get to the island and back. Dating from the turn of the century, they were multi-deck and had an opening on the lower deck where you could look down into the engine room and see the giant pistons working. The park eventually went bankrupt and closed, and the steamships Ste. Claire and Columbia were mothballed.
I went to Universal Studios in Florida in my 20s before I had kids. Then, years later, my wife and I took our kids there. I was kind of sad to see that the old rides based on classic movies like Jaws, Back to the Future, Earthquake and King Kong all had either been replaced, or were in the process of being replaced with rides based on insipid kids’ cartoon movies like the Minions.
By Press Museum do you perhaps mean the Newseum? It started in Roslyn, VA, in 1997, and relocated to a huge new building in DC in 2008, but sadly closed only 11 years later. It was an excellent museum with many impressive and well-designed exhibits.
The National Aquarium in DC was a rather small and unimpressive installation in the basement of the Commerce Department. It closed on September 30, 2013, after 140 years, the longest continuously operating aquarium in the United States at the time.
It didn’t exactly relocation to Baltimore. The National Aquarium in Baltimore was an independent entity until the two formed an alliance in 2003 to operate as a single National Aquarium with two sites.
I’ve floated the Salt River in Arizona a few times. You can still do it, but I’m predicting that it may not be long before it’s a thing of the past. Drought/climate change is hitting that part of the world very hard.
I went to both of those places several times in the 2010s,
The Newsuem was interesting, It had sections of the old Berlin wall, and a lot of stuff related to 9/11, like bits of twisted steel. A lot of people found the 9/11 exhibits very moving.
The “National Aquarium” was a modest collection of fish tanks and a little pond with a small alligator, in the basement of the Commerce Department.
Thinking about theme parks some more, I visited Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios, Florida during its heyday in the early 1990s. I got to be in the audience for the taping of an episode of Nick Arcade, even. Nick Studios closed in 2005, and from what I understand had been pretty much sitting there mostly unused since.
And I’ve also been to “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” at EPCOT. And probably plenty of other defunct attractions at Disney’s Orlando parks, and many of the defunct rides at Universal mentioned above.
I went to Disneyland in 1974, and again in about 2010. I was surprised how little it had changed. The old 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride was still there, but they had put in plastic clown fish and renamed it Nemo’s Adventure (or something like that).
Yes, couldn’t remember the name when I was responding on my phone. Plus it’s a location in the video game The Division 2 where it’s just called the Press Museum so that’s ingrained into my brain
True, but that was also what made it kind of cool. Coincidentally, ALSO a location in The Division 2 making it two places in the game that no longer exist in real life.
Two of my cousins worked there during one or two summers in high school, and I went once or twice.