Riverview Park in Chicago - the best amusement park around. Operated from 1904 to 1967, torn down to become a parking lot. From my aunt’s high-rise apartment, you could see the lights of the Parachute Drop at night. I still remember the year I was finally tall enough to ride it.
Sam’s Place on US 50 in the foothills east of Sacramento on the way to Lake Tahoe. It was a huge video arcade with cafeteria style fried chicken. It was a good place to grab some dinner on the drive from the SF Bay area to go skiing for the weekend.
It was called the “Newseum,” and it was great.
I came here to say this! It was 1999 and was already pretty desolate. In a big theatre, there were maybe 20 people watching the acrobats.
On the subject of amusement parks: Kiddieland & Adventureland in the Chicago area; Pontchartrain Beach in New Orleans.
We moved to the New Orleans area in time for that park’s final season. I went there at least twice, including Independence Day.
Walker-Gordon Farms in Central New Jersey used to have the Rotolactor, often described as a “merry go round for milking caws”. You put the cow on at one station and hooked it up to the milker. The thing rotated slowly, and by the time it got back to its starting point the cow was finished, could be disconnected, and another take its place. The thing serviced" six to eight cows – I don’t remember.
The Rotolactor was left over from the 1939 World’s Fair. They shut it down several years ago, after hosting tons of Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops and flocks of school kids, when Walker Gordon closed its doors in 1971.
I believe there’s still a Rotolactor in Australia that’s still running.
The Rotolactor may be gone, but you can still visit Elsie the Cow’s Grave. “Elsie” was her stage name. Her real name was the enigmatic “You’ll Do Lobelia”
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7449959/you’ll_do_lobelia
Easier to find, I think, is the Monument to Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast in the Grovers Mill section of West Windsor, NJ. My sister-in-law was instrumntal in getting this done.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monument-to-the-war-of-the-worlds
Both Elsie’s Grave and the Monument are still there, of course, but it’s notable that they mark places where nothing actually happened. Elsie is really buried somewhere else. And neither Martians nor Lectroids invaded New Jersey in 1938.
Ohh, forgot about that one. Great fun when the river was (is?) bigger than a trickle in a gutter.
Those kinds of devices on a large scale are bog standard milk production equipment today.
One being part of a theme park, or the original “rotolactor” branded device may well be long gone.
New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain rock formation In Franconia Notch collapsed and slid down Cannon Mountain in 2003.
Its visage is still plastered all over New Hampshire memorabilia.
Other defunct New Hampshire attractions I have been to:
Benson Wild Animal Farm
Six Gun City
Fantasy Farm
Heritage New Hampshire
Weirs Beach Water Slide
Weirs Beach Drive-In
Darn, you just beat me to it.
- Whalom Park - at the time it closed it was the 13th oldest amusement park in the US
- Edaville Railroad - although it still seems to have some very limited seasonal operations at a new location, after having opened and closed multiple times over the years.
- The Pink House at Plum Island
I saw The Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire. This would have been about 1985.
For those who are interested in all the changes in Disney parks over the years, I stumbled across a great site that explains them. Attractions that have come and gone, attractions that have changed, and so on. Plenty of photos from back in the day, and in some cases, photos showing the attraction evolving.
Looking through that site, I can see plenty that has changed since my visits to Disney parks. Here you go:
I grew up in Toronto. We used to have a great entertainment complex built on artificial islands and futuristic pods right on the lakeshore called Ontario Place. A great example of 1970s urban utopianism, it featured great attractions for children and adults alike: an adventure playground, a waterpark, a concert stage, an Imax theater called the Cinesphere, and so on. Some of the venues remain but unfortunately, the amusement park is long dismantled. The Cinesphere is still there but in 2022 was closed for renovations.
Another Toronto attraction that was both highly educational and highly entertaining was (and technically still is) the Ontario Science Centre. This science museum was the subject of many a school field trip and family outing when I was a kid and featured a multitude of artefacts, temporary exhibitions, and interactive exhibits, as well as educational presentations, lectures, and films. In 2024, the monumental original 1960s brutalist building was closed because the Ontario government claimed it was in need of repairs. Since then, the exhibits have been housed in vacated mall spaces, and now the Science Centre operates again, but in a smaller building on Toronto’s Harbourfront. This is an interim location pending the construction of a permanent, but still smaller building to house it.
Staying in the educational vein, we have the McLaughlin Planetarium, centrally located between the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto’s Falconer Hall. Between the ages of 6 and around 11, I had quite a few visits to this place with family or with school. Again, this was a very educational and entertaining venue, perfect for finding something to do on a weekend. This was closed in the 1990s during another bean-counting government’s term of office and never re-opened as a planetarium or properly re-purposed. And now it is finally being demolished. What a shame. 
Just remembered another, the CN Tower, one of Toronto’s best-known landmarks, featured an attraction from 1985 to 1992 called Tour of the Universe. It was a space shuttle flight to Jupiter. The experience included an elevator trip forward in time to the year 2019 and a simulation of a space port. I experienced the ride in Grade 2 in 1987 when, during a day off school my after-school daycare took us on a field trip there. To an imaginative seven-year-old (at that age I was a bit like Calvin in “Calvin and Hobbes”), it all seemed very realistic; IIRC, I think I actually believed we had gone to the future, to space, and back and my father had to explain to me what a flight simulator was when I told the story to my family in the evening.
For what it’s worth, I recommend watching this short original promo for the attraction..
Wow, I’ll have to fall down that Yesterland hole when I have more time!
Damn! This is the third thing I can add to my list, and I’m not even that old!
My college honors journalism class went on a field trip from Kent, Ohio to Washington DC to visit the Newseum in 1999.
Does East Berlin count?
We went to Opryland twice when I was a kid; I do have some memories of it.
(It was a country-music-themed theme park, in Nashville, and was built in the early '70s to complement the then-new Grand Ole Opry House. The theme park was shut down after the 1997 season.)
I’ve visited the Wisconsin Dells many times. It’s a tourist area in central Wisconsin, somewhat analogous to Niagara Falls, in that the original attraction was the area’s natural features, and a kitschy tourist industry sprung up around it. I’d been to a lot of the “old-school” tourist attractions which were popular in the 1950s through 1980s/1990s, which have since been torn down for more modern attractions and hotels: things like Storybook Gardens, Fort Dells, Stand Rock Indian Ceremony, Wonder Spot, the Tommy Bartlett Show, and probably more.
Two more:
North of Wilmington, NC, is the Orton Plantation, which was the most boring place on Earth. You couldn’t even get into the plantation house. It has closed permanently, no big loss. If you want to see what it looked like in its heyday, watch the Drew Barrymore version of Firestarter, where she looses all sorts of pyrotechnics on the property and blows it all to Hell.
Ocala, FL, had Silver Springs Attraction, which was my favorite place in the whole wide world until they shut it down. Boat rides, live animals (a jeep safari ride drove right up to the animals) and glass bottom boat rides in the crystal clear spring water. They had big name concerts during the summer (saw Blood, Sweat & Tears there) and their season pass was ridiculously inexpensive; we went every Friday afternoon for the better part of a year. I can’t tell you how sad I am they had to close.
I just remembered a small tourist trap that used to be near us. Pollardville was an ersatz Western ghost town on Highway 99 just outside Stockton. As a kid, we hardly ever went there because my parents disagreed substantially from the owners’ politics. They went out of business nearly 20 years ago, and the owners tried to market the property to developers of small housing tracts. Unfortunately, 2007-8 was a crappy time for the real estate industry in this part of California, so the property sat. And sat. And sat. It’s still sitting, fenced off in a vain attempt to prevent illegal dumping. There hasn’t been a shootout duel in front of the saloon in two decades. No train robbers to terrorize a 6-year old’s birthday party.
Coincidentally, the owners’ youngest son was in the same class as our youngest at the nearby elementary school. This kid told our kid they should not be reading Harry Potter because witchcraft is sinful. He was right, but for the wrong reason.
Thanks for that–I expect I’ll lose a lot of time exploring it. I grew up in SoCal and of course loved D-land, Knotts, Universal Studios, Marineland of the Pacific, and all the rest that are either gone or greatly changed.
I also LOVED the Exposition Park museums, which still exist but have been often reworked (as one would expect). The huge rose garden and the California Museum of Science and Industry were favorites. I always used to look forward to seeing the Mathematica hall, the baby chicks, and Shirley Temple’s extensive doll collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica:_A_World_of_Numbers…_and_Beyond
I was there not long ago and can confirm that the glass bottom boat rides are still operating, though the site was converted into state parkland some years back.