That may be true in the Dells, HD, but I have listed several going concerns that shut down for the winter in the Northeast that are still profitable. They must be – they’re still going. And have beenm much longer than Freedomland and Pleasure Island:
New Hampshire:
Storyland
Canobie Lake Park
Water Country
Six Gun City
Clarke’s Trading Post
and lots of smaller places
Massachusetts: Six Flags New England
New York:
Lake George
Seabreeze Park (Rochester)
New Jersey:
**Six Flags/Great Adventure
Pennsylvania:
Hershey Park
Utah (not in the NE, but still snowy)
Lagoon and Pioneer Village
That’s just off the top of my head. I’;m sure there are plenty of others I’m not familiar with.
Ski resorts have exactly the opposite problem - they have to make all their money in only a couple of months. Some places in New York can only do it by staying open evenings during the week, but they manage. Can’t make a lot of money at a ski resort in the summer (although they try).
Property values in Houston forced the closure of Six Flags AstroWorld. This year is the first season without it. It looks like the Borg scooped it up – there is nothing left but the bridge over 610. This in spite of warm weather all year long.
There have been rumors for years that Disney is looking to build west of Houston. They say that’s why the Katy Freeway is undergoing a major expansion. I’ll believe it when I see Mickey.
The park in Lake George is called “The Great Escape/Splashwater Kingdom,” formerly “Storytown.” It’s owned by Six Flags.
However, there are other smaller amusement parks in the Lake George area. One – Gaslight Village – died about twenty years ago, and the Lake George Zoo’s been out of business at least a decade. The only one still operating is the Magic Forest, which manages because it’s designed solely for children under ten. Families with young children go there instead of The Great Escape, especially if they don’t want the more exciting rides (there are kiddie rides at the Great Escape – and at least one ride that was originally at Freedomland and moved upstate). Magic Forest, ironically, filled the same niche as the original Storytown, but while Storytown added things for teens and adult, Magic Forest stayed with the kids. However, I doubt it’s a big moneymaker.
But Lake George is a major resort area. There are dozens, if not hundreds of hotels that fill in the summer. The Great Escape is a few miles south of the town, and if you’re spening a week in Lake George, you’re going to spend a day at the Great Escape. That helped keep the park going, as did the thrill rides and the fact that the owner (before Six Flags) was nearly as good as Disney at keeping the park interesting and worthwhile. He kept adding new attractions – roller coasters, a water park – to drum up interest and was willing and able to put the profits back into the park.
As for Pleasure Island – I don’t know much about it, but the answer could simply be mismanagement. Going for big names to perform, for instance, may have sounded nice, but it might not have drawn enough customers to pay for the added expense.
There are a couple of things from Freedomland that made it to Lake George – Tornado, Dany the Dragon, the Crystal Maze (now a funnel cake stand) See the Freedomland site’s “Where are they now?” section.
And, of course, a lot of these old parts still are operating, which means people will pay to ride on them, even in the Frozen North. The Tilt-a-Whirl from Palisades Park is at Canobie Lake, as are the lights friom the 1964-65 World’s Fair. The Train Stations, the gaslights, the seats from the Flying Saucer, and at least the plans from the Casa Loca of Freedomland are all at Clarke’s Trading Post. Clarke’s and Storyland are on opposite sides of the Kancamagus Highway through the White Mountains in New Hampshire, which probably resembles the Lake George area in being a Major Resort area, but Canobie Lake and Six Flags New Jersey and Six Flags New England aren’t particularly close to a Great Resort area, unless you stretch your definition to the point where just about anywhere is.
Six Flags is completely different. They’re a different type of park, focussing on the thrill rides and their connection with Warner Brothers cartoon characters. They’re also more recent, and keep a very strong eye on the bottom line: an MBA’s park, designed to maximize profit. For instance, they charge for parking and do no allow anyone to bring in food. Before Six Flags bought it, The Great Escape allowed people to bring picnics (on the theory that making customers happy brought them back) and had free parking. Six Flags doesn’t allow any food (on the theory that the customers are there to be charged for overpriced hot dogs) and started charging to park in the exact same lot the used to be free.
Six Flags are newer, and work as destinations from the area they are in (Six Flags New England tries to draw from New York and New England, for instance); most of the older parks were primarily local draws. It’s no different from Disney World in Orlando – people come from all over an even wider area instead of just from the Orlando area. They also work hard to keep up the park, much like Disney does.
Why did these parks close; I’d put it down to:
-short summer season-nobody wants to ride a rollar coaster in freezing weather
-high liability insurance 9if they could even get it-lots of greedy lawyers out there)
-rising property values: the owners realized they could get a few million in cash and retire-why work hard for a piddling return?
Six Flags Great Adventure, New England and Darien Lake aren’t in resort areas and neither is Cedar Point - but I know there are plenty of hotels near those parks offering special packages with theme park tickets, just like there are at Hershey and Busch Gardens and King’s Dominion (except for Great Adventure- they might be there too, but it’s a day trip for me). They don’t need to be in a resort area- the parks bring people to the area. The hotels I stayed in when visiting those parks were full of people visiting the parks. Part of the reason is the coaster specials- every year there seem to be two or three TV shows about this year’s best coasters. But I think the target audience makes a difference,too. Probably a bigger one. If Freedomland was an imitation Disney, it was probably aimed at younger children than most Six Flags parks are (except for the Great Escape, which when I was there still seemed like a park for young kids). It didn’t have the advantages Disney had of brand recognition. and being in a resort area. Disney parks are the only parks I can think of aimed at younger children that drew visitors from far away. There’s a limit on how far people will travel on a day trip with young kids, and I don’t think the Bronx was a vacation destination even in the 60s. Freedomland most likely had to depend on a more local crowd than Disney, but also was probably not attractive to the Six Flags- type market of teenagers and young adults. Multiple buses leave from the Port Authority bus station each day that Great Adventure is open, full of teenagers and young adults. There are also buses from Newark, Camden and Philadelphia. And I’m not talking about school or camp trips- I’m talking about public transportation
Disneyland wasn’t in a resort area, either, when it opened and when it was in competition with FreedomLand. Disneyland in Anaheim was surrounded by Orange Groves (I’ve seen the pictures), and there wasn’t even a hotel nearby. The Disneyland Hotel came later. DisneyWorld in Orlando opened long after Freedomland had died.
And Freedomland may not have had movie recognition, but it had saturation advertising and public transportation. In fact, being in the City proper, it was easy to reach by public transportation – far easier than Disney, in the great Californian expanses, and much closer to NYC than Great Adventure/six Flags NJ is today. Don’t forget that “the local crowd” was the New York Metropolitan area. Even if you only consider the city, that’s a huge pool of potential customers, and it was MUCH nearer and cheaper than Disney for them.
Right – but the flip side of my question – with all those disadvantages, howcum Canobie Lake, Storyland, etc. stay open year after year. By the same logic, they should’ve closed by now. Lagoon in Utah I can understand – they’ve got a captive audience – there’s nothing else with its attractions within a plane flight or a twelve hour drive of the densest population in Utah. Pleasure Island should’ve been able to keep going, but apparently it always lost money (good case for bad management there). Revere Beach was immensely popular for over fifty years before it died.
My Parents lived very close to Freedom Land/Co-op city when I was born.
I remember my father talking about it. He mentioned the World’s Fair and Swampy grounds killed it. Apparently parts of Co-op city had a fierce problem with foundations and many of the structures and Freedom land had problems in the short time they stood. It closed before I was old enough to go to it, so I can’t pass on anything else about it.
But before Six Flags bought Riverside Park in Agawam, it had already existed since 1840. It’s not a recent park, it had weathered over a century of winters, and it existed as a pre-“MBA Park” long before FreedomLand and Pleasure Island were built, and continued to exist in that form until decades after they closed (Six Flags got it after 1990, IIRC). Before that time it had no Warner’s characters, no anti-lunch policy, no charge for parking. They did have thrill rides, though. Although they had plenty of other rides (even in its “historic” period), it’s true that they never had a roller coaster.
But look at all of the other parks close to NYC that stayed open longer-Rockaway Playland, Rye Playland, the Coney Island parks, Nellie Bly, a little place on Cross Bay Blvd in Queens (don’t know the name), Adventurer’s Inn (probably a few more that I don’t know). They were apparently much smaller than Freedomland and didn’t focus on shows or any other participation attraction, so there costs would have been lower. One other difference I just realized- those parks I just mentioned either didn’t have a pay one price option, or it was an option and you could still buy tickets Unlike Six Flags and Disney, where you pay to get in, even if you ride nothing and watch no shows (and yes, there are people who do this). How did Freedomland charge?
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I’m still in WAG mode, but I would put it this way: If you build a “Chicago fire” enactment, it costs a certain amount of capital to get it up, and a certain amount of money to keep it going. What does it do to bring in the paying customers? There are people who line up all day long to ride one coaster or another and then get off the ride and go right to the back of the line to do it again. People who live close enough will make multiple trips during the summer to do that. It is a constant draw. Will any parent really let their kid spend hours manning a fire pump and then come back in two weeks to do it again?
The issue with the expense was not that they had to replace the first attractions, but that the first attractions did not bring in enough revenue to pay for themselves (on some projected multi-year curve) and before they had been paid off, the park had to go out and spend additional capital to put traditional rides in, as well.
Contrast this to Cedar Point where the first coasters went up a century ago (out on land that was cheaply purchased as not really suitable for farming and cheaply taxed until Sandusky finally wised up to the sort of money that was crossing the gates) and they could take the limited summer revenue and re-invest it on no-longer-mortgaged property, using modest receipts over multiple years to build a larger and larger customer base on bigger and faster rides. There was no need to recover the expense in some artificially short period that was hampered by a short business year.
I am not familiar with these parks specifically but I am pretty fluent in amusement park management, worked for several years as park operations for a smaller park. One of the biggest killers in that era (70’s early 80’s) was insurance rates. Many entertainment businesses, not just amusement parks crumpled under increasing insurance costs. A handful of accidents even ones seemly innocuous like a few slip and falls can blow holes in your budget you never thought possible. Once your insurance company gets around to upping your rates, you end up barely keeping your head above water.
Amusment parks are often also fraught with managerial peril in specialty areas like foodservice and maintenance. Good ops people don’t know anything about food, food people often don’t know anything about maintenance or operations. Even with all the specialization and departments an open position in upper management for any period of time can cripple a parks ability to function because his boss dosen’t understand his area as well as he does. All big businesses suffer from these types of problems, just most businesses don’t invite the public in and try to impress them with how pretty everything is.
I didn’t mean that Freedomland wasn’t accessible by public transportation, but rather that Great Adventure attracts people of an age to get there on their own, not those dependent on their parents for transportation.
Let’s see if I understand what Freedomland was- it was sort of an imitation Disney, right? Shows, activities but not thrill rides. Basically means it was probably aimed at kids under 10 or so ( and their parents), not teenagers or young adults. It seems to have been a fairly large park that would require the whole day to enjoy, not a small park like Rockaway Playland which could be done in a couple of hours, or the little kiddie park with about 10 rides I used to take my kids to. When my kids were young, I might have taken them a park like Freedomland once. Maybe even once a summer- but probably not. I certainly wouldn’t have taken them five or ten times over the course of a season as I have to Great Adventure (and the season is closer to 7 months than three) when they were older than Disney age. I don’t know why Disneyland survived and Freedomland didn’t , but I wonder if California had the same sorts of amusement parks that the Northeast did, or if Disneyland was the only permanent one they in that area of California at the time.
Given the long term, phenomenal success of Canada’s Wonderland just north of me, I sincerely doubt a northern climate really has that much to do with it.
I would guess that parks that fail are just badly run. Canada’s Wonderland jams the customers in at $50 a pop or whatever it’s up to now. The formula seems pretty simple; it’s clean, designed along the customary principlies of good amusement park designs, has a mix of attractions and a great many rides, especially a lot of roller coasters - I believe it’s in the top 5 in North America for the sheer number and variety of coasters - and is in close proximity to a large urban center and variouos modes of transportation.
Pretty much any kind of business can fail. If a grocery store shuts the doors you don’t ask why that community doesn’t want food.
I notice that New Hampshire seems over-represented on your list. Could favorable/unfavorable tax deals have been a factor in why the NH parks survived but Pleasure Island and Freedomland didn’t?
Personally, I think there’s a great deal to the observation made by others that Canobie Lake and a lot of the other NH parks started off small and gradually expanded. That way, when they started getting big, they already had a solid groundwork laid of profitable rides, experienced management and regular customers. This would be much less risky than immediately trying to rival Disneyland.
Richard Price’s excellent novel Freedomland - recently filmed, I believe - is of course fictional, but provides a lot of social and cultural background to the park.
???
I’ve seen the movie recently. The “Freedomland” of the title appears to be a home for kids with problems, a sprawling brick structure that’s now abandoned, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with the amusement park. The amusement park isn’t even mentioned in the movie (and the home couldn’t be on the actual site of the real Freedomland Park, since that’s occupied by Co-Op City).
Is the book different?
Huh? Riverside park has had several coasters in it’s pre-Six Flags history, including the Cyclone which I still think exists. During the 80’s & early 90’s, before the steel frame coasters took over, it always made the list of top 10 coasters in the USA.
BTW, Storyland in New Hampshire is geared strictly towards a younger crowd - they say 12 & under, realistically I’d say 10 & under. They don’t have any big (i.e. expensive to build & maintain) rides, so they’re saving a lot of money on rides.