Do you have time for a tale? Sit back, relax, and dive into the interesting and timeless case of Geauga Lake, a tiny family park that started humbly enough before rocketing overnight into international headlines by combining with a full-sized SeaWorld to create the world’s largest Six Flags.
A gargantuan park of mega-coasters, killer whales, dizzying flat rides, a Batman water ski show, dolphins, log flumes, Hurricane Harbor, and motion simulators for one price, Six Flags Worlds of Adventure was conceptually prepared to become the best theme park on Earth.
And yet, you won’t hear about Six Flags Worlds of Adventure today. It’s certainly not on Six Flags’ website. Doesn’t look like they own a park in Ohio at all, does it? Neither will you hear much said about Geauga Lake that isn’t accompanied by sobs from industry fans and admonishing head shaking from insiders. So what caused the rise and fall of Geauga Lake (and the many names it’s gone by)? Now that’s a story for the ages. The best place to start is the beginning. We’ll use park maps and images (all from the invaluable Geauga Lake Today fan site unless indicated otherwise) throughout. Those park maps, particularly, tell the story of the park perhaps better than words can!
A history along the shores (1887 – 1968)
GEAUGA LAKE (pronounced Gee-AH-guh) is one of those wonderful, storied parks that grew very organically. Its roots trace back to 1887 (which was adopted as its official “opening date,” if you could call it that) when the park was quite literally a picnic meadow along the northern shores of the eponymous 60-acre pond. Like many of its contemporaries (including nearby Cedar Point), the story really starts when the railroad was built nearby, creating in Geauga Lake a perfect family getaway in the 19th century.
And like so many other picnic parks, Geauga Lake was soon home to a waterside ballroom, gardens, and full-sized steamboat that conducted lavish dance parties on the weekends. In 1889, a steam-powered carousel became its first ever ride – the same spark that would serve as the prologue to many similar, local family parks from Cedar Point to Conneaut Lake; Coney Island to Knoebel’s. This was a world before Disney; before the idea that a park could be built-out, constructed all-at-once, and master-planned. Rather, Geauga Lake was the product of generations and generations of slow, steady growth.
To give a sense of Geauga Lake’s grand, multi-generational story, consider this: in 1925, just as Walt and Roy Disney were stepping off the train in Los Angeles with dreams of opening an animation studio, Geauga Lake was opening the Big Dipper, the tallest and fastest roller coaster that had ever been built.
The storied past of Geauga Lake is much like many other historical family amusement parks, slowly developing from a picnic spot to a family midway populated by vendors, roller coasters, gardens, and fried food. Likewise, the park’s history is that of debilitating fires, a steady stream of owners, and attractions that form a storied, local foundation for a magnificent park.
It would be impossible to overemphasize the tremendous foundation of the park and its first century. By the 1960s, Geauga Lake was a playground for the great-grandchildren of its first visitors. The quaint park was a draw for locals who hoped to share with their children the wonder of the amusement park on the lake.
The above park map from 1976 gives a good impression of the delightful family park that Geauga Lake was throughout most of its life as it grew up. Even in the bicentennial, Big Dipper was already 51 years old… it had been around for a quarter of the United States’ life!
Whales across the way (1969 – 1997)
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Our story really gets interesting back in 1969, when the park was purchased by Funtime Incorporated, who had plans to develop Geauga Lake into an amusement park as we might define it today – the kind you can see in the map above. Their first decade saw the addition of a log flume, a sightseeing tower of over 200-feet, and even a few steel roller coasters, like Arrow’s Double Loop designed by Ron Toomer. Geauga Lake was transitioning from a picnic park to a modern amusement park.
And it wasn’t going to be alone much longer!
A testament to the park’s picturesque location on the southern shore of the gorgeous 60-acre lake, it got a neighbor in 1970 when SEAWORLD OHIO opened directly across, on the northern shore. Predating their now-flagship park in Orlando, SeaWorld Ohio was a real place. The Penguin Encounter, the Shark Encounter, pearl divers, aquaria, Happy Harbor, and even the Shamu show. Yes, that SeaWorld had a park in Ohio, directly across from the Geauga Lake amusement park, a few hundred feet across the pond.
SeaWorld was a complement to Geauga Lake, and it, too, grew and grew. The wildlife park added to its staple killer whale shows, dolphin habitats, and water ski spectaculars.
By the 1990s, SeaWorld in Ohio was a modern park in all ways. It had added an immersive, themed Star Tours style motion simulator called Mission: Bermuda Triangle, a high-tech 4D theater, a meticulously-themed walkthrough dinosaur swamp, and was carrying staples like Clyde and Seamore’s sea lion show (below), nighttime spectaculars on the lake, and much more.
Image: Jeremy Thompson, Flickr (license)
Meanwhile, across the lake, Geauga Lake continued to expand, adding steel coasters and wooden coasters and a water park, as it became a standard family park. It was, primarily, a local spot. And all was right with the world. By the 1990s, Geauga Lake had a collection of roller coasters that sounds fairly standard: the Double Loop, the Corkscrew, the Big Dipper, and more – classic rides for a classic park.
Things began to change in 1995, and at first for the better! A company called Premier Parks acquired Funtime Incorporated, uniting parks like New York’s Darien Lake and Colorado’s Elitch Gardens into a single family of perfectly-sized local parks. And Premier was ready to invest, adding Mind Eraser (a Vekoma Boomerang coaster) and Grizzly River Run (a themed Intamin water rapids ride) while also expanding the water park.
Nearing a new millennium (1998 – 2000)
In 1998, Premier Parks gobbled up another entity, purchasing a down-on-its-luck Six Flags from Time Warner for $1.86 billion. The massive acquisition gave Premier control of Six Flags’ already large portfolio of parks. But instead of bringing Six Flags parks into the Premier brand, Premier instead renamed itself (and its own parks) in Six Flags’ image. In 2000, Premier re-named itself Six Flags Theme Parks Inc. and set out to bring its smaller, local parks the benefit of Six Flags’ name brand appeal.
So for the new millennium, Geauga Lake got a new identity. The park was renamed SIX FLAGS OHIO. More importantly, it was backed by a feverish new strategy. In 2000 alone, the park was granted $40 million in upgrades, expanding fast. That $40 million brought in twenty new rides, including four major coasters. That brought the tiny family park more in line with other Six Flags branded parks around the world, and it recast the historic Geauga Lake family park as something new: a thrilling, high-tech Six Flags complete with Looney Tunes, DC Super Heroes, and some record-breaking thrills.
Consider just the major roller coasters stuffed into the park in its first year as Six Flags Ohio. First was The Villain (above), a towering hybrid wooden coaster placed in the park’s Western-themed Coyote Creek land. A gargantuan ride, The Villain ripped through 3,980 feet of wooden track at 60 miles per hour, including a very rare piece of modern trick track, swaying from side to side on opposingly banked rails in an otherwise straight piece of track.
Using Six Flags’ licensing rights to the DC Super Hero universe, Six Flags Ohio also received an entirely new themed land: Gotham City. The only fitting inhabitant, of course, was a brand-new roller coaster called Batman: Knight Flight. The 157 foot tall B&M coaster featured floorless trains, leaving riders toes dangling inches above the track as it careened through five inversions, including interlocking corkscrews and the ride’s signature: a 135 foot tall vertical loop – the tallest vertical loop in the world.
A third major coaster, Superman: Ultimate Escape was the first of Intamin’s launched Twisted Impulse Coasters, with its two vertical towers dominating the skyline. The very next year, the park went big with X-Flight (below), a neon-green flying coaster that was nothing short of groundbreaking at the time, positioning riders face-first, lying toward the ground as they race through overbanked turns, loops, and rolls. The Vekoma creation was an early take on the concept that would evolve into B&M’s flying coasters, like Manta and Tatsu.
Each of the rides added to the park was tremendous and stunning in its size and design. They were, inarguably, world class rides. Added to the classic coasters from the park’s past and the mild investment of Premier, these new modern marvels made up a nine coaster line-up that would make even Cedar Point or Magic Mountain jealous.
Would you have believed then that the massive investment put into Six Flags Ohio would be its eventual undoing?
If you haven’t noticed: there is no longer a Six Flags Ohio. What came next might have been the park digging its own grave. If we can say anything though, it’s that the parks built around Geauga Lake went down in flames, not by burning out… The best is yet to come.
Sincerely overnight, little Geauga Lake – the family park located amid the tiny towns of Northeast Ohio – had become Six Flags Ohio, with a dozen coasters, each taller than the one before. The park was quite literally not your grandfather’s park. If you took him, he might not recognize it! This was a new Geauga Lake for a new millennium, and the park now counted itself as a jewel in Six Flags’ crown of thrill parks. And don’t forget, all the while, SeaWorld Ohio sat across the lake in a harmonious relationship with Six Flags – two parks run completely independendly, nestled up against one another.
It wouldn’t last.
Consider how odd it really was, though: For thirty years, visitors of SeaWorld would sit in a stadium on the water’s edge and watch a ski-show, with the hundred-foot-tall roller coasters of another amusement park as the backdrop! Likewise, visitors to Six Flags Ohio would glance across the lake and see the distinctive clamshell stadiums of SeaWorld nestled into the hillsides. It’s an odd dichotomy that’s not seen anywhere else on Earth to have two such preeminent theme park brands peacefully sharing opposite shores of a lake.
After three decades of peaceful cohabitation on opposite sides of Geauga Lake, Six Flags’ thrill park and SeaWorld’s marine life park would soon change roles.
An offer you can’t refuse (2001)
Eager to enter into the 21st century, SeaWorld’s parks in Orlando, San Diego, and San Antonio began to emphasize adrenaline-packing thrills at the dawn of the new millennium. Formerly operating more like zoos than amusement parks, suddenly SeaWorld was in the business of coasters, simulators, and thrill rides to punctuate its sea animal shows. That was all well and good, as SeaWorld Orlando opened Kraken (2000) and SeaWorld San Antonio upped its arsenal with Great White (1997) and Steel Eel (1999). It was a very intentional choice to shift the parks into competition with roller coaster parks, and it has served SeaWorld well even unto today.
But rides were not coming to SeaWorld Ohio.
There are conflicting theories as to why SeaWorld Ohio was not building thrill rides the way that its sister parks in Florida, Texas, and California were.
One theory is that local ordinances forbade such expansion at Ohio’s SeaWorld park. The county line, it seems, runs right down the middle of Geauga Lake, and SeaWorld’s side of the lake couldn’t build structures over a certain height or noise level, making coasters impossible.
A second version of the story is that SeaWorld couldn’t build coasters thanks to a long-existing non-compete agreement with Geauga Lake / Six Flags Ohio.
A third is that, under new management and branding, Six Flags Ohio refused to continue the cross-promotions that had helped the two parks co-exist for three decades, from which SeaWorld’s attendance was suffering.
Either way, the story goes that SeaWorld (then managed by Anheuser Busch) was ready for a change. Allegedly, the company offered to purchase Six Flags Ohio in hopes of managing both parks and keeping harmony in advertising. Though we don’t know, it’s safe to guess that the thrill park might’ve been branded as Busch Gardens Ohio, absorbed into the other park chain owned by Anheuser Busch… It’s odd to imagine how things might be different if that had happened.
Six Flags allegedly declined SeaWorld’s offer, but counter-offered to buy the marine park! The deal went through. For just $110 million, SeaWorld folded and sold its Ohio park to Six Flags, taking their animals with them. Six Flags quickly re-populated the animal park with their own (mostly borrowed from Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in California) and did the unthinkable…
A whole new world (2001 – 2003)
After just one year as Six Flags Ohio, the park opened in spring 2001 as SIX FLAGS WORLDS OF ADVENTURE, combining the two parks into one. A new forested path along the lake’s edge and a floating boardwalk united the former SeaWorld and Six Flags into a giant, 700-acre mega-park that offered a full marine life zoo, a full thrill park, and Six Flags’ Hurricane Harbor water park. Six Flags was fond of advertising Worlds of Adventure as three parks for one ticket, and it really and truly was – each was large enough to stand as its own gate. In fact, they had been!
The park map alone is astounding and worth zooming into and exploring, and doing so will help make sense of some changes we’ll see soon… On the map, you can see SeaWorld staples in the same park as Six Flags rides – Superman roller coasters, killer whales, Batman water ski shows, pearl diving, a motion simulator, Happy Harbor, penguins, and Looney Tunes, all for one price! Two parks – each with their own themed lands – were brought together. Truly astounding. For locals who recalled being at one and gazing at the other across the lake, they could now walk between them. Or take a ferry. Or a forested path. Two parks that had been independent for decades were now connected.
The largest theme park in the entire world, Worlds of Adventure seemed a park enthusiast’s wildest dream. Those three decades of harmony between two dissimilar parks had come to a head in their union.
It was unthinkable and somewhat mind-boggling that Six Flags Worlds of Adventure could exist at all, so perfectly divided into “Wildlife” and “Wild Rides” sections, each on opposite sides of a beautiful lake. In other words, they couldn’t have built the park more conceptually interesting if they’d tried. Everything theoretically fell together in a really picturesque and wonderful way. It felt like Worlds of Adventure was a new kind of theme park, poised to become a new flagship, even against the infallible Cedar Point.
It was dizzying.
It was doomed.
Adventure Falls (2004 – 2006)
One, two, skip-a-few. (We’ll come back to fill in the blanks on how it happened…)
In 2004, just four years after it first bore the Six Flags name and a short three years after it absorbed SeaWorld, Six Flags Worlds of Adventure had burned out.
The massive mega-park was purchased by Cedar Fair Entertainment Company – the folks behind Ohio’s other mega-park, Cedar Point. (Hmm…) The park was promptly renamed GEAUGA LAKE again, and any references to Six Flags’ Looney Tunes or DC Super Heroes were hastily removed (leading to some unfortunate and thoughtless new identities that were more de-branding than re-branding… A similar fate would befall the Paramount Parks after their purchase by Cedar Fair two years later, leading to the destruction of one of the world’s greatest themed thrill rides ever, coincidentally also in Ohio).
Across the park, identities were swapped as rides and themed lands took on generic placeholder names.
In Power City (once a dark and foreboding Gotham City re-painted in highlighter yellow), Batman: Knight Flight became Dominator. Famously, the Batman logoes etched into the headrests of the roller coaster’s restraints were seared off. Superman: Ultimate Escape was renamed Steel Venom (with a black-and-purple logo thoughtlessly applied to the still-red-and-blue coaster, above).
Mind Eraser was now Head Spin; Serial Thriller transformed into Thunderhawk. Bugs Bunny moved out of Boomtown as it became the generic “KidWorkz” with fountains of the characters disassembled and Bugs Bunny’s carrot house standing as an awkward reminder. Sea life topiaries and character references were removed left and right as remaining animal habitats were left vacant. Hurricane Harbor was hastily re-branded Hurricane Hannah’s (an obvious de-branding). Around the park, themes were dropped and names were changed as the feeling of the park turned to something new.
That was enough to bother locals. But then came some of the worst. Cedar Fair had no interest in running a zoological park.
The SeaWorld / Wildlife side of the park was shuttered immediately, leaving only [Shamu’s] Happy Harbor (a play area of climbing nets, midway games, and family flat rides) as well as the park’s motion simulator and a “4D” theatre on the northern side of the lake. Still, the stadiums and aquaria of the marine park continued to stand empty, walled off from guests – a very certain reminder of what had been for any visited the park. After decades as a treasured local attraction, the marine park / zoo that had been SeaWorld was closed forever, yet was still standing behind fences. Ouch.
In 2006 – just a few years after taking control of Geauga Lake – Cedar Fair purchased the Paramount Parks chain for a staggering $1.24 billion. Interestingly, that deal gave them complete control of Ohio’s four parks, which had previous been Paramount’s Kings Island, Six Flags Ohio, SeaWorld Ohio and their own Cedar Point. Monopolizing Ohio’s line-up, Cedar Fair was no doubt proud. But the purchase had also plunged them into staggering debt.
Waves of change (2006)
The new Geauga Lake was making no fans in the local community who stared at the skeletal remnants of SeaWorld on each visit and failed to warm to their favorite rides being hastily renamed. So in their second year at the helm, Cedar Fair leveled much of the ghost town SeaWorld had become and began to install a new water park. The complex officially changed its name to GEAUGA LAKE & WILDWATER KINGDOM in 2006, as the itty-bitty new water park co-existed with the remnants of Six Flags’ Hurricane Harbor (de-branded as Hurricane Hannah’s) that continued to operate back on the Six Flags side. Yep, two small water parks.
As Cedar Fair balanced its budget sheet, decisions were made. For one, Geauga Lake started to come apart, literally. In 2006, a publicized “Phase II” expansion of Wildwater Kingdom failed to take shape. Only a wave pool opened at the still-miniscule water park, coinciding with the closure of a wave pool and the rest of Hurricane Hannah’s on the dry park side (a net loss if you’re counting).
Much, much worse, X-Flight and Steel Venom, two of the park’s signature coasters from the expansion just six years earlier, were removed and relocated to Kings Island and Dorney Park, respectively, touted as new additions at each. (They continue to operate as Firehawk and Possessed at their respective new homes).
Cedar Fair, in fairness, was undertaking a necessary evil: reverting Geauga Lake back to the local-based family park it used to be. But of course, that’s not how it felt to fans who already had a distaste for the company’s treatment of the wildlife park and the de-branding of the park’s stories and themes. (Many also noted that dismantling two of the park’s signature rides lessened competition with their own flagship Cedar Point, just a few hours away – coincidence of course… right?)
A forgotten farewell (2007)
2007 proved even worse. The park’s historic Raging Wolf Bobs wooden coaster closed early in the season, which had already been restricted to summer-only, eliminating the Halloween and spring events that had become local traditions. And that was bad, but it was nothing compared to what happened next.
The park finished off the season on September 16, 2007, shutting down for a well-deserved winter break.
Five days later, on Friday, September 21, 2007, Cedar Fair announced that Geauga Lake would never open again. Literally less than a week after the park closed for the season, its fate was announced. There were no goodbyes. No last rides. No apologies. No final tours or memorial events. No last chance for photos. Nothing. Cedar Fair would later argue that they simply hadn’t made the final decision until after the park’s seasonal closure, but fans still argue (justifiably) that they deserved some warning; some chance to make their last memories in a park that was 120 years old.
Imagine that. Imagine if your local park closed for the season, and five days later, you were told it would never open again. It wrenches the hearts of those who grew up here, and whose great-great-grandparents had been the first visitors. Truthfully, it’s a lasting wound that will never close completely. That’s why the very mention of Geauga Lake still draws painful looks from those who know the industry and the park that was.
Six years after becoming the world’s largest theme park, only a fraction of the property around Geauga Lake would re-open in 2008 – the water park Cedar Fair had built on the remains of SeaWorld. Cedar Fair’s spokesperson nervously reported to local news that Cedar Fair had determined that “the market demand wasn’t there to support the park as structured. … We believe the park will be most successful operating exclusively as a water park.”
Geauga Lake wasn’t just closed. It was scrapped. Any relocatable coasters were moved, finding new homes at Kings Dominion (Batman: Knight Flight, as Dominator), Carowinds (Mind Eraser, later Head Spin, as Carolina Cobra), and Michigan’s Adventure (Serial Thriller, as Thunderhawk). Flat rides, too, found their way to the chain’s other parks. The Villain – just seven years old – was sold as scrap to the tune of $30,000. So was the Raging Wolf Bobs coaster. The park opened its gates just once more, as chronicled in this heartbreaking album of photos taken at the auctioning of the park’s remaining resources.
Then everything from food stands to gift shops were ransacked and cut to their foundations, with copper, plumbing, and infrastructure torn out. Obliterated. The iconic red-brick entry with its decorative teal towers was reduced to the turnstiles alone, seemingly only to spare Cedar Fair from the backlash of seeing those towers crumble on their own.
Image: Jeremy Thompson, Flickr (license)
In its 120th year, Geauga Lake was no more.
The park was, quite literally, bulldozed. To fly over it today is to see its paths, still arranged into its themed lands, making their way around concrete building foundations and ride footings among overgrown wilderness. Not even a restroom remains standing. The only attraction left is the Big Dipper, still upright from 1925. It was the third oldest operating roller coaster in the U.S. when the park closed. As for the remains of the water park? Here’s the real kicker.
Wildwater Kingdom (2008 – 2016)
While the former Six Flags side of Geauga Lake lay overgrown and entirely bulldozed, the water park that Cedar Fair had built over the remains of the SeaWorld side did continue along, re-opening in 2008 as GEAUGA LAKE’S WILDWATER KINGDOM – its name as a supposed testament to the former park. It contained one multi-slide complex, one ProSlide Tornado, a water play fortress, a lazy river, and a wave pool.
The diminutive park never got its Phase II expansion. Even the Happy Harbor area that had shared its side of the lake – above, the only remnant of SeaWorld – was demolished. Why the water park couldn’t have made use of the climbing nets, 4D theatre, motion simulator, and family flat rides, we may never know.
They, too, were obliterated (see below) apparently just so that the empty lot could be fenced off to become overgrown. Why that would be preferred to a climbing area and family flat rides, who could say?
For eight years, the diminuitive, tiny water park continued to operate (and for a very short time each year, given Ohio’s cool springs and autumns), its only addition ever being The Beach – Family Fun Area, with giant chess pieces and beanbag toss games. Year after year, the park went without sizable investment – a sure signal of its priority. (And to be fair, Wildwater Kingdom was the only standalone water park left in Cedar Fair’s portfolio, the rest having been sold off one-by-one in the 2010s).
Anyway, the park got its seventh name change when the wound-opening “Geauga Lake’s” prefix was dropped in 2011. WILDWATER KINGDOM continued to operate, without a single a new addition since 2006’s wave pool.
And imagine it: To get to Wildwater Kingdom, guests followed signs to Geauga Lake (ouch), joined a few dozen other cars in SeaWorld’s old parking lot, built for thousands (ouch), would pass through the front gate and entry boulevard that had been SeaWorld’s entrance for decades, now devoid of its iconic dolphin water fountain (ouch), and gaze across the lake at the single feature that could be seen there – the Big Dipper – where once a skyline of 100-foot roller coasters stretched across the entire lakeshore (ouch).
It was just… sad.
Then, on August 19, 2016, Cedar Fair pulled the plug. After trying for years and years to sell the abandoned amusement park side of the property, they announced that they’d worked closely with the city and township to determine that for any of the property to move forward, the entire property needed to be redeveloped, adding that “[a]fter examining its long-range plans, Cedar Fair has determined that the time is right to begin this transition…” In layman’s terms, after its seasonal closure on September 5, 2016 Wildwater Kingdom would never re-open. And that was that.
It’s no doubt that in the decade it stood alone, Wildwater Kingdom became its own destination for local families and inspired new memories for a new generation. And for that generation, another round of mourning begins.
Inexplicably thrust from a family amusement park to a mega, world-class theme park and back again, the little local water park that remained wouldn’t return in 2017. Wildwater Kingdom – all that remained of Geauga Lake’s 130 year history – was sunk.
Imagine if you will…
In 2001, Ohio was home to Six Flags Worlds of Adventure. A dozen innovative and record-breaking coasters, a full marine life park with killer whales, dolphins, penguins, sharks, and tigers, a charming Looney Tunes children’s land, and a full Hurricane Harbor water park. Just seven years later, it was gone. Completely gone. Barely a single shred of it remains. Practically no evidence that the land was anything but a vacant lot.
Once in a while, people will circulate petitions try to bring back Geauga Lake, no doubt expecting that it could one day see a Kentucky Kingdom style rebirth. “Re-open Geauga Lake!” they announce. Amusement park fans ask, “Reopen what?” There’s barely anything left of the “Wild Rides” side of the park. Concrete footers sunken into the swampy lake, a few sheds with every piece of copper and plumbing pulled out, broken brick paths, and a 91 year old roller coaster that’s been standing but not operating for a decade – arguably unsalvagable… The property is dead. Wiped clean.
You can no doubt imagine why locals still curse Cedar Fair and its then-CEO Dick Kinzel as a greedy expletive who bought Six Flags Worlds of Adventure, maliciously intending to close it to eliminate Cedar Point’s competition. Many believe that he planned from the beginning to use Geauga Lake as spare parts, distributing its rides to the chain’s other parks with no care for its history or value in the local economy.
Of course, we can’t say for sure that the intentions of Cedar Fair were nefarious. Can we agree that they overreacted by shutting the entire place down when the chain operates parks that are fractions of the size and scope and never seems to deem them unfit for operation? Probably. And should they have closed the park for the season, then immediately announced, “Oh, by the way, it’s closed forever?” Definitely not. It was a bad decision at a different time by different management.
Anyway, over more than 130 years and through seven name changes, Geauga Lake went from a timeless family amusement park to an international theme park packed with killer whales, ski shows, record-breaking coasters, dark rides, simulators, dolphins, water slides, and super heroes! Who could ever have guessed that that mega-park – a combined Six Flags, Hurricane Harbor, and SeaWorld – would just a few years later become this…
… before even that disappeared forever.
What – or who – is to blame? We’ll dissect the reasons behind the park’s death on the last page. Read on…
So that’s it. After 120 years of history, Geauga Lake crashed and burned in seven, with Wildwater Kingdom following closely behind. The new millennium and the Six Flags Ohio moniker were the beginning of the end for the little Ohio park. What exactly went wrong? Keeping in mind that Geauga Lake’s downfall and closure are the result (and the blame) of many, many people and ideas and strategies, here are a few guesses.
1. Over-expansion
Definitely the number one culprit, Six Flags’s idea to supercharge the park was not an altruistic one. Original plans called for an aggressive expansion of Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom in Louisville. The park’s major competitor, Paramount’s Kings Island, launched a pre-emptive strike to combat that expansion by investing $40 million of their own into a new land and three new headlining rides. (To give you a sense of the time frame, one of those headlining rides was 2000’s disastrous Son of Beast, the subject of its own Lost Legends entry.) Six Flags relented and left the Kentucky park to wither, instead shifting investment to their new Ohio venture, installing four major coasters in two years…
The idea was not to gift Northeast Ohio with investment. Plain and simple: it was to defeat Cedar Point. The reigning coaster capital of the world was decidedly ahead in the arms race of the era (now remembered as the Coaster Wars), and Six Flags sought to combat that with Worlds of Adventure. The influx of coasters might’ve evened out the statistics, but the artificial growth spurt put the park way in the red. It was a big risk to hope that the investment would be worth it.
In the end, we can begrudgingly admit that Cedar Fair was actually doing the right thing by paring the park back down to a local family park instead of clinging on to mega-destination dreams. It just didn’t read that way to locals who watched the company move in like vultures and pick the place apart while Cedar Point flourished. And then they went and ruined any goodwill by closing it altogether, as if no park of any size could reasonably exist there despite 120 years of history saying otherwise.
2. Bigger is not better
Different from over-expansion, we’re talking here about the sheer massive size of Worlds of Adventure. At about 700 acres altogether, the mega-park was literally created by building a bridge between a full-sized Six Flags and a full-sized SeaWorld. Consider the scope of it: Disneyland Park is about 70 acres (or one-tenth the size) while the garganuan Animal Kingdom is 500 (including the giant safari area traversed by truck.) Conceptually, it was brilliant and kind of incredible. But the reality of walking around the park was staggering. Consider also that creating one theme park out of two meant that Worlds of Adventure had two massive parking lots. Two main entrances. Two Guest Service centers. Two lost-and-founds. Two main gift shops. Two everything. It was not unusual for guests to end their day exhausted and find themselves in the wrong parking lot on the wrong side of the property.
And even if the park’s physical property doubled, it did not double the park’s infrastructure. Two local parks might combine to a mega-park on paper, but their facilities don’t. Restrooms and restaurants and internal facilities and queues and pathways were built for local crowds. Six Flags begged for crowd levels to rival Cedar Point’s, and they got them! The massive groups that descended on Worlds of Adventure in its first years were simply more than either park was meant to handle, overwhelming the infrastructure. Cramped, crowded, and unprepared. Those were the words used to describe Worlds of Adventure’s premiere seasons. There wasn’t enough of anything, and everything was too small.
3. Six Flags’ management
Six Flags in the early 2000s was much different than the Six Flags of today. Concentrated on coasters and not much else, Six Flags parks at that time were infamous: poorly maintained, poorly staffed by poorly prepared employees, and poorly run. On a corporate level, it was all about massive rides. Six Flags did exactly as expected of them by pushing four massive coasters into what had been a charming family park of mild thrills. And there they stopped. In their effort to compete with Cedar Point, they forgot just about everything else that a winning park needs. A de facto policy of the company at the time was, “Build it and they will come.” And they did come to see the new spectacular park near Cleveland. Trouble is, they didn’t come back.
Six Flags’ financial position also lead to unusual business choices. At the time, their strategy for all of their properties was simple: admission was dirt-cheap. A season pass to Worlds of Adventure (which included admission to all Six Flags parks, by the way) was $49.99. The strategy was to pack the park by dropping admission to fatally low prices, then charge for games, food, parking, snacks, and toys. “If we can just them in the park,” they seemed to think, “then we’ve got them.” The plan only exacerbated the “Bigger is not better” problem, above, and attracted crowds from Cleveland who were brought in via an intentional bus line that Six Flags lobbied for. Like it or not, the park was quickly identified as a place families didn’t care to be, packed with roving gangs of unaccompanied teenagers whose $50 season passes doubled as free babysitting all summer long.
As the composition of the park’s visitors changed, the parents, grandparents, and locals families who had made Geauga Lake and SeaWorld their homes away from home for generations bailed.
Zooming out from the Worlds of Adventure property, Six Flags as a whole was drowning under massive debt when they sold the park in 2003. The rapid and insatiable expansion of the brand in the early 2000s had seen their property count swell to unprecedented numbers, and the issues detailed above seemed to plague most of them. Six Flags as a whole had expanded too quickly, and with the wrong underlying principles at their foundation.
It likely didn’t take long for them to see that their investment in Ohio was not fruitful. To reiterate: Six Flags Worlds of Adventure did get the record crowds they’d hoped for. But those visitors didn’t come back the next year. Or the year after. Six Flags was in trouble, and they needed to offload the inflated Ohio property as fast as they could. To put it into perspective, Six Flags inherited Geauga Lake and spent about $60 million to turn it into Six Flags Ohio. They then bought SeaWorld Ohio for $110 million – a relative steal. Just three years later, Six Flags sold the entire Worlds of Adventure complex (the combined marine park, ride park, and water park) for $145 million… In other words, they sold it at massive loss out of desperation. They unloaded their European parks and many U.S. parks shortly thereafter, and even filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They’ve only now re-emerged as a strong company that has almost nothing in common with the Six Flags that operated the park in Ohio.
4. Cedar Fair’s management
When Cedar Fair took over the park in 2004, they were determined to do things differently. They publicly tried to de-emphasize thrills and recast the park as a family one, just as it always had been before Six Flags’ overblown expansion. It was the right move, and the direction the park probably should’ve been heading in. Six Flags’ time at the helm alienated the many generations who grew up there. Humongous roller coasters aside, the very atmosphere of the park felt changed when the park was suddenly overrun by an influx of thrill-seekers and teenagers.
Cedar Fair may have been right to turn the clock back. They just took it too far, and made their own foolish mistakes in their rush to undo the park’s rapid growth. Still-burnt fans call them greedy. Maybe. There’s just no good way to explain to locals why a brand-new and groundbreaking roller coaster like X-Flight was being removed so that another park could have it.
What was probably the biggest hit to Geauga Lake’s future had nothing to do with the Ohio park’s performance: in 2006 – just two years after purchasing Geauga Lake – Cedar Fair expanded big time. Paramount Parks (a competing chain of five regional theme parks owned by CBS) went up for sale. Apparently, then-CEO of Cedar Fair Dick Kinzel was so enamored with Ohio’s Paramount’s Kings Island, he decreed that Cedar Fair would buy the Paramount Parks come hell or high water. They met both when Cedar Fair paid $1.24 billion for the chain (a figure that many analysts agree was well above Cedar Fair’s means), and the company was plunged into massive debt from which they’re only now recovering.
Cedar Fair’s game-changing purchase of the Paramount Parks almost doubled their park lineup, and this massive purchase required immense reorganization. First, the legacy and Paramount Parks would need integrated together infrastructurally as ticket systems, POS systems, pass systems, and more had to change. Just as importantly, Cedar Fair at once had to set out absorbing the former Paramount Parks into their own brand. That meant the hasty removal of any movie themes within the parks. (If you think Cedar Fair’s de-branding of Geauga Lake was bad, imagine nearby Kings Island, which lost of the most incredible, well-themed rides ever to grace a regional theme park, TOMB RAIDER: The Ride.)
Languishing under the debt from the Paramount Parks purchase and still investing big money into tweaking those parks, Cedar Fair was ill-equipped for the absolute financial meltdown of 2007 recession, which hit at just the wrong time for the company.
Cedar Fair seemed to make their own desperate decisions as the chain struggled to make ends meet. Put simply:
- Geauga Lake may have just been the newest and easiest to part with when times got tough. The recent purchase of the Paramount Parks overshadowed the also-new Geauga Lake.
- Eliminating Geauga Lake also happened reduced competition to Cedar Point.
- Closing the park allowed Six Flags’ over-expanded coasters to be re-distributed through Cedar Fair’s chain.
On paper, it was a win-win.
In hindsight, even Cedar Fair’s management would probably admit to big mistakes in closing Geauga Lake, and especially in the way they closed it. Sometimes decisions sting in the present, but make sense in retrospect. Geauga Lake’s closing still seems absurd since Cedar Fair manages tiny little parks like Michigan’s Adventure and Valleyfair that even a pared-down Geauga Lake would’ve fit nicely with. There’s no reason Geauga Lake couldn’t have been inched back down to a charming family park. It wouldn’t have been ideal and locals would probably never forgive the death of SeaWorld, but at least there would still be a park to see.
5. Location, location, location
Despite brochures advertising the park as being located in Cleveland, the park was actually in Aurora, Ohio, a tiny town about 40 minutes from the city on a good traffic day. No interstates pass by, so a trip to the park was a trip along state routes and two-lane county roads through small Ohio towns amid vast expanses of nature. For most of the park’s century-long life, it had been the people of those towns and the surrounding region who had visited the park – a complimentary relationship that had made it so successful.
The park’s sudden growth to Worlds of Adventure (and its subsequent national advertising campaign) was quite literally overnight, and at once those little towns exploded in construction, hoping to widen their tiny roads to five-lane highways to prepare for the national tourists who would flock to the park. Locals were no longer the target market, yet it was their towns that were being uprooted to accomodate this new mega-park.
And guests who did travel from neighboring states to Worlds of Adventure were able to stay in the many, many hotels that popped up around the park… Err, wait… Located in the middle of rural Ohio and instantaneously shifted from a local park to a marketed destination on par with Cedar Point, there was no time for hoteliers to even try to open locations near the park. A motel down the road got to be Six Flags’ official hotel, if only because there was almost nothing else. There were a handful of hotels, sure, but nothing to support the theme park resort that had appeared. So while Cedar Point visitors can choose from a half-dozen official, partnered hotels and dozens more in the area that had grown with the park over a century, Worlds of Adventure had almost nothing… certainly not enough to handle the huge crowds. That’s the price of shifting the marketing from Northeast Ohio to the entire country…
Location didn’t help Wildwater Kingdom much, either… A standalone water park in Northeast Ohio didn’t seem the smartest business plan, and rumors surfaced every single year that the tiny water park would follow in its predecessor’s footsteps and quietly close for good at the end of the season. By time its eventual closure was announced in 2016, it had gone a full decade without a notable investment.
Saying goodbye
Locals may never forgive Cedar Fair for what they did to Geauga Lake. To be fair, though, it was just a nail in a coffin that had been closing for some time. For the reasons above, Worlds of Adventure might have been doomed. That doesn’t necessarily mean Geauga Lake was. Despite Cedar Fair’s last comments on the subject, Northeast Ohio could support a family amusement park. Indeed, it did for 120 years.
As it is now, the case of Geauga Lake is closed. The property is flattened. Now, even the remaining Wildwater Kingdom is closed for good. Any hopes for a theme park operator to purchase the land and cobble together a nice, quiet family park can be pretty quickly abandoned, as Cedar Fair would never allow the property to be sold to any entity hoping to recreate an amusement park of any size unless they’re willing to pay well over its value.
It’s just especially a shame to see the entire infrastructure totally leveled. Truly like a vulture came through and picked it clean. It’s not even one of those ghostly-looking abandoned parks. It’s flattened. The knowledge that the overgrown paths of the park still weave around concrete foundations is haunting enough.
This is not the way Geauga Lake’s story should end. And yes, it’s one of countless amusement parks in the world that were cut down in their prime, all of which have dedicated and loyal locals who will never forget their own parks’ tragic stories. The difference is that Geauga Lake went out with quite a bang, not as a shriveled, sad underdog. The unique circumstances and story of this park’s instant rise to international headlines, its fusion of two leading park brands, and its dismal destruction over a decade give it a story that is so unlike anything that’s ever happened before or would ever happen again.
Fans of the park never did get their goodbye, and pangs of guilt still ripple through their stomachs because of it. Even for those who never saw this park or never knew it existed, a mile in the shoes of locals should be gutwrenching and tragic – what if this fate befell your local park?
Still, we’ll always wonder how this…
… became this…
… in just five years.
For lots more information on Geauga Lake, Six Flags Ohio, and Six Flags Worlds of Adventure, visit Geauga Lake Today & Forever, a fan community turned memorial site that tracked the park’s growth and decline, including invaluable images and park maps that were used in this feature. All of the photos used in this feature are via Geauga Lake Today & Forever unless otherwise noted.
