Nashville is a bustling place with plenty of tourist destinations, many themed around the city’s pride and joy—country music. Some of the area’s star attractions include the Grand Ole Opry House and the Opryland Hotel, but one of the obvious standouts during the drive on Briley Parkway is the spacious and popular shopping mall known as Opry Mills. Each of these individual attractions come together to create a sprawling tourism destination with events hosted year-round.
Inside the mall is one of the sixteen remaining Rainforest Cafe locations around the United States, an aquarium-themed restaurant, Dave & Busters (a family arcade chain), a Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, a movie theater, and more. With so many options to choose from and such a short distance from other popular tourism destinations, Opry Mills has quickly established itself as a must-do for many out of towners–but before this sprawling shopping center occupied the land, there was once a bustling theme park promoting Nashville’s deep connections to the music industry.
Opryland USA (also known as Opryland Themepark or simply Opryland) opened in 1972 and enjoyed years of operation before its closure in 1997. During the park’s heyday in the late 80s, it welcomed an average of 2.5 million visitors per year. The park hosted the famous country music radio station Grand Ole Opry over the course of more than two decades and even predated the Grand Ole Opry House itself by two years. To this day, the Grand Ole Opry House continues to provide radio entertainment from the same location making it one of the few surviving buildings from the theme park era.
Opryland existed at the heart of the country music empire, but the park was a celebration of multiple genres of music including jazz, pop, bluegrass, and rock. During the park’s early years there were relatively few thrill attractions with most of the emphasis being on stage performances and music shows.
The park was divided into nine areas, many of which were themed around a particular music genre. These areas included Opry Plaza which hosted the Grand Ole Opry House and accompanying radio show, Hill Country (later Opry Village) that had an emphasis on bluegrass and folk music, New Orleans with an abundance of jazz shows, the Riverside, a scenic area closest to the river, the American West celebrating western music and the western frontier, the Lakeside which offered a few children’s play areas and water rides, the State Fair with a petting zoo and carnival games, Grizzly Country and its river rafting ride and an indoor roller coaster, and the Music of Today (or “Mod”) area which prominently featured pop and rock music and Opryland’s oldest thrill ride, the Timber Topper (later Rock n’ Roller Coaster).
In 1975, Opryland saw its first expansion. Leading up to the fourth season of operation, the park had added a State Fair themed area with a few new rides and games. However, the season was delayed due to flooding of the nearby Cumberland River that swamped the park.
In 1977, the Opryland Hotel (now the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center) opened to the public to draw in more overnight tourists eager to take in all Nashville had to offer. With the nearest theme park competitors between 4-6 hours in any direction, the Opryland experience was able to maintain a tight hold on tourism in the area. 1981 saw Opryland USA’s final expansion. This introduced a newly themed area known as “Grizzly Country” along with a river rapids ride.
During its peak operating years, Opryland USA was a leisure venture through the world of music, offering live entertainment, shows, and shops and fewer thrill rides. But as more and more guests began seeking out better thrills, Opryland saw a dip in attendance. Additionally, by the late 80s, competitors were beginning to appear in closer proximity. Dollywood opened under its new name officially in 1986, and Kentucky Kingdom in Louisville was quick to follow the next year.
Due to its limitation as a seasonal park and changes in consumer expectations about theme parks, Opryland’s popularity began to decline. Additionally, due to its proximity between the Cumberland River and the busy Briley Parkway, the park was quickly outgrowing its footprint with no space to expand, and concerns of flooding from the aforementioned river were always prevalent.
To top things off, the Opryland Hotel was thriving; With expansions introducing beautiful atriums with lush green plants and indoor waterfalls, a Victorian style garden, a quarter-mile of indoor river, and boats to escort guests across, the hotel had become a tourism attraction of its own. With the hotel able to stand on its own without Opryland USA’s crowd during the off season and the massive 1986 expansion that nearly doubled the size of the hotel and used up the remaining potential expansion space for the theme park, the decision was finally made to shutter and demolish Opryland.
In 1997, Opryland USA was demolished to make room for a brand-new shopping and entertainment complex to complement the existing Opryland Hotel and convention center. This decision wasn’t made without hefty backlash from locals and out of state fans alike. In 2012, Gaylord CEO Colin Reed spoke out about his experience coming into the company in 2001, three years after the park’s demolition. He recounts that much of his first year was spent dealing with continued complaints about Opryland’s demolition, and called the decision to close the park “a bad idea”. In 2018, Gaylord Entertainment’s former CEO Bud Wendell also discussed the closure, stating: “Opryland was successful. And it was successful when they shut it down. We weren’t losing money.”
Regardless, the new Opry Mills Mall opened in 2000 and breathed new life into tourism in the area. Although in recent years the popularity of shopping malls has decreased drastically resulting in many closures nationwide, the Opry Mills Mall continues to welcome busy parking lots and crowded shops year-round.
However, the mall’s over two decades of life have been anything but uneventful. In 2010 following two days of torrential downpours, the Cumberland River rose past is borders and flooded the Opryland area along with much of Nashville. The mall was submerged in up to ten feet of water and took two years to rebuild.
Unfortunately, even if the Opryland theme park were to make a return, there is simply no space for it on the grounds it once stood. With the hotel and convention center occupying so much of the limited room, it would be impossible to recreate a theme park in the same location. Additionally, the area now has a record of devastating flooding history. It would be unwise to undertake another large and expensive construction project so close to the river.
However, hopes for Nashville’s return to the theme park scene aren’t entirely out of the picture. In the early 2010s, plans were proposed to develop a new park near the original location. This project would be a collaboration between Gaylord Entertainment and Herschend Family Entertainment who own and operate Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, with Dolly Parton herself involved with the plans. Sadly, those plans fell through soon after due to disagreements between the involved parties, but who’s to say another opportunity won’t come along in the future?
Nashville only continues to rise in popularity from a musical and tourism standpoint, so it is not entirely out of the question whether the city will have another theme park of its own one day. But for now, fans of Opryland are left waiting, hoping for potential developments to bring this once-beloved park back to life.
