How The World’s First Automotive Theme Park Died Of Boredom In Just 6 Months

In the midst of an American manufacturing collapse, Flint, Michigan, spent tens of millions constructing a twisted monument to the very trade that was leaving its residents excessive and dry. AutoWorld, the world’s first automotive theme park, was offered as the reply to Flint’s woes. It would flip across the metropolis with the best unemployment within the nation. It lasted all of six months.

While GM was busy slashing jobs in Flint, metropolis leaders concocted a hare-brained scheme, puffed up by a military of consultants with help from elected officers and federal packages. The concept was destined for greatness, one other approach for the folks of Flint to outlive off of automobiles as that they had executed for many years. But from the beginning, the issues with AutoWorld have been apparent.

“When you ask Flint residents about AutoWorld, they all say the same thing: Either ‘Oh, we never went,’ or ‘We only went one time — it was too expensive for our family,’” Flint historian, University of Michigan-Flint archivist (and my sister) Colleen Marquis informed Jalopnik. She’s steward of all kinds of intriguing items of memorabilia from AutoWorld, Flint’s failed try on the world’s first automotive-themed amusement park.

(A particular due to the University of Michigan-Flint and their archivist for permitting me time to comb by their bins of paperwork and memorabilia pertaining to AutoWorld.)

“Have you ever seen so much ridiculous merch?” she stated, as we went by the bins of rocks glasses, private grooming kits, espresso mugs and dollhouse furnishings, all emblazoned proudly with the admittedly very cool Six Flags AutoWorld emblem. All of it from a park that was open common public hours for less than six months.

The varied items of flotsam validated my cynical perception that such locations are constructed solely to soak up cash from vacationers lulled into spending by alcohol or nostalgia or delicate mind trauma (or all three.) From that angle, a theme park in Flint, Michigan, within the ’80s, when unemployment was typically over 17 %, clearly made no sense.

But there have been moments of perverse, perhaps determined optimism. That or opportunism and grift. Maybe AutoWorld was some combine of all of them. Looking again on it, to the times when theme parks have been an enormous deal, the times of National Lampoon’s Vacation, it’s arduous to inform how a lot was craven and the way a lot was silly.

Along with the tiny cups and ashtrays within the U of M-Flint archives are bins and bins of paperwork pertaining to the planning and improvement of AutoWorld. The University didn’t have a lot to do with the plans, apart from permitting for a number of heaps to be designated as overflow parking for AutoWorld in the summertime.

I actually assume “planning for overflow parking at AutoWorld,” could possibly be the brand new “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” It seems, not an entire lot is smart in regards to the world’s first automotive themed amusement park. The total factor was a blunder, and the folks of Flint paid the worth for it.

How It Started

The concept to construct the primary automotive theme park in America’s Vehicle City didn’t originate from General Motors, however from C.S. Harding Mott and his basis’s president, William White. Yes, that Mott, as in apple juice. His household got here from beverage cash, however this Mott invested within the automotive trade and was very lively in Flint. The Mott Foundation would play a key position in getting AutoWorld constructed and ultimately sharing in its ruinous demise. GM would really largely keep out of AutoWorld, apart from a $1 million donation. Former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith informed the Flint Journal again in 2009 that he may see the venture was doomed from the beginning, however there was no stopping civic leaders.

What Mott initially envisioned was an Automotive Hall of Fame and guests heart, the place the proud historical past of the automotive trade can be highlighted. Something extra akin to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which Ford himself designed to have fun not simply the Ford Motor Company and Detroit space achievements however industrial historical past typically. It can be a non-profit, hands-on museum or some form of science museum. Detroit designer Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the unique World Trade Center, was tapped to come back got here up with plans for the middle in 1970. The ultimate architect for the park can be Randall Duell Associates — a agency chargeable for 22 theme parks throughout the U.S.

Flint simply so occurred to be in the midst of an city revitalization venture that was presupposed to prop up an already struggling metropolis. Millions of {dollars} of funding flowed into the encompassing space. There was $80 million spent on constructing the University of Michigan-Flint campus. A $61 million Hyatt lodge with 35,000-foot conference heart and 400 rooms opened downtown. An industrial park within the former St. John’s neighborhood, a 54,000-square-foot market with native outlets and River Village — $40 million in residential planning — have been nearly executed earlier than the C.S. Mott Foundation even purchased the area for AutoWorld. The area got here within the type of the Industrial Mutual Aid Auditorium — a former UAW-owned facility that hosted live shows by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Holiday for its members. The IMA can be absorbed into AutoWorld.

By then the preliminary estimate for the price of constructing AutoWorld had ballooned from $28 million in 1977 to $60 million. The park’s ultimate prices would develop to $68 million earlier than it opened on July 4, 1984. So who paid for it? According to the ebook No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan And The United States by Theodore J. Gilman, the unique plan was for the town to pay for no a part of the venture however the usage of federal funds particularly would come again to hang-out Flint. By 1980, Flint Mayor James Rutherford entered discussions with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development about making use of housing grants to the constructing of AutoWorld. Seemingly with no self-awareness, Rutherford predicted success in profitable grants on account of Flint’s extremely excessive unemployment and poverty charges. He was proper and a bit of over $13 million in federal funds went into constructing AutoWorld, regardless of the numerous want of the folks residing within the neighborhoods of Flint.

Historic Flint AutoWorld Foundation was based to fund the constructing of the park by way of non-public funding. It would find yourself placing up $19.7 million to get the job executed. The Mott Foundation additionally put up a hefty, $14 million chunk — 1 / 4 of its yearly price range. The Mott Foundation admitted funding AutoWorld would severely curtail different good it did within the metropolis. The state of Michigan tossed in practically $5 million after Republican Governor William Grawn Milliken got here round to ultimately help the venture. The metropolis council additionally accepted a tax-exempt bond to the tune of $7.5 million. With all this official backing, non-public donations from the town’s elite got here flooding in. Even former president Gerald Ford kicked in for AutoWorld.

Of the $13 million in HUD funds, Flint took out a $4.5 million CDBG bond to fund AutoWorld. The downside with that bond is that Flint needed to make funds of $727,000 yearly. Later, if the town didn’t pay, the quantity can be deducted from the full Community Development Block Grant funds HUD dispersed throughout the town. Organizations in Flint counted on the total quantities from these grants yearly to maintain their doorways open. The metropolis defaulted on the grant in 1987, forcing nonprofits within the metropolis to cut back companies or shut altogether. The Mott Foundation gave Flint a $4.6 million grant, however a prepayment clause prevented the town from paying the grant off abruptly. (Doing so would have incurred a $500,000 price, which the town additionally didn’t have on the time.)

The enthusiasm of the consultants employed by Flint who beforehand labored within the theme park trade bordered on manic. You can nearly hear them claiming how theme parks put Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook on the map! As constructing value estimates rose so, too, did their predictions of income. AutoWorld was a two-hour drive from 2.8 million folks, they reasoned. Surely one million guests a yr after 5 years wasn’t out of the query. And those that came visiting would keep within the park, on common 5 hours a go to. AutoWorld would supply 500 minimal wage jobs and 1,800 jobs within the surrounding space to deal with the inflow of holiday makers. Millions in revenue would roll in instantly and the outcome can be a revitalized metropolis stuffed with hope once more. It can be that straightforward.

Over a decade of improvement by a parade of consultants who pushed the town nearly completely in the direction of a theme park morphed the standard dream of a science museum into one thing unrecognizable. No Miracles Here cites consultants pushing the town to repeat what others had executed as the principle reason behind AutoWorld’s demise.

They actually muddied the waters. Here’s what an 1982 prospectus described all that AutoWorld would entail by Randall Duell Associates after the Historic Flint AutoWorld Foundation inexperienced lit the venture:

What Is AutoWorld?

AutoWord has audio-animatronics, it has Indians, Waterfalls, log jams, log cabins, forests, historic perspective, crafts, eating places, a noticed mills, nice eating and night attract, outlets, snack bars, theaters, a re-creation of Flint’s outdated Saginaw Street, a normal retailer, a carousel, bumper automobiles, distant management race automobiles, a huge three story tall V-6 engine, an electrifying exploration of the trade’s expertise in the present day – new expertise. AutoWord has arcade video games, auto artwork, exhibitory, video games, a set of vehicles, carriages, carts and bicycles, a library and archives, dwell theater, an superior IMAX film, fantasia of the longer term, a transferring sidewalk historical past of the meeting line, impertinent mechanical horses, monkeys, damsels in misery, menacing mechanical chickens, innovations of all kinds, pioneers, and even an vehicle present from the subsequent century, the nice races of all time and a gallery of racing greats.

Impertinent mechanical horses? Menacing mechanical chickens? Wasn’t this presupposed to be a automotive museum? Once the consultants had executed tens of millions in work, the tug of struggle grew to become between the Mott Foundation and Six Flags itself. Six Flags needed the location to be extra of an leisure venue whereas the Foundation struggled to maintain the historical past side alive. It’d do it with static displays and no thrills.

Consultants ultimately estimated that 930,000 attendees can be wanted to maintain the park working in its first yr when essentially the most hopeful real-world estimates put the variety of anticipated attendees at 600,000. Even from those that supposedly knew the biz and have been directing the selections from behind the scenes, AutoWorld was a misplaced trigger. But by now, it was too massive to cease.

Doomed To Fail

On July 4, 1984, AutoWorld opened after a decade of improvement and tens of millions of {dollars} in investments and it appeared extremely lame:

At 300,000 sq. toes, AutoWorld was additionally the most important indoor theme park on this planet, full of tropical vegetation that additionally one way or the other “recreated the banks of the Flint river.” Under its 70-ft huge dome have been, carnival rides, freaky animatronics, performers and digital excursions, outlets, eating places, a three-story mannequin of a V6 engine, an IMAX theater and an entire host of different sights—however largely purchasing and shops stuffed with branded merch. There wasn’t the fun of a Busch Gardens or Six Flags theme park. Your choices have been pretty soporific rides, like a carousel and bumper automobiles, or sitting and watching a film or some nightmarish “humorous” historical past.

Or you could possibly spend cash. Go purchasing. Dine out. Spending cash was the primary attraction at AutoWorld it appears. All this purchasing was on prime $8.95 for an grownup ticket—about $28 in in the present day’s {dollars}. Attendees have been spending cash, to spend cash, in one of many quickest fading cities in America with the best unemployment charge within the nation at the moment.

Today, we all know instructional leisure is commonly neither. The clumsy blurring of the 2 soured AutoWorld’s essence proper from the beginning. Was it a spot you could possibly take children to on discipline journeys? Was it a spot for households to let unfastened? By making an attempt to be each, AutoWorld ended up as neither. The builders grew to become too enamored with their imaginative and prescient because it grew and overlooked what makes theme parks engaging. As one professional informed Vox for a 2021 article :

“Theme parks are all about us,” says Margaret King, who has studied and written about theme parks all through her profession and is the director of the Center for Cultural Studies and Analysis, a market analysis institute. “It’s a museum of us, of America. It’s a distillation of the qualities we most value and like about ourselves.”

We are nostalgic for locations that by no means actually have been, she says. Disney’s Main Street USA, the thoroughfares themed to the early-Twentieth century that function gateways to the remainder of Disneyland and Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, are idealized portrayals of a extra genteel, if unrealistic America. They are spotlessly clear, impeccably landscaped, and overflowing with cheery optimism (in addition to loads of souvenir merch). Visiting the Disney parks is “like going back to your hometown,” King says. “It’s the hometown that’s shared by everyone in the country.”

The very predictable hassle began nearly instantly after the parks July 4 grand opening. In a memo from Senator Donald Riegle Jr. from his Flint workplace to William White, president of the Mott Foundation and spokesperson for the non-public traders in AutoWorld, Riegle was fearful in regards to the low attendance as early as July 27.

“Attendance during the evening has averaged between 200-300 people; there does not appear to be an attraction or incentive for individuals to return to the facility; there is some confusion as to whether AutoWorld is educational or recreational, and lastly, although there has been no mention of it made publicly, the $8.95 entrance fee presents a problem for many people.”

To repair attendance issues, in addition to empty seats within the eating places at night time, AutoWorld dropped entrance charges after 6 p.m. to $5.95 and dinner reservations started to incorporate a tour of the ability to try to attract visitors. As the numbers fell additional and additional behind, everybody started to panic. Investors quickly started to flee AutoWorld.

It was regarding when simply 2,500 guests walked by its halls on the unofficial opening day, discounted particularly for the residents of Flint. It was alarming when, by the primary week, attendance had solely reached 38,000. By the tip of July, 100,000 folks visited, properly under the 110,000 anticipated. The 600,000 wanted within the first six months to remain within the black ended up at solely 439,000.

So what occurred? Riegle, who had additionally supported the venture, nailed each downside with AutoWorld proper on the top just some weeks after its opening.

AutoWorld was opening at a time when Flint’s largest employer, General Motors, was starting to wind down manufacturing within the industrial metropolis. In 1978, GM employed greater than 80,000 Flint-area residents, based on a examine by Michigan State University. By 2015, that determine plummeted, to almost 7,000, and this wind down was ramping up proper when AutoWorld opened. From Ryan Felton’s story What General Motors Did To Flint:

Following World War II, the automaker pursued a company technique that centered on shifting the technique of manufacturing to the suburbs and away from city cores, based on Andrew Highsmith, a University of California-Irvine assistant historical past professor who has extensively researched Flint.

In Flint’s suburbs, Highsmith wrote in a 2013 paper, GM constructed eight factories, all forming “an arc around the city.”

As the Seventies and 80s approached, GM’s plant closures in Flint ticked upward, compounding the town’s rising monetary duress, forcing it to the brink of chapter, based on Highsmith. To preserve GM on the town, metropolis officers accepted quite a few tax abatements for the automaker, which “coincided with a net loss of nearly 15,000 local positions at GM,” Highsmith wrote.

The thriving firm city wasn’t such any longer.

Theme parks had saved different cities, however copying and pasting that resolution on to Flint was by no means going to make sense. Sure, practically 3 million folks lived inside a two hour drive of Flint, however when you’re executed with AutoWorld you’re now in Flint; a metropolis that works for a residing, with out the attraction of honest climate or extra websites to go to like say, Orlando, Florida or Anaheim, California. The folks residing three hours from AutoWorld can be folks from Michigan, and the state at giant wasn’t doing so scorching within the ’80s with unemployment at 11 %. Flint can also be over an hour’s drive from Michigan’s largest metropolis, Detroit, and its largest airport, Detroit Metro. It’s flat, so the snowy winters don’t even present the appeal of seasonal outside recreation, and Flint is surrounded by factories. It’s simply not in a spot the place you’d assume “yeah, vacation!”

Flint, very similar to Detroit, is experiencing a resurgence, particularly in hometown pleasure. The metropolis might not be the bustling heart of trade of the ’40s and ’50s, however it’s being reformed into one thing new and exquisite by the individuals who stay by issues just like the Flint Public Art Project, cultural occasions and new investments.

The Fallout

AutoWorld went to 5 days per week in an effort to shore up attendance numbers. Often there have been extra staff than guests on some weekdays, resulting in a lower than festive environment.

By January 1985, the park closed to common attendance. This closure would show solely momentary, however the park was by no means open full time once more, with lengthy durations of closure making the location much less and fewer of a vacation spot. Several makes an attempt have been made to reopen the park with new traders, however none managed to maintain the doorways open full time. It closed for good in 1986 and was knocked down in 1997 to construct extra space for the University of Michigan-Flint campus.

AutoWorld is such an odd second in American historical past. The solely factor I can relate it to is the fictional Ice Town within the TV present Parks & Rec that sank a then-teenage Ben Wyatt’s mayoral profession, solely it’s not as humorous when it occurs in actual life. AutoWorld grew to become an emblem of Flint’s decline till the Flint Water Crisis picked up the mantle. It would even be featured in Michael Moore’s Roger and Me, which launched the world to the shitshow that was GM’s actions in Flint.

The Charles H. Mott Foundation, the principle philanthropic establishment within the metropolis to at the present time, would lose $50 million on AutoWorld, when all was stated and executed. All organizers, planners and builders later claimed they noticed the failure coming from a mile away. From the Flint Journal:

Foundation President William S. White stated even earlier than development began, lengthy earlier than the grand opening, he “had a bad feeling” about what the theme park was rising into and he wasn’t alone.

“A lot of people blame (former GM Chairman) Roger Smith for this,” White informed The Journal. “(But) he sat in my office and said, ‘It’s not going to work. What can I do to stop it?’’’

White said in the end, the project couldn’t be stopped because civic and business leaders were so committed to bringing the idea to life.

“It had a life of its own,” stated White, who grew to become a de facto spokesman for AutoWorld as a result of non-public traders have been scattered all around the nation. “People have been simply offered on this dream.’’

When the dream is over, solely actuality stays. Today, on the previous spot of AutoWorld, stands the William White constructing, satirically named for one of many most important architects of the failed theme park. Flint continues to wrestle with its sophisticated relationship with automotive historical past. The metropolis wouldn’t exist in the present day with out the auto vegetation, however the lack of these vegetation many years later spelled devastation for the area. Flint has the best focus of individuals residing in poverty within the state of Michigan and always charges as one of many poorest within the nation. It then got here out that when GM had early indications that Flint’s water was harmful, the automaker was allowed to quietly change water sources with no testing being executed on water that was corroding engines. It can be years earlier than officers would take public complaints severely nonetheless, compounding the horror of the Flint Water Crisis and mistrust of GM.

No half-baked rides or eccentric bobble could make up for the lack of the dignity of a residing wage and primary requirements like clear water. AutoWorld is now nothing greater than a retro emblem on some dusty mugs behind a University archive. A becoming finish, to an ill-fitting theme park.