Within the midst of an American manufacturing collapse, Flint, Michigan, spent hundreds of thousands constructing a twisted monument to the very business 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 could flip across the metropolis with the very best unemployment within the nation. It lasted all of six months.
Whereas GM was busy slashing jobs in Flint, metropolis leaders concocted a hare-brained scheme, overrated by a military of consultants with help from elected officers and federal applications. The concept was destined for greatness, one other means for the folks of Flint to outlive off of automobiles as that they had carried out for many years. However from the beginning, the issues with AutoWorld have been apparent.
“Whenever you ask Flint residents about AutoWorld, all of them say the identical factor: Both ‘Oh, we by no means went,’ or ‘We solely went one time — it was too costly for our household,’” Flint historian, College of Michigan-Flint archivist (and my sister) Colleen Marquis advised 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 because of the College of Michigan-Flint and their archivist for permitting me time to comb by means of their packing containers of paperwork and memorabilia pertaining to AutoWorld.)
“Have you ever ever seen a lot ridiculous merch?” she stated, as we went by means of the packing containers of rocks glasses, private grooming kits, espresso mugs and dollhouse furnishings, all emblazoned proudly with the admittedly very cool Six Flags AutoWorld brand. All of it from a park that was open common public hours for under 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 gentle 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.
However there have been moments of perverse, possibly determined optimism. That or opportunism and grift. Possibly AutoWorld was some combine of all of them. Wanting again on it, to the times when theme parks have been a giant deal, the times of Nationwide Lampoon’s Trip, it’s laborious to inform how a lot was craven and the way a lot was silly.
Together with the tiny cups and ashtrays within the U of M-Flint archives are packing containers and packing containers of paperwork pertaining to the planning and growth of AutoWorld. The College didn’t have a lot to do with the plans, aside from permitting for a couple of tons to be designated as overflow parking for AutoWorld in the summertime.
I actually suppose “planning for overflow parking at AutoWorld,” may very well be the brand new “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” It seems, not a complete lot is sensible concerning the world’s first automotive themed amusement park. All the factor was a blunder, and the folks of Flint paid the worth for it.
How It Began
The concept to construct the primary automotive theme park in America’s Car Metropolis didn’t originate from Common Motors, however from C.S. Harding Mott and his basis’s president, William White. Sure, that Mott, as in apple juice. His household got here from beverage cash, however this Mott invested within the automotive business and was very energetic in Flint. The Mott Basis would play a key function in getting AutoWorld constructed and ultimately sharing in its ruinous demise. GM would really principally keep out of AutoWorld, aside from a $1 million donation. Former Common Motors Chairman Roger Smith advised the Flint Journal again in 2009 that he might see the undertaking was doomed from the beginning, however there was no stopping civic leaders.
What Mott initially envisioned was an Automotive Corridor of Fame and guests middle, the place the proud historical past of the automotive business can be highlighted. One thing extra akin to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which Ford himself designed to have a good time not simply the Ford Motor Firm and Detroit space achievements however industrial historical past basically. It could be a non-profit, hands-on museum or some form of science museum. Detroit designer Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the unique World Commerce Middle, was tapped to return 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 course of an city revitalization undertaking that was purported to prop up an already struggling metropolis. Hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of funding flowed into the encircling space. There was $80 million spent on constructing the College of Michigan-Flint campus. A $61 million Hyatt lodge with 35,000-foot conference middle and 400 rooms opened downtown. An industrial park within the former St. John’s neighborhood, a 54,000-square-foot market with native retailers and River Village — $40 million in residential planning — have been virtually carried out earlier than the C.S. Mott Basis even purchased the house for AutoWorld. The house got here within the type of the Industrial Mutual Help Auditorium — a former UAW-owned facility that hosted live shows by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Vacation 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 closing prices would develop to $68 million earlier than it opened on July 4, 1984. So who paid for it? Based on the e-book No Miracles Right here: Preventing City Decline in Japan And America by Theodore J. Gilman, the unique plan was for the town to pay for no a part of the undertaking however the usage of federal funds specifically would come again to hang-out Flint. By 1980, Flint Mayor James Rutherford entered discussions with the USA Division of Housing and City Growth about making use of housing grants to the constructing of AutoWorld. Seemingly with no self-awareness, Rutherford predicted success in profitable grants as a consequence of Flint’s extremely excessive unemployment and poverty charges. He was proper and a little bit over $13 million in federal funds went into constructing AutoWorld, regardless of the numerous want of the folks dwelling within the neighborhoods of Flint.
Historic Flint AutoWorld Basis was based to fund the constructing of the park by way of personal funding. It could find yourself placing up $19.7 million to get the job carried out. The Mott Basis additionally put up a hefty, $14 million chunk — 1 / 4 of its yearly finances. The Mott Basis 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 undertaking. The town council additionally authorized a tax-exempt bond to the tune of $7.5 million. With all this official backing, personal 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 issue 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 whole Group Growth Block Grant funds HUD dispersed throughout the town. Organizations in Flint counted on the complete quantities from these grants yearly to maintain their doorways open. The town defaulted on the grant in 1987, forcing nonprofits within the metropolis to scale back providers or shut altogether. The Mott Basis gave Flint a $4.6 million grant, however a prepayment clause prevented the town from paying the grant off . (Doing so would have incurred a $500,000 charge, which the town additionally didn’t have on the time.)
The passion of the consultants employed by Flint who beforehand labored within the theme park business bordered on manic. You may virtually 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. Certainly 1,000,000 guests a yr after 5 years wasn’t out of the query. And people who came around would keep within the park, on common 5 hours a go to. AutoWorld would offer 500 minimal wage jobs and 1,800 jobs within the surrounding space to deal with the inflow of holiday makers. Hundreds of thousands in revenue would roll in instantly and the outcome can be a revitalized metropolis stuffed with hope once more. It could be that straightforward.
Over a decade of growth by a parade of consultants who pushed the town virtually solely in direction of a theme park morphed the common-or-garden dream of a science museum into one thing unrecognizable. No Miracles Right here cites consultants pushing the town to repeat what others had carried out as the primary reason for AutoWorld’s demise.
They actually muddied the waters. Right here’s what an 1982 prospectus described all that AutoWorld would entail by Randall Duell Associates after the Historic Flint AutoWorld Basis inexperienced lit the undertaking:
What Is AutoWorld?
AutoWord has audio-animatronics, it has Indians, Waterfalls, log jams, log cabins, forests, historic perspective, crafts, eating places, a noticed mills, positive eating and night attract, retailers, snack bars, theaters, a re-creation of Flint’s previous Saginaw Road, a common retailer, a carousel, bumper automobiles, distant management race automobiles, a huge three story tall V-6 engine, an electrifying exploration of the business’s expertise as we speak – new expertise. AutoWord has arcade video games, auto artwork, exhibitory, video games, a group of cars, 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 following century, the good races of all time and a gallery of racing greats.
Impertinent mechanical horses? Menacing mechanical chickens? Wasn’t this purported to be a automotive museum? As soon as the consultants had carried out hundreds of thousands in work, the tug of conflict grew to become between the Mott Basis and Six Flags itself. Six Flags needed the positioning to be extra of an leisure venue whereas the Basis struggled to maintain the historical past side alive. It’d do it with static reveals and no thrills.
Consultants ultimately estimated that 930,000 attendees can be wanted to maintain the park working in its first yr when probably 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. However by now, it was too massive to cease.
Doomed To Fail
On July 4, 1984, AutoWorld opened after a decade of growth and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in investments and it seemed extremely lame:
At 300,000 sq. ft, AutoWorld was additionally the most important indoor theme park on this planet, full of tropical vegetation that additionally in some way “recreated the banks of the Flint river.” Beneath its 70-ft large dome have been, carnival rides, freaky animatronics, performers and digital excursions, retailers, eating places, a three-story mannequin of a V6 engine, an IMAX theater and a complete host of different points of interest—however principally buying 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 may spend cash. Buy groceries. Dine out. Spending cash was the primary attraction at AutoWorld it appears. All this buying was on prime $8.95 for an grownup ticket—about $28 in as we speak’s {dollars}. Attendees have been spending cash, to spend cash, in one of many quickest fading cities in America with the very best unemployment price within the nation at the moment.
Immediately, we all know academic leisure is commonly neither. The clumsy blurring of the 2 soured AutoWorld’s essence proper from the beginning. Was it a spot you may take children to on subject journeys? Was it a spot for households to let unfastened? By attempting to be each, AutoWorld ended up as neither. The builders grew to become too enamored with their imaginative and prescient because it grew and overpassed what makes theme parks engaging. As one professional advised 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 Middle for Cultural Research and Evaluation, a market analysis institute. “It’s a museum of us, of America. It’s a distillation of the qualities we most worth and like about ourselves.”
We’re nostalgic for locations that by no means actually have been, she says. Disney’s Foremost Road 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’re spotlessly clear, impeccably landscaped, and overflowing with cheery optimism (in addition to loads of memento merch). Visiting the Disney parks is “like going again to your hometown,” King says. “It’s the hometown that’s shared by everybody within the nation.”
The very predictable bother began virtually 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 Basis and spokesperson for the personal buyers in AutoWorld, Riegle was frightened concerning the low attendance as early as July 27.
“Attendance through the night has averaged between 200-300 folks; there doesn’t seem like an attraction or incentive for people to return to the ability; there may be some confusion as as to whether AutoWorld is academic or leisure, and lastly, though there was no point out of it made publicly, the $8.95 entrance charge presents an issue for many individuals.”
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 attempt to attract company. Because the numbers fell additional and additional behind, everybody started to panic. Traders quickly started to flee AutoWorld.
It was regarding when simply 2,500 guests walked by means of 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, nicely beneath 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 undertaking, nailed each drawback with AutoWorld proper on the top just some weeks after its opening.
AutoWorld was opening at a time when Flint’s largest employer, Common Motors, was starting to wind down manufacturing within the industrial metropolis. In 1978, GM employed greater than 80,000 Flint-area residents, in response to a examine by Michigan State College. 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 Common Motors Did To Flint:
Following World Struggle II, the automaker pursued a company technique that centered on shifting the technique of manufacturing to the suburbs and away from city cores, in response to Andrew Highsmith, a College 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 across the metropolis.”
Because the Nineteen 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, in response to Highsmith. To maintain GM on the town, metropolis officers authorized quite a few tax abatements for the automaker, which “coincided with a web lack of practically 15,000 native 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. Certain, practically 3 million folks lived inside a two hour drive of Flint, however when you’re carried out with AutoWorld you’re now in Flint; a metropolis that works for a dwelling, with out the attraction of honest climate or further websites to go to like say, Orlando, Florida or Anaheim, California. The folks dwelling three hours from AutoWorld can be folks from Michigan, and the state at massive wasn’t doing so sizzling within the ’80s with unemployment at 11 %. Flint can 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 out of doors recreation, and Flint is surrounded by factories. It’s simply not in a spot the place you’d suppose “yeah, trip!”
Flint, very similar to Detroit, is experiencing a resurgence, particularly in hometown pleasure. The town will not be the bustling middle of business of the ’40s and ’50s, however it’s being reformed into one thing new and delightful by the individuals who stay by means of issues just like the Flint Public Artwork Challenge, cultural occasions and new investments.
The Fallout
AutoWorld went to 5 days every week in an effort to shore up attendance numbers. Typically there have been extra staff than guests on some weekdays, resulting in a lower than festive ambiance.
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 positioning much less and fewer of a vacation spot. A number of makes an attempt have been made to reopen the park with new buyers, however none managed to maintain the doorways open full time. It closed for good in 1986 and was knocked down in 1997 to construct more room for the College of Michigan-Flint campus.
AutoWorld is such an odd second in American historical past. The one factor I can relate it to is the fictional Ice City 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 Disaster picked up the mantle. It could 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 Basis, the primary philanthropic establishment within the metropolis to at the present time, would lose $50 million on AutoWorld, when all was stated and carried out. All organizers, planners and builders later claimed they noticed the failure coming from a mile away. From the Flint Journal:
Basis President William S. White stated even earlier than development began, lengthy earlier than the grand opening, he “had a foul feeling” about what the theme park was rising into and he wasn’t alone.
“Lots of people blame (former GM Chairman) Roger Smith for this,” White advised The Journal. “(However) he sat in my workplace and stated, ‘It’s not going to work. What can I do to cease it?’’’
White stated ultimately, the undertaking couldn’t be stopped as a result of civic and enterprise leaders have been so dedicated to bringing the thought to life.
“It had a lifetime of its personal,” stated White, who grew to become a de facto spokesman for AutoWorld as a result of personal buyers have been scattered everywhere in the nation. “Folks have been simply offered on this dream.’’
When the dream is over, solely actuality stays. Immediately, on the previous spot of AutoWorld, stands the William White constructing, paradoxically named for one of many principal architects of the failed theme park. Flint continues to wrestle with its difficult relationship with automotive historical past. The town wouldn’t exist as we speak with out the auto vegetation, however the lack of these vegetation a long time later spelled devastation for the area. Flint has the very best focus of individuals dwelling 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 carried out on water that was corroding engines. It could be years earlier than officers would take public complaints severely nevertheless, compounding the horror of the Flint Water Disaster and mistrust of GM.
No half-baked rides or eccentric bobble could make up for the lack of the dignity of a dwelling wage and primary requirements like clear water. AutoWorld is now nothing greater than a retro brand on some dusty mugs behind a College archive. A becoming finish, to an ill-fitting theme park.
