Within the midst of an American manufacturing collapse, Flint, Michigan, spent hundreds of thousands 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 will flip across the metropolis with the 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, overestimated by a military of consultants with help from elected officers and federal applications. The thought was destined for greatness, one other means for the folks of Flint to outlive off of automobiles as they’d accomplished for many years. However from the beginning, the issues with AutoWorld have been apparent.
“While 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 instructed 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 via their containers of paperwork and memorabilia pertaining to AutoWorld.)
“Have you ever ever seen a lot ridiculous merch?” she stated, as we went via the containers 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 assorted 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 p.c, clearly made no sense.
However there have been moments of perverse, perhaps determined optimism. That or opportunism and grift. Perhaps 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 exhausting 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 containers and containers of paperwork pertaining to the planning and improvement of AutoWorld. The College didn’t have a lot to do with the plans, aside from permitting for just a few tons to be designated as overflow parking for AutoWorld in the summertime.
I actually assume “planning for overflow parking at AutoWorld,” may very well 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. Your complete factor was a blunder, and the folks of Flint paid the value for it.
How It Began
The thought to construct the primary automotive theme park in America’s Automobile Metropolis didn’t originate from Normal 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 trade and was very energetic in Flint. The Mott Basis would play a key position in getting AutoWorld constructed and finally sharing in its ruinous demise. GM would really largely keep out of AutoWorld, aside from a $1 million donation. Former Normal Motors Chairman Roger Smith instructed 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 heart, the place the proud historical past of the automotive trade could be highlighted. One thing extra akin to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which Ford himself designed to have fun not simply the Ford Motor Firm and Detroit space achievements however industrial historical past on the whole. It will be a non-profit, hands-on museum or some type of science museum. Detroit designer Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the unique World Commerce Middle, was tapped to come back got here up with plans for the middle in 1970. The ultimate architect for the park could be Randall Duell Associates — a agency answerable 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 resort 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 retailers and River Village — $40 million in residential planning — have been nearly accomplished earlier than the C.S. Mott Basis even purchased the area for AutoWorld. The area got here within the type of the Industrial Mutual Support Auditorium — a former UAW-owned facility that hosted live shows by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Vacation for its members. The IMA could 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? In keeping with the e book No Miracles Right here: Combating 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 using federal funds specifically would come again to hang-out Flint. By 1980, Flint Mayor James Rutherford entered discussions with the US Division of Housing and City Improvement about making use of housing grants to the constructing of AutoWorld. Seemingly with no self-awareness, Rutherford predicted success in successful grants as a consequence of Flint’s extremely excessive unemployment and poverty charges. He was proper and a 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 through personal funding. It will find yourself placing up $19.7 million to get the job accomplished. The Mott Basis additionally put up a hefty, $14 million chunk — 1 / 4 of its yearly funds. The Mott Basis admitted funding AutoWorld would severely curtail different good it did within the metropolis. The state of Michigan tossed in almost $5 million after Republican Governor William Grawn Milliken got here round to finally help the undertaking. The town council additionally authorised 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 could be deducted from the whole Neighborhood Improvement 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 town defaulted on the grant in 1987, forcing nonprofits within the metropolis to cut 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 unexpectedly. (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 trade bordered on manic. You’ll be able to 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. Certainly 1,000,000 guests a 12 months 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 tourists. Hundreds of thousands in revenue would roll in instantly and the consequence could be a revitalized metropolis filled with hope once more. It will be that simple.
Over a decade of improvement by a parade of consultants who pushed the town nearly 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 accomplished as the principle explanation for AutoWorld’s demise.
They definitely 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, fantastic eating and night attract, retailers, snack bars, theaters, a re-creation of Flint’s outdated Saginaw Avenue, a common 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 at present – new expertise. AutoWord has arcade video games, auto artwork, exhibitory, video games, a group of vehicles, carriages, carts and bicycles, a library and archives, reside theater, an superior IMAX film, fantasia of the long run, a shifting 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 nice 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 accomplished hundreds of thousands in work, the tug of conflict turned 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 facet alive. It’d do it with static displays and no thrills.
Consultants finally estimated that 930,000 attendees could be wanted to maintain the park working in its first 12 months 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. However by now, it was too large to cease.
Doomed To Fail
On July 4, 1984, AutoWorld opened after a decade of improvement and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in investments and it appeared extremely lame:
At 300,000 sq. ft, AutoWorld was additionally the biggest indoor theme park on the earth, full of tropical vegetation that additionally by some means “recreated the banks of the Flint river.” Below its 70-ft vast 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 an entire host of different sights—however largely procuring and shops filled with branded merch. There wasn’t the joys 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 can spend cash. Buy groceries. Dine out. Spending cash was the primary attraction at AutoWorld it appears. All this procuring was on prime $8.95 for an grownup ticket—about $28 in at present’s {dollars}. Attendees have been spending cash, to spend cash, in one of many quickest fading cities in America with the best unemployment fee within the nation at the moment.
Right this moment, 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 can take children to on discipline journeys? Was it a spot for households to let free? By making an attempt to be each, AutoWorld ended up as neither. The builders turned too enamored with their imaginative and prescient because it grew and overpassed what makes theme parks enticing. As one knowledgeable instructed 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 Major Avenue 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 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 Basis and spokesperson for the personal buyers in AutoWorld, Riegle was anxious in regards to 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 power; there’s some confusion as as to whether AutoWorld is instructional 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 evening, AutoWorld dropped entrance charges after 6 p.m. to $5.95 and dinner reservations started to incorporate a tour of the power to attempt to attract friends. 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 via 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 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 downside with AutoWorld proper on the pinnacle just some weeks after its opening.
AutoWorld was opening at a time when Flint’s largest employer, Normal 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 research by Michigan State College. By 2015, that determine plummeted, to just about 7,000, and this wind down was ramping up proper when AutoWorld opened. From Ryan Felton’s story What Normal Motors Did To Flint:
Following World Conflict 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 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, based on Highsmith. To maintain GM on the town, metropolis officers authorised quite a few tax abatements for the automaker, which “coincided with a internet lack of almost 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 answer on to Flint was by no means going to make sense. Positive, almost 3 million folks lived inside a two hour drive of Flint, however when you’re accomplished 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 could be folks from Michigan, and the state at giant wasn’t doing so scorching within the ’80s with unemployment at 11 p.c. 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 assume “yeah, trip!”
Flint, very similar to Detroit, is experiencing a resurgence, particularly in hometown pleasure. The town will not be the bustling heart of trade of the ’40s and ’50s, but it surely’s being reformed into one thing new and delightful by the individuals who stay via issues just like the Flint Public Artwork Challenge, cultural occasions and new investments.
The Fallout
AutoWorld went to 5 days per 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 environment.
By January 1985, the park closed to common attendance. This closure would show solely non permanent, however the park was by no means open full time once more, with lengthy intervals 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 turned an emblem of Flint’s decline till the Flint Water Disaster picked up the mantle. It will 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 principle philanthropic establishment within the metropolis to at the present time, would lose $50 million on AutoWorld, when all was stated and accomplished. 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 building began, lengthy earlier than the grand opening, he “had a nasty 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 instructed 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 in the long run, 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 turned a de facto spokesman for AutoWorld as a result of personal buyers have been scattered all around the nation. “Individuals have been simply offered on this dream.’’
When the dream is over, solely actuality stays. Right this moment, on the previous spot of AutoWorld, stands the William White constructing, paradoxically named for one of many foremost architects of the failed theme park. Flint continues to wrestle with its difficult relationship with automotive historical past. The town wouldn’t exist at present with out the auto vegetation, however the lack of these vegetation a long time later spelled devastation for the area. Flint has the best focus of individuals dwelling in poverty within the state of Michigan and consistently 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 swap water sources with no testing being accomplished on water that was corroding engines. It will be years earlier than officers would take public complaints significantly 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 fundamental requirements like clear water. AutoWorld is now nothing greater than a retro emblem on some dusty mugs at the back of a College archive. A becoming finish, to an ill-fitting theme park.
