Earlier this year, Six Flags America in Prince George’s County, Maryland, announced it was closing for good, and the company vowed that it would market the 500-acre site for redevelopment in the future.
Usually, when that happens, the future takes a long time to arrive.
In 2007, an amusement park in the town of Aurora, Ohio, shut down; and in 2016, a nearby lakefront water park considered to be in the boundaries of an adjacent town closed as well. The mayor of Aurora told WTOP that what’s being built in its place is something she deems a success, but it’s taken a long time to get to that point.
“We had our lawyer and our team contact them pretty regularly,” Aurora Mayor Ann Womer Benjamin said. “It was kind of moving them along.”
It took several years to rezone the property for the residential and commercial use being built there — partly because of the necessary voter approval. Eventually, the town agreed to a deal with neighboring township Bainbridge, and in recent years, purchased several acres of land right on the shores of Geauga Lake in order to eventually build a waterfront park complete with a beach.
Along the way, there were arguments over what should come next after the parks closed. Womer Benjamin said Prince George’s County leaders would be wise to move aggressively to come up with a vision for the future of Six Flags.
“We had to be proactive at certain points, because the business that abandons the park or the property, whatever the case may be, will likely have certain business interests that are at the forefront of their concerns,” Womer Benjamin said. “They’re not necessarily going to be concerned about what happens to that abandoned property in that community.”
The redevelopment of the old Six Flags park in New Orleans is less than a year into the process, even though the park closed for good following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The city took over the land a couple years later, but the park sat there growing weeds while the rides decayed.
“We’ve had a lot of challenges,” said Troy Henry, of Henry Consulting, which owns half of the New Orleans site. “Some of them are municipal organizations that we’re dealing with in the city. Some of them are just the structural challenges of rebuilding an overall amusement park. And there’s a little bit of healthy skepticism, I think, that exists in the minds of a lot of people, because it sat dormant for so long.”
While the circumstances behind the closure of the Maryland park and the closure in New Orleans are different, he said it’s important that the park owners get rid of all the rides in the park first. It makes redeveloping harder, plus the cleanup takes longer. Only recently have all the rides left in New Orleans been torn apart and taken to the scrap heap.
“The first thing you’ve got to do is spend the money to clean up behind a major corporation who decided to leave blight in the hands of the public,” Henry said.
He also advised Prince George’s County leaders be aggressive with the owners of the site and be ready to prod the owners of the land to move faster than they might want to.
“If you’re the property owner, you’re going to meet the needs of your own economic interests, not necessarily the community’s interest,” Henry said. “In all likelihood, they’re going to pursue something that is financially in their best interest — which is their right since it’s their property.”
In New Orleans, eventually a youth sports complex, water park, arcade and movie production studio will be going up where the roller coasters used to take people down steep hills. It’s the vision that seemed to energize city leaders the most.
Prince George’s County leaders will have just as much say in the matter.
“I would tell the community to be vocal and express your desires to the powers that be because whoever owns the property, if they want to do something that is counter to the community’s interests, they’re going to have to do zoning, and they’re going to have all kinds of different regulatory challenges that they’ve got to overcome,” Henry said. “And that’s where the voice of the people is.”
Both Henry and Womer Benjamin said county leaders should act with urgency to get everyone on the same page, since that makes it easier to incentivize property owners to go along with that vision.
“You’re not necessarily going to agree on everything,” Womer Benjamin said. “But you can at least come to perhaps a few common points that will help you move forward.”
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