Demolition of Geauga Lake nearly complete

It is really a jarring video. Just the way it's filmed in general with the helicopter flyby, no audio or voiceover. Like you're surveying some post-apocalyptic world. Creepy.

I was wondering the whole time what all those white dots were, then realized that they're the footers for Knight Flight.

It is really a shame. Can't help but think what would've happened if Funtime would've sold to Busch when they wanted to buy it.

Or how about if Kennywood purchased the park? I always hear that they were interested at some point.

They were interested at a few points.

I figured that. I find it intriguing to think about what the park would be like had Kennywood been able to purchase it.

I'm guessing it would be in slightly better shape than it is now . . .

All the free love in the world wouldn't have saved the park regardless of who owned it. Busch leaving said volumes about the viability of amusement parks there. From a business standpoint, they're the only ones who got it right. I realized that conflicts with the emotional attachment to the place, but it doesn't make it any less a reality.

Busch's leaving said nothing about the "viability of amusement parks". It said everything about the viability of a seasonal marine park with year round marine care costs.

As I understand it, Busch wanted Geauga Lake, but not Darien or Wyandot. Funtime didn't want to sell one park and be left with the other two.

I really think that if they would've sold to Busch, that the Sea World brand could've made that park work. Even with combining the gates.

I read that Busch approached Six Flags about purchasing GL. The property that Sea World sat on was leased from the owners of GL. It had been that way since SW opened in the early seventies. Six Flags turned around and made an offer for SW that Busch could not refuse. Unfortunately that was the downward spiral... I too believe that if Busch would have taken over the GL side we would have an amazing vibrant park today. Not the demolished mud pit we have now... yeah we need another "lifestyle center". Cedar Fair wanted to get rid of a competitor that was too close to home… and they did.

What did Busch's move say about anything, Jeff? It said the idea of a seasonal animal-based theme park wasn't working in the Cleveland market. Geauga Lake survived for more than a hundred years in that same place so I don't think it was a matter of an amusement park not being viable. It was the result of ownership by Six Flags and Cedar Fair not understanding what it would take to make the park competitive. Both companies figured they had the magic touch when it came to turning parks into licenses to print money, which is probably why both companies ended up about $2 billion in debt.

So nothing about the market changes over the course of a hundred years? Cleveland made Forbes' list of the top ten most dying American cities. The population flight from Northeast Ohio is fairly enormous. This is a crappy place to have a leisure business.

Some of you guys want to make this purely a mismanagement issue. While that surely may have hastened the demise of the park, I feel strongly that it was inevitable regardless. The closing of almost all of the area's water parks were a pretty good indicator. Busch's withdrawal sure sounded like a good indicator as well, I don't care if they had animals or not. (Incidentally, wasn't it you, Rob, who once said that keeping animals would've saved the park?)

And by the way, Cedar Fair's debt load is now down to $1.8 million. They aren't like Six Flags, simply paying on the interest.

I'm not insinuating that a market doesn't change over a hundred years but it's totally inaccurate to assume Busch pulling the plug on Sea World was any indication that the market still couldn't support one park. Frankly, I'm shocked that a seasonal Sea World park was able to survive as long as it did. That's saying a lot about the way Busch knows how to run parks.

I honestly have no idea if I said that keeping the animals wouldn't have saved the park. I do believe the the animals didn't have much to do with the park's fortunes in its later years, especially once Busch was gone. I don't believe the region could have supported another theme park, but I do believe something along the lines of Kennywood could have worked in that location. Six Flags turned the park into something people knew it wasn't, and Cedar Fair's solution was to remove the Six Flags influence without doing anything to otherwise improve the park. Removing the rides that didn't belong made perfect sense, but why weren't they replaced with rides that did belong? The park went from being marketed to death to not being marketed at all. Mismanagement wasn't the only problem, but it was a very big one and it's likely the park would have thrived under proper management.

Nice to see Cedar Fair paying down debt but I think it was foolish to assume that much when all they had to do is look at Six Flags and see what that kind of debt did to a competitor. If I were a stockholder, that would have made me uneasy. And what's to say that debt won't increase again if the market for theme parks softens? Seems to me the parks experiencing the largest increases this year are the smaller ones.

So why does Busch get a free pass? Because it wasn't as old and didn't have an old roller coaster? SeaWorld was beloved by Clevelanders, myself included.

We've been over this countless times. They couldn't attract enough people with A-list rides, and you want them to replace those with lesser rides? They dropped the price to $25 their first year, and the people still didn't come. I don't know how you can get a better value proposition than that. They should have never bought the place.

Comparing them to Six Flags just because they're both park operators yields no useful talking points when it comes to debt. Six Flags got where they are by buying everything they could and making ridiculous cap ex decisions year after year with no plan to recoup their investment. Market softness is not Six Flags' problem. Each acquisition of Cedar Fair was planned to turn around in five years for the most part. I've heard internally that they expected maybe seven or eight years on the Paramount Parks, but that was also derived on the idea that there was a lot of fat to trim from them, and I don't think there was as much as they thought.

I didn't say that Busch got a free pass, but when it comes down to a traditional park that's 100+ years old and a theme park that's been around a fraction of that time, of course I'm going to mourn the loss of the former. For the record, I loved Sea World. I just always found it odd that an animal theme park existed in a Cleveland/Akron suburb when others existed in warm weather climates. The closing of the park wasn't really a surprise.

Six Flags assumed its debt a lot differently than Cedar Fair did, but debt is debt. It doesn't help that Cedar Fair is ready to close another park, since that's less revenue and therefore less money to be used to pay down debt. I don't think Great America is losing money, although I'll admit I have nothing to support that. It just seems to me that a company should produce more revenue if trying to pay down debt, and instead of selling parks that don't work, maybe making more of an effort to make those broken parks work?

I wouldn't say A-B gets a free pass, but certainly they did more things right than Premier Parks, Six Flags, or Cedar Fair. They built the park carefully, sensibly, without putting in outrageous investments that couldn't be supported by the gate. When they realized a stand-alone seasonal marine park couldn't support itself, they tried to buy Geauga Lake: a move that would have been the exact opposite of what SF eventually did, and which in A-B's careful management hands would have been much more likely to produce a combined park that would show a profit.

Then, when they were spurned and decided to get out of the market altogether, A-B didn't engage in a scorched earth campaign like the Romans sacking Carthage. They actually sought suitors to purchase the park. They recognized that they could profit by selling the park intact, while still leaving an asset for the community to enjoy.

Those are enough reasons for me to go soft on A-B.

Come on, Rob, you're smarter than that. Of course the key to resolving debt is to make more money. What do you think they were trying to do all those years? Unfortunately there comes a time where you have to cut your losses and stop the bleeding. They didn't close the park to ease their debt, they closed it to stop losing money.