The end of fun, the final forest
Next, they'll pry a hydro from your cold, dead fingers. Meantime, where can you find a roller coaster in this town?
Red alert to Dick's Drive-In. They're coming for you next.
The Seattle Times reports that the Fun Forest, which isn't a forest or the right sort of fun, seemingly, is headed to a likely closure, doomed by pressures to erase the tacky from our Seattle Center.
The center used to be a place for everybody. That included the mugwumps who like their hydros loud, the Blue Angels louder, and their Dick's Deluxe with fries.
The Times says the Fun Forest shows declining revenue and it's all very sad, but the city just can't subsidize a marginal business, unless, ahem, its employees are seven feet tall and skillful with a basketball.
OK, the operator owes the city $763,890 in back rent, and business is business, when it's only about that. But it isn't. Nearly every other piece of Seattle Center has a constituency, and nobody gets a no in city politics. The skateboarders get attention and, you bet, a replacement for their lost park. The opera people get their hall and needed subsidies. The Irish get their freckle contest, along with the city's other ethnic groups. Even Channel 9, which has nothing to do with recreation, got a piece on that contested ground. And that's how it should be, our center, our gathering place. Come one, come all.
But I like roller coasters and kiddie rides. It's been a while, but I loved it, especially with kids in tow.
Months ago, when news first broke that the Fun Forest was threatened, I called their operator's offices and they wouldn't talk. That's typical. They had no idea how to play the game, much less make the case that they served a community that deserved a spot, at least somewhere.
So out they go by the end of 2009, that silly collection of metal and grease, squealing kids and other unauthorized noise, yet another discarded remnant of blue collar Seattle.
Is there a roller coaster left in this town?
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Nov 21, 9:38 p.m. inappropriate
I guess my kids are blue collar: because they love the Fun Forest, at least the part that caters to the younger set. I have many fond memories riding the boat swing, mini-roller coaster, ferris wheel, dragon and elephant ride, and tornado with my kids clinging to me and screaming with a mix of delight and terror. Or waving to me with a goofy smile from those little cars each time they rounded the loop.
That place definitely has appeal beyond the mullet-class. I once saw Jim Allchin there with his son spending several of his hundreds of millions of dollars.
The demise of the Fun Forest has more to do with an utter lack of business managment skills than Seattle snobbery or lack of a market for amusement parks. The pay per ride pricing structure resulted in people spending far less time and money per visit than they would have if a two hour pass were available. It also ensured that there were never more than one or two kids at a time on any given ride, which creates the wrong sort of ambience for an amusement park.
The owners did no marketing, no promotions, no two for one specials, no package deals with the Monorail, Space Needle, or EMP, no community alliance, and, as we now learn, they wouldn't even talk to the press. The place is run like it's a front for the mob. On the positive side, at least there are never any lines.
The coolest outcome would be for competent management to take over the place and do it right.
Posted Wed, Nov 21, 10:29 p.m. inappropriate
RE: I guess my kids are blue collar: Sean makes an excellent point here. I've watch the Fun Forest for decades, and I never noticed a promotion (they could have used help from the coffee shop guy who launched the SLUT tee-shirts). And true, the pricing structured had problems. The Times reported that the operators invested $9 million in improvements in 1996--that shocked me. So why not do some marketing?
And Sean is absolutely right, you could find everybody there. I always liked how the back of the EMP spilled into it. It's that mingling of people that makes the center so enjoyable.
Here's a link to the Fun Forest site.
http://www.funforest.com/
--Casey
Posted Fri, Nov 23, 2:42 p.m. inappropriate
Tacky?!: If the city wants to eliminate tackiness from the Seattle Center, it can start by removing all the "stuff" cluttering up the courtyard of Minoru Yamasaki's once-beautiful Science Center. The area around the arches looks like a junkyard.
Posted Fri, Nov 23, 9:31 p.m. inappropriate
The Aaesthetics of the Seattle Center: You bring up a telling point. The beauty of those arches and the vision for the original Science Center is ignored, and too often trashed. This isn't really so much a problem of competing aesthetic visions, or even of tacky visions, but of a Seatle Center colossusly clueless about aesthetics, beauty and art. The result is a Seattle Arena with a Sonic-less KeyArena(TM), a monorail that gets in head-on collisions, a Wild Mouse concessionaire who apparently owes over $700,000 in back rent, a preposterous EMP (the box Chernobyl came in), a dilapidated Memorial Stadium, encroachment on parking by the Gates folks, dispossession of skateboarders, and not just a "no there, there" feeling about the place, but of a disappearance of vision, and an accompanying aethetics that isn't interesting, isn't disinterested, but is simply uninteresting -- and allows me to use that aardvark of a word -- aaesthetics -- to describe why the Seattle Center is so in need of a great roller coaster, a great Fun Forest, and a beautiful implementation of roller-coasterism that befits an aesthetic Seattle.
Unfortunately, the Fun Forest is but a sample of the whole. Fortunately, it's been difficult to turn the Space Needle into an ugly restaurant tower -- and its ascendent transcendent aesthetic is clearly what should drive the aesthetics of the Seattle Center. So instead of the tacky Fun Forest or no Fun Forest, we need a new Fun Forest with Space Trees and Fun Needle rides, and some inspired design and someone to champion an aesthetic vision beyond the tacky consumerism and neglect that characterize our city's 1962 World's Fair site, a location that is now little more than an historical assemblage of accumulated architectural dreck, which may be the impetus behind razing existing structures and burying them beneath a lawn, creating an architectural Arlington without the crosses. It's hard to argue with this vision. It's better to bury the dead than to watch the carcasses deteriorate before our eyes over the years.
Posted Tue, Nov 27, 1:03 p.m. inappropriate
RE: The Aaesthetics of the Seattle Center: A lot of what you talk about could have been addressed about 20 years ago, when the Center officials proposed bringing Disney in to consult on how to fix up the Center and make it a better experience for visitors. The cries of outrage that resulted from that proposal (usually along the lines of "Why should we turn our beautiful urban park over to a bunch of money-grubbing mouse peddlers?!") killed the proposed cooperative venture before it even started. What the perpetually-offended class failed to realize was that Disney wasn't going to take over the Center, it was just going to offer some expertise on how to make it a place people would look forward to visiting. I think you're right - a "retro-future" type of theme would be wonderful. the future was a really cool place in the early 60s. "The World of Century 21" didn't quite pan out as it was promised.