Today is the final day of operation for Six Flags America, in Woodmore, Maryland. Six Flags is closing the park after 51 years of operation under several names and owners.
The park opened in 1974 as a drive-through safari attraction called The Wildlife Preserve. That closed in 1978 and the new owners rebranded the property as Wild Country and then into a theme park known as Wild World.
Premiere Parks bought the property in 1992, rebranding it once again, as Adventure World, which is the name the park kept until Premiere Parks acquired Six Flags in 1998 and adopted that name. That's when the Maryland park became Six Flags America, in a nod to the nearby national capital in Washington, DC.
In May, the new Six Flags Entertainment Corporation - which was formed last year by the merger of the old Six Flags and the Cedar Fair amusement park chains - announced that it would close Six Flags America at the end of the 2025 season.
"As part of our comprehensive review of our park portfolio, we have determined that Six Flags America and Hurricane Harbor are not a strategic fit with the company’s long-term growth plan," departing Six Flags President & CEO Richard A. Zimmerman said at the time. "After reviewing a number of options, we believe that marketing the property for redevelopment will generate the highest value and return on investment."
The old Cedar Fair, which Zimmerman ran, previously had decided to sell the land under its California's Great America park, putting that park on the clock for closure once its new lease ends. With the new Six Flags struggling under pandemic debt - leading to the impending departures of Zimmerman and board chairman Selim Bassoul - it's possible that Six Flags may choose to close more of its parks for their real estate value. [See Looking for clues to Six Flags America's demise for details.]
Jake Sundstrom wrote about what that might mean for a generation of theme park fans, in Are we witnessing the end of the regional theme park?.
Disney and Universal increasingly are pricing their parks as luxury goods. These are not parks for everyone. They’re certainly not parks for everyone all the time. That was not the case 30 years ago. What happens when theme parks, one of the few mass-culture experiences left in this country, become another bauble for the rich?Certainly, there are more existential threats facing Americans. The world will continue to spin if you don’t have a Six Flags park within an hour’s drive. But the hollowing out of these parks stinks and robs younger generations of meaningful experiences that are enjoyed in public, around strangers. That this coincides with American’s grappling with loneliness and isolation is not a coincidence.
Six Flags had been adding to the park as recently as last year. Russell Meyer reviewed Six Flags America's last expansion project in Six Flags steps up with Steam Town.
He concluded that review with a sentence that now reads as ironic: "Hopefully, Six Flags America will be given the needed resources in the future so the rest of park looks as good as Steam Town."
To honor the park in its final season, Jake visited this summer. He detailed that visit in his trip report, Saying hello, and goodbye, to the park Six Flags is closing.
"I had a nice time at what may be Six Flags’ worst park (comparison is the thief of joy, etc. etc.)," he wrote. "Theme park fans, families and tweens who live in the D.C. area will now need to drive quite a bit further for their closest regional theme park. Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Kings Dominion are, with little doubt, better parks. But their distance from D.C. will naturally limit how frequently residents of the capital city can visit."
Goodbye, Six Flags America.
There are a lot of things to say about this. The first is that while SFA was not the greatest theme park in the country (the reality is that is was easily bottom third), but is was "DC's Capital of Fun". As someone who has lived in the DC region my entire life, SFA/Wild World/Adventure World toggled between also-ran to laughingstock more than I can remember, but it still had a loyal and dedicated (though somewhat small) fanbase. I would tend to agree with the_man25 that the merger with Cedar Fair was likely the final nail in SFA's coffin with Kings Dominion drawing heavily from the DC Metro area, but the fact of the matter is that SFA attracted a very different audience than KD and unfortunately had to compete with Hersheypark and to a lesser extent BGW and SFGAdv (it was common practice for people in the DC Metro Area to buy season passes for SFA just to visit SFGAdv because the Maryland park's passes were often half the price of the Jersey park). SFA's location was a blessing and a curse at the same time, because it was one of the few theme parks in the US that could easily be reached on public transit (about 60 minutes from the downtown core using Metro and Metrobus), but existed in a market with a multitude of other entertainment options. SFA should have been a destination for every tourist group coming to DC visiting the monuments and museums, but the park was never able to establish a positive enough of a reputation to make it a "must-see" attraction when tourists could easily fill up a 3-5 day itinerary without leaving downtown. Just when you thought the park was trying to turn itself around, something would happen to undermine any progress. Whether it was security issues and reports of massive fights both inside the park and parking lots, cycles of indifferent employees/management, or just an overall lack of customer service or care for guests, it was always 2 steps forward, 1 step back over the past decade plus of operation. The park was forced to do more with less while trying to maintain customer loyalty, because a typical day consisted of a park full of 80+% of passholders who paid somewhere between $50-100 months ago with most who had the All-Season Dining plan that further undercut the potential for the park to generate revenue. Any attempts the park made to try to increase revenue typically backfired, and attractions added to the park since the massive infusion after Premier bought the park (and installed Superman, Batwing, Joker's Jinx, and 2-Face the Flip Side) rarely held enough appeal to generate the revenue to offset the cost. It's true that you need to spend money to make money, but SFA often spent money aimlessly just to say the added "something new" instead of investing in aspects of the park that would have created more loyalty and interest from casual fans like a better food program, better levels of customer service, or an actual bathroom near the park's most popular coasters (the "Superman Bathrooms" weren't added until 3 years ago after years of complaints that the closest bathroom to the park's best coaster was nearly 1/4 mile away).
While its attraction lineup was far inferior to other nearby parks, it wasn't that bad when you look at other similarly sized parks around the country, and if this park did more of the "little things" better, they could have generated enough revenue to justify more investment.
The saddest part of this closure is not that this is one of just 3 major parks that I've visited over my lifetime to have closed (Hard Rock Park and Geauga Lake/Six Flags Worlds of Adventure/Sea World Ohio are the others), but what else that's been lost. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, and while some managers and higher level staff might find assignments elsewhere in the chain, it's a massive loss to the region in terms of part time and employment that requires specialized skills like the cast of the stunt show - one of the few constantly operating regional theme park stunt shows still running in the US (the cast was extremely emotional during their performances yesterday). I don't know the exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if SFA was one of the largest employers of part time staff aged 16-25 in the DC region, and while most team members are not likely to find a career in the theme park industry, it was an important source of jobs for the area. SFA was also a prime recreation spot for the area, which might have contributed partially to its undoing because it was cheap to visit (great for lower income families), and an easy place for local youth to hang out during summer break, often without appropriate parental supervision. A season pass to SFA was cheaper than an annual membership to most pools, gyms, and recreation centers, so it was an easy outlet for kids. These folks are not going to trek all the way to Kings Dominion or other nearby theme parks, so the DC are is about a lose a generation of future theme park fans as well as everything that goes with a place like SFA closing forever.
Let's pour one out for SFA, a theme park that might not have been the best, but it was a theme park that meant a lot to a lot of people far and wide.
Really well said, Russell. I should have talked about the easy access via public transportation in my report. I took a red-eye from San Francisco to Dulles and was able to take a train, and then a bus, for Not Very Much Money on the morning I visited the park. I was then able to bus and train back to D.C., where I was able to see a Nationals game that night before going to three (3) museums the next morning before flying home.
Obviously, Six Flags America was not the focal point of most people's Washington D.C. trip. But it was a perfectly cromulent park whose absence will be felt in the region. Thanks for the memories.
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I've been seeing several misleading media reports that the park is closing because of the economy and/or because Six Flags is struggling, however it needs to be clarified that this park is closing because of the merger and proximity to Kings Dominion. This park was doomed from the moment the Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger was announced.
That being said I have been to this park several times, and while it was a terrible corporate park, I think if it were under family ownership or a more regional operator (like Herschend) it would have done well. Sadly it was the victim of bad timing as part of the early 2000's Kirean Burke/Gary Story manifest destiny and then they never seemed to have the money or wherewithal to follow through and actually make it a competitive park.