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weremacaque @kbin.social

What’s a place from your childhood that doesn’t exist anymore?

There used to be a water park in my hometown that had a bunch of slides and a wave pool. I used to go there all the time as a kid, and even went there as a senior on a trip. I went to birthday parties there, sometimes.

It closed in 2020 and never reopened because they had apparently been avoiding paying bills for years. It wasn’t just the pandemic. It was visible from the freeway, so I watched it slowly being demolished over the next couple years any time I passed by.

I haven’t found a water park that really compared to it yet. Most are either too small or part of a larger theme park, which is fine. It just seemed like the fact that it exclusively was a water park allowed it to focus more on the atmosphere and types of slides it had.

112 comments

  • This goofy ass restaurant that served the food to your table on model trains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoCam8WqC4

    RIP, their food was probably just OK but I was a little kid so it was all totally amazing.

    As a bonus, the very end of this video has one of the old Seattle trolleys, which also aren't around anymore.

  • The World Of Sid And Marty Krofft in Atlanta. It was a mindfuck of an indoor amusement park located in what's now CNN Center. Granted, it was only open for six months in 1976, but I was able to go, and as a six year-old kid, it was amazing.

  • @weremacaque it sounds flippant but seriously: The USA. I find this current view of my home country to be unrecognizably insane...we played outside, we drank and smoked early and generally got along. I grew up in an integrated neighborhood, integrated public school...

  • My Secondary (High) School - levelled to build houses a few years ago.

    If this had happened when I was still a pupil I would have been overjoyed to turn up for School one day and find a pile of rubble instead, but now I feel a bit sad at the destruction of a bit of my personal history.

  • Gosh, so many places.

    It just so happened that the house I currently live in is literally down the street from the hospital where I was born . . . or at least, where it used to be. They closed down and demolished that hospital and built a new one across the city. All that's left in that lot is piles of rubble. The new hospital is legitimately a better one with a lot of great improvements and upgrades, but I still miss being able to walk up the street and look up at the old building and go "I was born in there :)"

    Two of the schools I went to as a kid have also long since been bulldozed. Recently, though, a new school went up on the lot where the oldest one used to be (after at least a decade of just being an empty field), and it looks really nice.

  • Bunch of my childhood town is now just more buildings. Used to be more forest and now there's nothing but slabs of concrete. This small mall that used to be there? Buildings now, just tons of buildings.

  • Sega World Sydney. It was a whole theme park based around Sega properties in Sydney, Australia. Rides themed around classic Sega arcade games, Sonic paraphernalia everywhere, a huge arcade and overpriced Sega merch shop. One ride entirely took place in virtual reality, with headsets for everybody. I wasn't even a Sega kid, but it was amazing.

  • Soviet Union. Not necessarily a bad thing, but there is some nostalgia...

  • I have a similar waterpark story except mine closed around 2005. It was my first job and I would ride my bike to and from there and goofed off with my highschool friends, all while getting paid for most of the summer. It was closed the next year and later demolished and a huge mansion erected in it's wake.

  • Six Flags AstroWorld. I still can't believe it's gone, and still can't believe it's a freakin' parking lot now.

  • I'm in San Diego, and grew up here. Open space. Yeah, we are really good about keeping some open spaces (typically national/state parks) but just random open space is all filled with urban sprawl now.

    When I was a kid, there was an area of San Diego county that was a GIANT piece of private property. There was one dirt road that ran through it (likely an easement/eminent domain thing), connecting the east and west part of the county.

    Decades ago, when I was in high school, we used to party, and do all kinds of dumb shit out there. It had been the same for so long that my parents also partied back there too many, many decades before. I know there were at least 2 cars buried out there. I had gotten a car stuck in the mud once myself (had to dig it out in the dark. that was super fun) It's all but gone now.

  • This may be a weird answer, but I played Celtic music with the family band as a teenager and our favorite place to play was Santa Rosa Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, CA. Great vibe, good food—I of course was too young to partake of the brew 😉—but it was a lot of fun and we had a crowd of regulars who'd come to see us perform every time. When they eventually closed down, it felt like the end of an era…

  • My elementary school closed down a few years back. They had a small reunion with any students that attended before they closed for good. It was a definite blast from the past as there were a few teachers that still worked there and many of my old classmates attended. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive the news until after they already shut down but I was able to see pictures on Facebook.

  • MY HOUSE
    Had to get demolished to make way for a lightrail
    kinda cool to have the key to a place that no longer exists at least

  • You perfectly described a water park in my home town, although mine closed down in the 1990s. It had a "silver bullet" slide, a bunch of conventional slides and a tube slide, a lazy river, a wave pool, a pretty decent arcade and a go-kart track, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't remember from spending big chunks of my childhood summers there. Birthday parties and school trips, too.

    After it closed down, some of the slides were moved to a golf course across town that wanted to expand, but it wasn't as good and it was way too far to go by bus. The original park is the loading dock for a Home Depot now.

  • I'm getting old enough now where this is true for multiple things, but the ones that come to mind would be my schools - 2 of the 3 schools I attended have since been demolished. My high school is still standing, but the elementary and Junior High schools are gone now.

  • There's no grave marker for the old mall in my home town. Just a new, totally different mall.

    An elementary school was torn down and a replacement built right next to it, on the same grounds. The old school I attended is now the new parking lot.

    The church I attended as a child is gone. Luckily my belief was torn down years before that happened.

    In essence my high school doesn't exist, at least not as it did. It was dramatically reconstructed and hardly resembles the school I went to.

    Of course these were things that were old when I knew them, and only continued to age to the point they needed replacing. The oldest stuff in my home town though, will outlast me.

  • Hastings’s stores. They sold books, CDs, DVDs, tabletop game supplies, video games etc. It was always exciting to go and look even if my parents were not going to buy me anything.

  • My elementary school was heavily renovated the year after I "graduated" sixth grade. It's not the same place anymore, and I have a lot of memories and nostalgia tied up with that old building — among other things, it's where I met the woman who'd become my wife.

112 comments