Also commenting on the "corporate" feel of Hersheypark. There's basically 2 eras of the park, and Tudor Square was built during the beginning of that 2nd era.
Sorry to parse your post out here with more information, but in college one of my internships was writing a paper on factory towns that ended up published (after massive MASSIVE editing). Hersheypark is entering it's 4th era. At 110 years old it should be expected. They are:
1903-1923: This was the workers park era. A time when it had a ball field, amphitheater, skating rink, dance hall, ect.
1923-1971: The start of the amusement era. This kicked off with the original Wild Cat. 1945 saw the original carousel replaced with the current one and 1946 saw the original Wild Cat replaced with Comet (currently standing).
1971-1999: This was the change over form Hershey Park, a pay-as-you-ride 'amusement park' into a one time gate fee 'theme park' Hersheypark.
2000-current: Ushering in of the new age. Comet Hallow has been renamed "The Hallow" and updated theme elements. Other area of the park have ben renamed and in the process of having it's theme elements being updating. They did change from 'theme park' back to 'amusement park' in this time.
Prior to 1971 Hershey used to be a free admission, pay per ride park ala Knoebels but due to the increasing attendance they decided an admission gate would be a better move for their future.
Correct on the time and change, incorrect on the reason though. They changed because they wanted to change from a local park to be regional and even 'super regional' and felt the most cost effective way was to have a single ticket pass.
Prior to about 15 years ago Hershey was a perennial 2 million attendance per year park, in line with Busch Gardens Williamsburg and and behind a tad of Great Adventure. After the economic recession for whatever reason Hershey's attendance has skyrocketed past the 3 million mark and they now compete toe-to-toe with Great Adventure (Both acheiving in the neighborhood of 3.2-3.5 million visitors a year). It has overwhelmed the park to a sense, which is explained beautifully by @warfelg up above with regards to ADA and accessibility. Hershey was painted into a corner, and outgrew their current infrastructure. Their marketing basically touts this as a turn into a 3rd era of the park, which despite all of the 3rd party vendors, not exceptionally good capacity rides, and general lack of themeing (Hershey is a branded amusement park, not a theme park), I'm perfectly satisfied them and how they're handling their future.
Correct on all of this. A side note: the park's website calls it the 3rd iteration because they don't count the 'pre-ride' era as part of the parks history.
As part of my project, I was lucky enough to get to talk to people that planned out Tudor Square and RhineLand. Those were the official names of the entry area to Hersheypark, with Tudor Square being outside the gate and RhineLand being inside the gate. At the time the park was seeing a roughly modest 250,000-350,000 people per day. At the time, ownership wanted Tudor Square/RhineLand to be handle about 4x that capacity (1M people). The designers said they went a little above that and pushed it to handle the flow of 1.5M people).
Hence why the stores aren't that big, the bathrooms (well, I've never seen the women's, just the mens) had about 10 stalls and 10 urinals. They were built to accommodate that few people because they never planned on lines that big at the gate before opening.
5 openings in the old gate, with 2 cashiers a side, the 6th (ADA capable) gate was added later, and the exit that was much smaller next to it. Mind you what BGW uses 4 areas for (Zone A or the old ticket booths, Zone B with the kiosks, Zone C for the Season tickets, Zone D for the front gate) ticketing issues, HP uses 2 (One building for group sales/season tickets, and the gate for everything else). So the setup was very inefficient.
While BGW is same size in terms of entry ports, they are much bigger, don't handle ticket sales there, have security moved away, they do serve far fewer people. Best projections that I can see out of it is HP sees 3.3M people per year, while BGW sees 2.5M.
BGW: 2.5M people, 193 days (including Member Preview Days) = AVE 12,953.4 people per day open
HP: 3.3M people, 179 days (including Member Preview Days) + AVE 18,435.7 people per day open
Imagine cramming an average of 5,500 extra people a day through the front gates of BGW daily. Now of course you factor in slow days (Christmas for both having days with less than 10,000 for both; summer days with 20,000-25,000+).
HP has seen a 17% growth in the last 10 years, which is just staggering. It's a time when parks are happy to be scratching 10% in growth over their last 10 years.
So you got a gate that's getting overrun, with a poor layout for more than 1.5M people in a season, seeing 3.3M people in a season and only growing. They needed to do something about it. Would it have been nice to do it in a way that kept some of the charm and just made it bigger? Sure. But in fact this is one of the places going for the 'factory/warehouse' look that I don't mind at all because that's what Hershey was built around.
