News Six Flags America & Hurricane Harbor to Close Following 2025 Season

[Coasternerd]

Ride operations often depend a lot of when during the day you visit. Rides are often just closed until the afternoon for mysterious reasons in my experience.

Mysterious reasons = SFA’s maintenance team of approximately 15 people. Friend of mine worked with them last year and they had such a skeleton crew only these rides opened with the park when I visited:
Scrambler
Pirate Ship
Roar
Firebird
Flying scooters
Kids area
Superman

 

[Great Adventurer]

This would be nice....

Six Flags America will be for sale in August, and local officials are interested in another amusement park replacing it.

“We are looking at park amusement entertainment,” Blegay said. “Six Flags is going up for official sale in August. We’re going to see who gets the top bid and start working with them.”

Six Flags America up for sale in August

Six Flags America will be for sale in August, and local officials are interested in another amusement park replacing it.

attractionsmagazine.com

 

[CoasterBroCam]

This would be nice....

Six Flags America up for sale in August

Six Flags America will be for sale in August, and local officials are interested in another amusement park replacing it.

attractionsmagazine.com

SAVE WILD ONE!

 

[harry580]

looks like we gonna have a betting war with this one!

 

[horsesboy]

I want to mention that ACE mid Atlantic is hosting an goodbye from ACE to the park August 3rd. Deadline yo purchase tickets is Wednesday and they say they will have representatives from SF there for a presentation. I am not really optimistic that there will be anything of substance said but I did purchase a ticket to the event.

 

[paintervision]

Maybe Universal could make this a Kids park? Comcast would have the money to buy the property and split it up for different uses, and carve out 100 acres for themselves for a park like Frisco, and the rest becoming mixed residential and commercial use. It would be a way to buy-in to the region without needing to go through years of exploration work behind the scenes.

But that's maybe a best-case scenario, and it would still be risky. While that would "keep an amusement park use" on the site, they'd probably start from scratch and while it could pull in tax dollars/job creation for the area, the goals would be lower than SFA was in the past. I don't see this becoming home to a major park again with so much of the surrounding area being overlapped with mature, larger amusement parks in the mid-Atlantic area.

 

[Fenrihr]

Disney's Wild America, anyone?


I, unfortunately, think the best case scenario is that the waterpark stays open, and the rest is housing/mixed use development. That is the way in NOVA, it seems.

 

[GAcoaster]

I honestly don't see Six Flags selling to a competitor, and I don't see anyone else interested in buying it as a park, unless United is still thinking about more Sesame Place locations.

 

[rswashdc]

I honestly don't see Six Flags selling to a competitor, and I don't see anyone else interested in buying it as a park, unless United is still thinking about more Sesame Place locations.

United would buy this park in 2 seconds, and start putting the squeeze on KD. No way SF sells this to anyone thinking of keeping an amusement park there. Maybe they would tolerate a water park or small kids park being there, but absent SF being in bankruptcy, there will be conditions on the sale.

 

[GAcoaster]

That’s it— I’m sure Six Flags would put in non-compete restrictions, but a Sesame Place could probably be something allowable. I just don’t think United Parks wants to build any more Sesame Place parks after their legal dealings with Sesame Workshop.

 

[warfelg]

Before their most recent purchase I would have said Hershend would be into it, but I don’t think they would be now.

I don’t love the way they operate but I could see Fun Spot being interested, making the two parts separate from each other and shrinking the size of the dry park. Maybe Merlin would take it and make it a LEGOLAND, selling some of the more intense rides.

 

[Thriller]

It’s doubtful that Six Flags would sell to another theme park co given the low attendance of their nearest other parks. In the end, money will win and it will most likely be housing.

 

[Mushroom]

I visited SFA yesterday. Had a wonderful day despite some questionable operations at times.

I don’t see any way this park gets sold to another theme park operator. It just needs so much work to make it a viable park for any chain that wants it to succeed. So much of the infrastructure is in disrepair, the layout is unworkable, and there are basically no standout rides here. If an operator wanted to make this park viable, I truly believe they’d essentially have to bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch. (And at that point, just avoid the demolition costs and enormous opportunity cost of that land, and start fresh with a park built on less valuable land.)

This park has some really nice places, like the entrance area and the new steampunk area, but they don’t even come close to saving this park. It almost feels like it’s already been closed for many years.

The only exception to the above is the water park. It was in surprisingly great shape — clean, freshly painted, good attractions, a solid infrastructure with lots of shops and eateries, and surprisingly nice theming. And it was packed. Given that a water park is probably a thousand times easier to operate than a water park — so much so that a random investment group or even a local municipality could figure out how to operate it — I could see it being carved out from the main park and surviving. Maybe it’ll even go the way of Geauga Lake’s Wildwater Kingdom and go on for a few years while the main park gets sold and developed first.

It’s painful to see any park closed, and especially so SFA — a park that was clearly cared about when it opened, neglected for decades, and suddenly started getting some love again, but too little too late. It’s tragic seeing areas like the new steampunk area and seeing how nice this park could have been if it had been treated that way for decades. But after seeing what a sad state this park is in, and how much work would be needed to get it up to standard, I understand why the new SF management decided to sell it — and I wouldn’t blame any other chain for not wanting to come near it.

 

[harry580]

I know people will disliked me for this but theres were people who at one point thinks Kentucky Kingdom is done in 2010 and that the Kentucky expo center nearby was going to expand it in its place but someone else did saved the park so why not we have something similar happening to six flags america

 

[horsesboy]

Um I don't want to alarm anyone possible unnecessarily but as of this afternoon all operating days after Labor Day have disappeared from the app and website.

 

[Mattatee]

I didn't check every single park, but It isn't on KD or any park I checked other than Cedar Point. It is still listed as a special event for SFA. I assume they just haven't announced the hours.

 

[horsesboy]

I didn't check every single park, but It isn't on KD or any park I checked other than Cedar Point. It is still listed as a special event for SFA. I assume they just haven't announced the hours.

They were previously listed through November 2

 

[Crunchewy]

I visited SFA yesterday. Had a wonderful day despite some questionable operations at times.

I don’t see any way this park gets sold to another theme park operator. It just needs so much work to make it a viable park for any chain that wants it to succeed. So much of the infrastructure is in disrepair, the layout is unworkable, and there are basically no standout rides here. If an operator wanted to make this park viable, I truly believe they’d essentially have to bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch. (And at that point, just avoid the demolition costs and enormous opportunity cost of that land, and start fresh with a park built on less valuable land.)

This park has some really nice places, like the entrance area and the new steampunk area, but they don’t even come close to saving this park. It almost feels like it’s already been closed for many years.

The only exception to the above is the water park. It was in surprisingly great shape — clean, freshly painted, good attractions, a solid infrastructure with lots of shops and eateries, and surprisingly nice theming. And it was packed. Given that a water park is probably a thousand times easier to operate than a water park — so much so that a random investment group or even a local municipality could figure out how to operate it — I could see it being carved out from the main park and surviving. Maybe it’ll even go the way of Geauga Lake’s Wildwater Kingdom and go on for a few years while the main park gets sold and developed first.

It’s painful to see any park closed, and especially so SFA — a park that was clearly cared about when it opened, neglected for decades, and suddenly started getting some love again, but too little too late. It’s tragic seeing areas like the new steampunk area and seeing how nice this park could have been if it had been treated that way for decades. But after seeing what a sad state this park is in, and how much work would be needed to get it up to standard, I understand why the new SF management decided to sell it — and I wouldn’t blame any other chain for not wanting to come near it.

While I don’t think it’s going to go to another chain, I take issue with the “no standouts”. Wild One is fantastic and is going to be a huge loss for coaster fans. I also think Batwing will be a big loss and is a standout as well. I love Batwing.

 

[Mushroom]

While I don’t think it’s going to go to another chain, I take issue with the “no standouts”. Wild One is fantastic and is going to be a huge loss for coaster fans. I also think Batwing will be a big loss and is a standout as well. I love Batwing.

As a coaster enthusiast, I'll be sad to see Wild One go, as a piece of coaster history. That said, at least yesterday, it was running so poorly that even I (a seasoned coaster riser who loved pre-retrack Grizzly) could barely concentrate on the layout because of how painful it was. I overheard several other groups getting off the ride remarking how much it hurt. It's a standout piece of history, but Six Flags has maintained this coaster so badly that it's not a great ride.

Batwing is awesome, but it was closed during my visit (its entire plaza was blocked off and there was no activity whatsoever in the station) and it's hard to imagine that it would survive for more than a few years even if the park weren't closing.

 

[halfabee]

As a coaster enthusiast, I'll be sad to see Wild One go, as a piece of coaster history. That said, at least yesterday, it was running so poorly that even I (a seasoned coaster riser who loved pre-retrack Grizzly) could barely concentrate on the layout because of how painful it was. I overheard several other groups getting off the ride remarking how much it hurt. It's a standout piece of history, but Six Flags has maintained this coaster so badly that it's not a great ride.

That's a shame. When I visited in June it was running well, with the exception of the helix which gave more of a washboard ride than we liked. But even the helix wasn't bad enough to prevent us from getting in our re-rides. Perhaps in June there were still some lingering positive effects of off-season maintenance, which by now have been hammered into oblivion by multiple months of full-time summer ops.

Roar, by contrast, was a disaster even then. Its new lumber seemed to provide no improvement at all over the rest of the ride. But perhaps that was an improvement over whatever those sections were doing to riders in 2024.