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A Tale of Two Failed Tourist Attractions Column for July 19, 2007

<%FloatImg "images/flinn/autoworld_entrance.jpg", "AutoWorld entrance", "right", ""%> This is a story of two tourist attractions with many things in common. One was in Flint and the other in Battle Creek. Unfortunately, they both went out of business for the same reasons. In Flint, known as the Vehicle City, construction began on AutoWorld in 1982 (which incorporated the former IMA Auditorium and annex) and opened in 1984. Flint was a major manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages before it became the birthplace of General Motors. The original AutoWorld concept was devised in 1969 and by 1971 an Automotive Hall of Fame was proposed. Many changes to the proposal were made before ground was broken on AutoWorld. Nearly half of AutoWorld's construction costs were paid by the Mott Foundation. Six Flags operated the park which opened on July 4, 1984 with much ballyhoo and fanfare. City leaders predicted it would double or triple the area's tourism. Unfortunately, the indoor theme park couldn't decide about what it was. It had elements of a theme park, a science center, a festival marketplace and an automotive museum. TV commercials which aired regionally made AutoWorld seem like an amusement park, but it did not have thrill rides. What rides it did have were disappointments. It did have bumper car rides and an historic carousel. Needless to say, the number of paying visitors did not meet projections and AutoWorld first closed six months after it first opened. Six Flags reopened AutoWorld in 1985 adding additional attractions including Summer Magic with outdoor entertainment and a Ferris wheel inside the dome. But after another disappointing year, Six Flags pulled out. <%FloatImg "images/flinn/autoworld_dome.jpg", "Inside the AutoWorld dome", "right", ""%> The IMAX Theater briefly operated on its own with only the Wonder Wall historical exhibits open. The rest of AutoWorld was sealed off. It did open occasionally for special events but it closed for good by 1994. There were many proposals submitted for the AutoWorld property in 1993 to then mayor Woodrow Stanley. They included two for gambling casinos and one each for a corporate training facility, a soccer complex and a game show arena. The casino idea seemed to be the best idea at the time according to Stanley, but Flint voters in November 1994 rejected a ballot proposal to convert AutoWorld into a casino by a narrow margin. This left Stanley and the Mott Foundation with the only feasible option of expanding the University of Michigan Flint. But the university was only interested in the land, not the buildings on the land thus sealing the fate of AutoWorld and the former IMA Auditorium in 1996. The Mott Foundation covered the cost of demolition which began on January 3, 1997. The AutoWorld dome and the former IMA Annex were demolished by conventional means. But the demolition contractor, Best Wrecking of Detroit decided that the old IMA Auditorium was too sturdy a building to demolish by wrecking ball during the cold winter months and hired a subcontractor, Engineered Demolition, to implode the building with explosives. On the morning of the implosion, 10,000 people showed up. Most of them were at Windmill Place across Fifth Avenue from the AutoWorld site. The rest, including this writer, stood on the Saginaw Street bridge. WJRT covered the implosion live beginning at 8:30 a.m. that Sunday morning so before leaving to see the implosion, I set the VCR to record the event which WJRT called "Boom for Growth." Reporter and weekend anchor Joel Feick covered the implosion from the bridge so I saw his live reports as Feick gave them. As he covered a previous implosion in Toledo, he warned the crowd to expect a loud boom you could feel and a thick dust cloud. <%FloatImg "images/flinn/c3^demolition_blast.jpg", "Former IMA Auditorium implosion, ending the AutoWorld story", "left", ""%> After a minor delay caused by a security breach, the explosives went off at 9:05 a.m. beginning with the southeast corner of the IMA, moving in both directions to the northwest corner. The shock wave was felt on my chest. The bricks came down and the huge trusses dropped from front to back with the developing dust cloud. The chimney in the back billowed dust and when the explosives went off in the back, the chimney slowly teetered before it tumbled. The crowd roared their approval. But when the dust settled, disappointment set into the crowd as the huge trusses kept their shape and a part of the back wall stayed in place. Even reporter Joel Feick thought that the implosion was not a success during the live coverage. But when the demolition people were contacted, they said they did their job and that the implosion was a success. The IMA Auditorium did not have a basement so when it was imploded, the debris had no place to go other than to pile up on top of itself. The wall that was left standing was also intentional as they thought the debris would keep it standing anyway. The implosion made the job of clearing what was left of the IMA much easier and that took about three weeks to clear the site. <%FloatImg "images/flinn/cerealcityusa.jpg", "The now defunct Kellogg's Cereal City USA in Battle Creek", "right", ""%> The fate of Battle Creek's failed tourist attraction was more fortunate. In the Cereal City, breakfast cereal is the main industry. Kellogg's is headquartered there, Kraft Foods' Post division began there. Ralston Foods makes store brand breakfast cereal there, too. Battle Creek's main industry began at a sanitarium run by an eccentric doctor named John Harvey Kellogg who was a strong believer in health food as well as other practices of the type which is best not to be discussed here. He and his brother Will Keith Kellogg invented corn flakes as a health food. You can read more about Dr. Kellogg and his sanitarium elsewhere on the Internet and in the novel "The Road to Wellville" by T. Coraghessan Boyle which was made into a movie in 1994. One of his patients, Charles W. Post, was inspired by the diet there to start his own food business which first produced Postum, a cereal-based beverage intended as a coffee substitute in 1895. Post created Grape-Nuts cereal in 1897, then his own version of corn flakes called "Elijah's Manna" in 1904. That product was renamed Post Toasties in 1908. All of these Post created products are still being made by Kraft Foods. In 1897, the Kellogg brothers founded the Sanitas Food Company to market their whole grain cereals commercially. But the two brothers argued over the ingredients as John refused to allow sugar to be included as an ingredient. So the brothers split and never spoke to each other again. Will founded the Battle Creek Toasted Flake Company in 1906. Will was a superb salesman and marketer. His products became popular worldwide. In 1922, with a wide selection of breakfast cereals, the company was renamed the Kellogg Company. Kellogg's held factory tours until 1986 when they were discontinued for safety, security and, more important, competitive reasons. <%FloatImg "images/flinn/cerealcityglockenspiel.jpg", "The glockenspiel in front of Kellogg's Cereal City USA", "left", ""%> But the interest in how cereal is made had not waned. It gave birth to a concept of developing a facility to help replace the cereal industry tours and tell the story of this uniquely American commercial and cultural phenomenon. That was what the developers of Kellogg's Cereal City USA in downtown Battle Creek stated when they opened the attraction in 1998 at 171 West Michigan Avenue. Owned by the Heritage Center Foundation, the 45,000 square foot building was designed to look like a turn of the 20th Century factory building, was designed to entertain visitors while informing them of the phenomenal impact the cereal industry and Kellogg's products have had on American culture, from nutritious breakfasts to Saturday morning cartoons. It had a simulated breakfast cereal production line as its main attraction where you can sample the warm corn flakes at the end of the line. Unfortunately, for this attraction, it has the same Achilles' heel which doomed AutoWorld in Flint. There wasn't much in this attraction to attract repeat visitors. Any museum attraction, in order to be successful, has to have changing exhibits. Inside, it looked like a continuous commercial tie-in which you paid $7.95 to see. You can see Roadside America's review of the attraction at at this link. A slightly more positive review can be found at at this link. So after failing to meet projections each year, Kellogg's Cereal City USA closed abruptly on January 2007. From 2000 to 2005, it attracted an average of 86,203 visitors annually. Last year, they had 79,500 visitors, the lowest yet. They needed at least 100,000 visitors annually to break even. The city of Battle Creek was left holding the bag on an $875,000 bill for the closed attraction. The Kellogg Company saved the day! Needing additional office space, Kellogg's bought the closed Cereal City USA for $2 million, covering the debt, and will convert the former museum into office space. In June, the contents were auctioned off. AutoWorld operated at a time when the Internet wasn't widely used yet. On the other hand, Cereal City USA had an active web site. While the < http://www.kelloggscerealcityusa.org > URL is a dead link now, thanks to www.archive.org, you can still see the web site's contents over the years. Just go to this link to see how the web site evolved from 1998 to 2006. Finally, if you've been following developments concerning the now partially demolished Lebowsky Center in Owosso, you're probably as happy as I am that it will be rebuilt. But the Owosso Community Players will need donations to complete the process of rebuilding the theater. Just click on this link Lebowsky Center tribute link for the OCP's address.

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