Larger and more thorough, more attraction-focused theme park based on the United States of America.
~ over 200 years in the making ~
Ten distinct areas, loosely arranged in the shape of the country:
1) 1760 - 1790 ×× Bay Colony … … … (boston)
2) 1790 - 1820 ×× Blue Hills … … … … (appalachia)
3) 1820 - 1850 ×× Dixie … … … … … .. (deep south)
4) 1860 - 1865 ×× The Divide … … … . (mason-dixon)
5) 1865 - 1895 ×× Frontier Four … … . (the west)
6) 1900 - 1929 ×× Seacoast … … … .. (carolinas)
7) 1930 - 1940 ×× Dustbowl … … … .. (great plains)
8) 1945 - 1965 ×× Venture … … … … . (south calif.)
9) 1970 - 1995 ×× Brickyard … … … .. (great lakes)
10) 1999 - 2019 ×× Bright Harbor … … (seattle)
note: Change 4 to Juncture? Change 8 to Destiny? Change 9 to Steeltown or Metropolis?
Statues for each area, in bronze, depicting individuals who represented the ten tenets of Americanism:
1. Optimism - Samuel Adams, patriot
2. Discovery - Daniel Boone, frontiersman
3. Conviction - Sojourner Truth, abolitionist
4. Equality - Abraham Lincoln, congressman
5. Opportunity - Andrew Carnegie, industrialist
6. Ingenuity - Tallulah Bankhead, actress
7. Tenacity - Dorothea Lange, photojournalist
8. Idealism - John F. Kennedy, senator
9. Courage - James Baldwin, novelist
10. Innovation - Mark Cuban, entrepreneur
The America Park in greater detail…
Massachusetts Bay Colony ×× 1760 - 1790
Based on: Boston, Salem, and Maine.
Tenet: Optimism - Samuel Adams, patriot
Paul Revere's ride as a steeplechase, with three tracks interwoven as Dawes, Revere, and Prescott race from the Old North Church to Concord by way of Lexington.
Faneuil Hall as a long projection/animatronic show about the birth of our nation through the ire of the people and the wills of certain men.
Quincy Market as a hub of quick-service meal options.
shipyard (drydock; stevedores) for shops.
along the wharf, a lobster and fish restaurant (serving Sam Adams beer).
museumette of colonial life and the reasons for rebellion.
Boston Tea Party... dark boat ride?
Battle of Bunker Hill... immersive theater?
Salem Witch trials... interactive live show?
Blue Hills Wilderness ×× 1790 - 1820
Based on: Appalachia - Kentucky, Ohio, and American Indian land.
Tenet: Discovery - Daniel Boone, frontiersman
wooden coaster that zooms through bountiful foliage.
moonshine distillery as shooting gallery, firing muskets at glass bottles.
War of 1812... naval battle simulation?
museumette for frontier life and the Scots-Irish immigrants.
whitewater round-raft ride, for the Louis & Clark expedition, through forest, dell, gorge, etc.
country-style eatery, like Cracker Barrel but with a family-style dining option.
Deep South ×× 1820 - 1850
Based on: New Orleans streets and Mississippi plantations.
Tenet: Conviction - Sojourner Truth, abolitionist
jazz club eatery (live music, Cajun eats)
French Quarter with shops and street performers and a rooftop adults-only bar.
voodoo-story animatronic show in bayou, on small circlet stage a la Enchanted Tiki Room.
Jackson, Polk, & Fillmore: a retrospective (projection show) of the good and bad alike.
French trappers in the bayou, a theatrical boat ride a la Pirates of the Caribbean, with fanciful scenes, memorable songs, and at one point a dirty frenchman is wrestling an alligator.
plantation with ornate lawn and gardens; inside the manor is a museum on the history of slavery in America, and a projection show.
the shed beside the manor is an entrance to a winding tunnel that eventually snakes out of a cave and into the bayou, weaving through the trees to the back of the other half of the area, with a grotto midway to tell of the Underground Railroad.
neighboring plantation manor as a buffet eatery.
one-man stage show about/starring Mark Twain, ideally using Hal Holbrook’s iconic script
Penn/Virginia ×× 1860 - 1865
Based on: Gettysburg & Manassas; DC & Richmond.
Tenet: Equality - Abraham Lincoln, congressman
telegraph station: communicate with other park guests via morse code on real wires that extend to the San Francisco area.
Sherman's March to the Sea as a Virginia Reel coaster, beginning with the burning of Atlanta and ending with a signified victory at Savannah.
Spectrum of the Civil War: a walkthrough with miniature dioramas of war rooms, camps, and battlefields that, with the aid of 3D glasses or holograms, show spectacles of movement, cannonfire, speech, battle, blood, smoke, and agony. (Or, instead of a walkthrough, an omnimover attraction could keep the speed up, but at the expense of losing individual agency on the inspection of detail.)
battle reenactments of Gettysburg and Manassas, as EMV charge-through scenes.
in DC, a retrospective (projection show) of all the Union men (Lincoln, Colfax, Stevens, Sherman, McClellan, Grant, Chamberlain, Meade, etc) and their beliefs, decisions, and outcomes.
in Richmond, retrospective (projection show) of all the Confederate men (Davis, Stephens, Stonewall, Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hood, Bragg, etc) and their beliefs, decisions, and outcomes.
Settling the Frontier ×× 1865 - 1895
Based on: Four distinct western lands, connected by a railroad.
Tenet: Opportunity - Andrew Carnegie, industrialist
CHICAGO — stockyards; factories for steel, rubber, and petroleum, all with machine tools.
railroad station, whose plaza features the frontier’s “tenet statue”
daily performance: radical politicians giving stump speeches on opposite ends of a small plaza.
museumette [in stockyard] on the cattle industry of the Plains and the boom that trains made after supplanting cattle drives, and how those ranches (by way of barbed wire) helped to structure the west for statehood.
deep-dish pizza and burger restaurants.
foundry ‘splashdown’ ride: the cart is an oversized metallurgic ladle, travelling over water that is lit by subsurface red/orange LEDs to give the appearance that it’s actually molten metal; zooming thru heavy industry, blast furnaces.
museumette on the titans of industry (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, Edison & Westinghouse, etc)
inverted coaster on a rail, swooping through its steel foundry and those factories adjacent to it (oil, cattle, rubber) with inversions.
for the World's Fair of 1893, maybe a small Ferris Wheel and ice cream on waffle cones.
SANTA FE (or El Paso) — adobe buildings, desert dunes, sandstone monoliths, and Apache.
railroad station!
authentic Mexican restaurant.
Old Spanish Mission: a circle-vision theater around a ring of battlements, armed all-around with rifles (arcade light guns, e.g. Duck Hunt, Big Buck Hunter) wherein participants shoot at the enemies charging in, hoping to, 1) Survive long enough for a great team score, and, 2) Get the most kills for a great individual score—although inevitably you will all be overwhelmed). Remember the Alamo! (Anachronistic 1836.)
sandstone plateau with the façade of a ghost town, within which is an animatronic showcase of famous outlaws detailing their escapades.
museumette on Tombstone (Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, the OK Corral, etc) and other towns, and outlaws like Butch Cassidy.
wagon circle for shops and ‘cowboy’ entertainers.
Apache campsite, with shops for American Indian memorabilia, and an animatronic shaman storyteller who speaks of the slow, hostile destruction of all native tribes by the whites who arrived in the east and south and moved ever onward into the west, taking the land and killing all those who stood in their way.
museumette on The Indian Wars.
COLORADO SPRINGS — mining for ore and minerals throughout the Rocky Mountains.
railroad station!
shop for geodes; stand for jerky, turkey, root beer, etcetera; shop for cowboy accoutrements.
museumette on the life of prospectors, shop owners, and the symbiotic relationship of the two that helped to civilize the west.
Saloon restaurant with live entertainment (dancing girls, rowdy gamblers, drunk cowboy shootouts, etcetera)
caverns for free exploration, with some small staged moments of immersive storytelling.
mine train coaster, throughout caverns and hoodoos, with prospector theme (gold rush).
elevator shaft tower-drop ride.
sluices for paid panning experiences, chance at finding gold dust or little gems.
SAN FRANCISCO — Oregon Trail, railroad empires, and Oriental immigrants.
railroad station!
Chinese restaurant...
museumette on nativism and immigrants.
telegraph station: communicate with other park guests via morse code on real wires that extend to the Penn/Virginia area.
museumette on the California Gold Rush, Oregon Trail, Pony Express, and other circumstances that brought people west.
projection show detailing the history of rail empires (and barons like Carnegie) and how they led the settlement of the wild west.
coaster: runaway steam train racing east to Promontory Point, to drive the golden spike.
omnimover recreating the journey of the Oregon Trail: promises and pitfalls.
Carolinas ×× 1900 - 1929
Based on: Beach resorts, suffragettes, cars, electricity, prohibition, gangsters, glamor, art deco.
Tenet: Ingenuity - Tallulah Bankhead, actress
antique cars, with greater driving freedoms (so essentially go-karts where everyone drives the Rolls-Royce New Phantom)
electricity... live show hosted by Nikola Tesla in a circular theater [based on his Colorado Springs lab] where he details the power, potential, and history of electricity, a la the Van de Graaff generator presentation at the Boston Museum of Science.
gangsters... live show, or dark ride?
Algonquin Round Table... interactive live show with witty repartee.
beach with boardwalk, and midway games and carnival rides (carousel, whip, tilt-a-whirl, scrambler, matterhorn) and novelty snack stands.
speakeasy restaurant and bar.
lounge with live jazz/swing music, cigars, flapper dancers...
museumette on Nikola Tesla and Philo Farnsworth (and other inventors).
museumette on women's sufferage and the subsequent flapper movement.
museumette on prohibition and the boom of organized crime (and famous gangsters).
museumette on the Lost Generation writers, the modernist art movements, and the dawn of motion pictures.
Great Plains ×× 1930 - 1940
Based on: Dust bowl, farmland, labor unions (socialism) and scapegoating xenophobia (fascism).
Tenet: Tenacity - Dorothea Lange, photojournalist
farms: unions, commies, fascists... a museumette on populist ideologies?
projection show about the truth of the Crash of '29 (Coolidge, bankers) and Hoover, a great humanist forsaken for the autocrat FDR.
ramshackle house half-buried in silt... as entry area to circular amphitheater (dozen or so seats) with shoulder pull-down restraints, powered by a system above that spins the ride unit (applying G-forces to the chest) and lifts it upward higher and higher, with staccatic drops — altogether simulating a tornado!
New Deal's refugee settlement... with a steakhouse, and a patio for quick service food.
museumette on Huey Long, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the works of John Steinbeck.
Nat'l Park vibe (i.e. Yellowstone, with sequoias, geysers, cliffs, bluffs, pines and firs) on attached area, with WPA themes and a nature walk featuring temperate animal enclosures.
also, a mountaineering ride...?
Outside Los Angeles ×× 1945 - 1965
Based on: Postwar suburbia, sprawl, atomica, Hollywood.
Tenet: Idealism - John F. Kennedy, senator
movie studio, and you're the fill-in actors for a rush to complete B-roll for a series of B-movies: 6-person motion simulator cabin with different control panels for each person (levers, buttons, etcetera) and seated in pairs facing each of three sides, peering out windows at projections of different scenarios, changing the scenes and the requirements of the passengers input from tank driving (vs Nazis in WWII) to spaceship flying (vs aliens from Planet 9) to repelling the British Navy (as pirates on the lam) and etcetera in an OTR video game interface. (Could randomly be assigned 3 scenes from a pool of 8; e.g. tribesmen in Borneo, knights at sieged castle, zombies at boarded-up house...)
facades of Levittown as proposals of prefab homes, with sloganeering plastered around as sales pitches to purchase for “your own idyllic neighborhood”. Yet, inside them are museumettes for a snide condemnation of commercialism, critique of wealth inequity, and examination of economic disenfranchisement.
atom bomb testing site: homes, cars, school, offices, streets all designed to be destroyed in an imminent blast [that will never come]; the attraction could be laser tag, a la Nuketown, or some kind of escape room/scavenger hunt where you must trigger certain switches to stay the bomb blast, as you’re a group of people mistakenly left at a drop site with an impending countdown…
three museumettes: one on JFK (and RFK, LBJ), one on the Cold War (Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, etcetera), and one on the dawn of nuclear power (the manhattan project, A-bombs, operation paperclip, "our friend the atom", nuclear power stations, etcetera).
connected by road to Santa Fe and San Francisco but reachable by cable car to Colorado Springs?
Great Lakes ×× 1970 - 1995
Based on: Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo; cultural revolution and the death of industry.
Tenet: Courage - James Baldwin, novelist
deli and brewery (Milwaukee restaurant)
multicultural marketplace on a dilapidated street corner, with old school hip-hop emanating from an open apartment window; picnic tables set across the basketball court and a vacant lot, as an open-air eating space.
abandoned car factory (launch coaster with inversions) in Detroit, graffitied and decrepit.
the SS Edmund Fitzgerald (squall and wreck) as dark boat ride (a la a more intense Maelstrom) out of port, into rolling seas, sinking underwater and into a wooden shipwreck, then the infamous broken tanker, and resurfacing at shore at dawn.
museumette on the Civil Rights Movement, and a projection show adjacent about MLK; and a longer presentation on Jefferson, Fillmore & Whigs, Free Soilers, Lincoln, John Brown, Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, Rosa Parks, MLK, JFK, RFK, LBJ, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, NWA, In Living Color, Rodney King, Tupac, Oprah, Obama, Black Lives Matter, Kendrick Lamar, etcetera, and the fight against institutionalized racism (Robert Moses, Baldwin-RFK meeting, Brown vs Board of Education, etcetera.
museumette on James Baldwin, splitting in two directions: to Civil Rights (branched via institutionalized racism, w/ Nina Simone, Lena Horne, Toni Morrison, Jackie Robinson & Jesse Owens, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier) and, on the other side, to the history of the Gay Rights Movement.
omnimover about the genesis/growth of the PC industry and internet, a la Halt & Catch Fire.
record store with classics of disco, punk, R&B, soul, pop, new wave, heavy metal, grunge, alt rock, etcetera (and an adjoining laundromat where the glass faces of the washing machines are all playing music videos from different eras and genres, with parabolic loudspeakers overhead to sync the songs to their particular acoustic areas).
Seattle ×× 1999 - 2019
Based on: Y2K, 4IR, AI, smartphones, algorithms, robots.
Tenet: Innovation - Mark Cuban, entrepreneur
entry area in an urban marketplace, with a hipster fashion store, coffeeshop, novelty and retro merchandise, etcetera; also a storefront (e.g. Uniqlo) with an emphasis on fashions of the future.
showcase of burgeoning tech, constantly updated with new interactive displays.
shops or sponsorships for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, iRobot, Nintendo, etc.
Space Needle facsimile with a rotating restaurant atop.
museumette on landmark postmodern music and television, like Nirvana, Green Day, Britney Spears, REM, Matchbox Twenty, Lady Gaga, Adele, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Office, Frasier, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, etcetera.
Original document created 09/26/2019.