The Lamest Place on Earth
I feel a bit odd writing this, but somehow I feel good reading that Six Flags has filed for bankruptcy. It seems like they’re going to come out of it okay, but still… I grew up in New Jersey not far from what would become Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson. Going there was a summer ritual. You’d ride the rides and do the safari drive-through, watching armies of baboons destroy the roofs of suckers with vinyl car tops (do they still make vinyl car tops? Can’t recall the last time I saw one). In many ways, the place was lame. I’m not a roller coaster guy, I’m a dark ride guy, and the park never had any dark rides (as with so many of my personal tastes, dark rides seem to belong to the last century — even Disney, once the dark ride masters, build few of the things). Second, crowd control was miserable, so you had endless lines, and third, it was very poorly kept up. Chewing gum everywhere. You could count the chewing gum layers on certain ride queues and figure out how old it was.
They did have one sort-of dark ride thing, a “haunted castle” walk-through that was just 17 aluminum trailers pushed together behind a facade. Cheap stuff. There were no smoke detectors, no sprinklers, no emergency anything. There was one staffer on duty. He had received no fire training. There was one extinguisher in the building, which twisted through those metal trailers for 150 yards. It was pitch black inside. In early May, 1984, the trailers caught fire. Eight died and seven more were injured. The fire, said the local prosecutor, had turned the trailers into “heated ovens.” Fire inspectors concluded after that someone had lit a cigarette lighter to illuminate the interior in a room where a light had malfunctioned and this had ignited some exposed foam rubber padding. It took less than five minutes to kill eight teenagers, high school students.The bodies were too badly burned for visual identification. Because there was no fire protocol, patrons were still being ushered into the structure as it burned.
In the criminal trial that ensued, the attorney for the defense said, “We are not trying to point the finger at these eight teenagers and say they killed themselves. But when someone screamed ‘Fire!’ they didn’t move. When they did, it was too late.” Incredibly, the jury acquitted the company, preferring to blame local inspectors who had given the attraction a pass. Two Six Flags executives indicted for the blaze were allowed to enter a pretrial diversion program and the charges were dropped. There were numerous civil suits; I don’t know how those played out.
I was 13 at the time. I have never gone back. I refused all invitations. I still live here. I still wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t take my kids. I realize that the park and the Six Flags corporation has gone through several changes of ownership since then, and that a quarter of a century has passed. I still am not interested.
I had walked through the Haunted Mansion and could very easily imagine myself trapped there, though that’s not what bothered me. What somehow struck me as terribly unjust and neglectful then, and bothers me even more now that I’m a parent, is this: when the news of the fire spread, when frightened parents began calling to check on their system, park management stonewalled them, wouldn’t take the calls, wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong. Accidents happen, I guess, and history is full of buildings that were supposed to be “fun” that were really death traps, from the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston infamous 1944 Hartford circus fire to the horrible Station fire in Rhode Island back in 2003. That’s not what bothers me. It’s the lack of solicitude for the victims and their families, the cold self-protective instinct.
I know it’s a different company now, but I’ve never been able to shake that association.
