Hard Rock Theme Park (for sale, construction, cost)

[bblaine]

well, looks like pieces of the park are going to be sold one piece at a time... it's not coming back... as a park atleast...

[rrufast]

The Sun News is reporting that they have not secured a buyer and will now liquidate under Chapter 7.

[g-man430]

Looks like Myrtle Beach is slowly going down the drain. First the Pavilion and now Hard Rock Park. What will be the next to go?

[drsmiley06]

Yea know now that people mention this place called the Pavilion, I now know where that place was located. Back in June I stayed in Myrtle Beach for a week and stayed at the Diplomat Motel. As I was walking up Ocean Blvd. I did notice a nice piece of land that sat empty right next to the Ripley's Museum. Someone on this site had posted a link to some photos of this Pavilion Park and it looked it like a nice place to go with plenty of rides too. I know the economy is bad but what's the deal with MB, I mean you can't blame the economy on everything, are people just not making good business decisions or what? Everywhere I turn that's all I hear is that the economy is bad, the economy is bad, but that can only go so far. At some point you have to look at the people involved and ask if they know what they're doing. I posted something last week about going to MB for alittle x-mas getaway and visited Broadway for a day. A few of the people I talked to in the stores up there were actually from the NY/NJ/Philly area and boy did give me an earful about the way people run their businesses down there. As one lady said to me "some of these people have absolutely no business sense whatsoever." Couldn't help but laugh at her comment!

[Summering]

It is so sad that a park said by the owner to be worth 400million is unable to get a 35 Million bid for this park.
Facts reported by The Sun News says they are in debt of 300 Million right now. The 50 dollar admission price and the ten dollar parking fee scared people off. The Park had a 2.5 Million agreement per year to use the Hard Rock name.
Its hard for me to believe it opened after I left for home and is closed before I arrive back this winter.
I honestly didn't think the average person coming to the area would spend for admission to enter a restaurant area with a few roller coasters.
Would you really invest in something so costly without making the park a family friendly location?
Tons of things for the kiddies. Parents like to keep the kids occupied while on vacation. A park with major attractions could have worked. I would not have been a stockholder without knowing the park was somewhat simular to Universal, MGM, or Epcot perhaps............
It needed a Universal theme. Music would work well into it....I can see the area working out. But, at this point, it would take the Disney company or MGM to make it work.

[coastalgirl]

That park was the stupidest idea from the beginning...I've never spoken to anyone who thought it was a good idea. What an idiotic waste of money - they should have listened to the locals who didn't want it there in the first place.

[baylovers]

I thought it was a good idea & my wife, kids & I enjoyed ourselves when we went. Everything was overpriced though and it needed a few more attractions. But as a theme, I thought it was well done and attractive. But, as Joan Jett says, I love rock and roll.

[Dawne]

Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009
Fiasco Prevention
Hard Rock Park failure imparts a painful lesson

When risky enterprises turn out well, investors count their profits while marveling at the mental acuity of the folks who enticed them into plunking down their money. When risky enterprises collapse into bankruptcy, creditors tally their losses while wishing they had put their money into safer investments. That's the nature of capitalism - private transactions in which the public has no interest, right?

Wrong. The Hard Rock Park, putatively South Carolina's largest-ever tourism investment, may have left unsecured investors with nothing and the folks who conceived it with egg on their faces. (What were they thinking building a high-entry-cost amusement park based on boomer music associated with illicit drug use?)

But the theme park's collapse has left the Grand Strand, the finest large-scale seaside resort on the East Coast, with a black eye and a 55-acre hulk whose chances of salvage seem nonexistent. Unless some capable company swoops in to repurpose the facility as a garden-variety theme park, our communities will be left with an enduring monument to insufficiently skeptical public-side development planning and approval.

Horry County Council members, who prescreened and ultimately approved the project, first proposed in 2002, weren't the only ones who thought it "cool" that a development group saw Myrtle Beach as the ideal location for a theme park devoted more to boomer memories than to thrill rides for parkgoers. They weren't the only ones who assumed that the park would succeed because the developers seemed to know what they were doing. They weren't the only ones who fell prey to the developers' unreasonable desire to reveal as little as possible about their plans for fear that local tourism giants would try to quash their project. Lots of local leaders found the tourism-mission-expansion possibilities that the park presented to be intriguing.

Moreover, council members wisely rejected the initial investors' request a few years later to put public tax dollars into the project. That refusal is the only bright spot in this fiasco - that no local public money went down the rathole along with the $400 million allegedly invested in the park.

But if anyone along the tortuous approval path for the project had the clout to say "whoa, this project doesn't seem economically feasible and sounds weird," it was Horry County Council members. What gave them the right to say that, considering that the park was built on private land with private money? The possibility - now unfortunately realized - that the project would fail, leaving the public with a massive eyesore with potential to create public-safety problems.

In this instance, such council intervention on behalf of the public would have been reasonable and prudent. When a failed project in question is a housing development or condo tower, it's all but certain that some developer will step in to complete it. But when the failure is an anomalous project stemming from a development group's fantasy, the host community gets stuck with a white elephant with low to nonexistent takeover potential.

The purpose here is not to castigate the County Council for saying yes to the project. That would be a cheap shot grounded in perfect 20/20 hindsight.

But the council should work up a more refined philosophy for handling anomalous development proposals - one that gives a project proposal's long-term feasibility greater weight in the ultimate yes-or-no decision. No one can forestall the defunct Hard Rock Park's negative public impacts, but the council can and should prevent such a fiasco from happening again.

Source: The Sun News - Editorial
Fiasco Prevention - Opinion - Myrtle Beach Online (http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/opinion/story/735059.html - broken link)

[lindz]

Dont worry one day im goina bring that perfect amusement park to Mrytle u just wait

[Summering]

Originally Posted by lindz

Dont worry one day im goina bring that perfect amusement park to Mrytle u just wait

Great........and remember this..........Perfect would be the Pavilion Park right back where it was, reborn.