The Cedar Fair amusement park chain announced today [PDF] that it will sell its Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, California for $70 million.
The new buyer is JMA Ventures, a real estate investment firm that manages several ski resorts and other properties, mostly in northern California. Great America is located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, better known to tech geeks as Silicon Valley.
So now new Cedar Fair president Matt Ouimet has $70 million to pay down debt, and one less park to maintain. Great America was not one of the top-attended parks in the Cedar Fair chain, operating seasonally in northern California in competition with a a Six Flags park, not to mention the many much larger and better developed theme parks operating a short plane flight or half-day drive away in Southern California.
And, by the way, for those of you who are wondering and weren't around the 1970s, yes, Great America used to be the sister park of Six Flags Great America, when both were Marriott theme parks. When the hotel company got out of the theme park business, it sold the Chicago-area park to Six Flags and the San Francisco-area park to (*edit) Kings Entertainment which then sold to Paramount, which years later sold its theme parks to Cedar Fair.
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My dad says that Marriott was going to sell the park for its land value in 1984; however the city saved the park when they bought it and contracted KECO to run it for them.
As for the Gurnee park, I am pretty sure Six Flags was not who Marriott sold it too. I'm getting old but I think it was Bally Corporation that might have been the one that purchased that park???
As for Chicago, that was a direct deal between Marriott and Bally, which owned the Six Flags chain at the time.
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