AutoWorld (theme park)
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| Location | Flint, Michigan |
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| Opened | July 4, 1984 |
| Closed | 1994 |
AutoWorld was an indoor theme park in Flint, Michigan, USA, built to make the town attractive to tourists. It opened as Six Flags AutoWorld on July 4, 1984 and closed for the first time just six months later, and the theme park closed for good in 1994.
On the grand opening of AutoWorld, then-Governor James J. Blanchard predicted it would trigger "the rebirth of the great city of Flint."
The idea for AutoWorld originated as early as 1969, when Joseph Anderson, retired manager of AC Spark Plug, “recalled that Harding Mott, president of the Mott Foundation was angry because of a news story from California about students burying a Chevrolet to emphasize their antagonism towards cars” and wanted to show the importance of the automobile to society. However, former mayor of Flint, James Rutherford, attributes the idea for AutoWorld to Anderson. A second possible origin for the idea of AutoWorld is Harding Mott discussing the need for the Flint community “to get its pride together” because “after all, [Flint is] one of the main centers in the history of automaking.”
AutoWorld was one element of Flint’s overall downtown redevelopment plan in the 1960s and 1970s. Initially, the idea was to build a hall of fame for the automobile in Flint. On April 2, 1970, civic leaders from Flint met at the Consumers Power Co. lodge at Tippy Dam on the Big Manistee River to discuss the redevelopment of the central city of Flint. This meeting led to the establishment of the Flint Area Conference, Inc. (FACI), a non-profit corporation with the stated purpose “of an organization of civic and business leaders working with public officials in an effort to meet unfilled physical and economic needs of the community.”
After the meeting at Tippy Dam, a committee headed by Anderson was founded to study the idea for an automotive hall of fame. The committee commissioned Yamasaki and Associates of Troy, Michigan, to produce a plan for the hall of fame to be built on an island in the Flint River, which was the first plan for AutoWorld. Over the next decade, between 1970 and 1980, several other plans and designs were commissioned, playing roles of varying importance to the development of AutoWorld. In 1978, C. W. Shaver & Company, Inc., developed a plan to create “a National Institute to demonstrate the impact of the automobile” and “a people-attraction in downtown Flint centered around the automobile.” The project was called “A National Institute of Automotive Science and History (AutoWorld).”
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