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04-15-08/Tuesday----Hard Rock Park employees load passengers into cars on the coaster Led Zeppelin-The Ride Tuesday during the soft opening of Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach. Photo By Randall Hill/The Sun News
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The Southeast’s first new amusement park in nine years sits partly on Myrtle Beach’s long-dormant Fantasy Harbor entertainment complex and partly on the rubble of the failed Waccamaw Factory Shoppes.
Hard Rock Park has 55 acres of rides, eateries and shops on a 140-acre site south of U.S. 501. It is about half the size of Charlotte’s Carowinds, eastern Tennessee’s Dollywood, or Islands of Adventure, which opened in Orlando, Fla., in 1999.
Closed only in January and February, it will be the northernmost four-season amusement park in eastern North America, and the first anywhere associated with the Hard Rock Cafe brand, which boasts about 125 bar/grill locations from Amsterdam to Yokohama. And it is the first theme park in the world hard-wired to the enduring appeal of rock ‘n’ roll.
The park’s five themed sections are arranged around a lagoon. Here’s a preview of what you will find:
• Born in the USA includes a midway-style games area; climbing structures for kids; an all-ages Shake Rattle & Roller coaster; plus the Slippery When Wet suspended coaster that’s an easy target for folks on the ground, who can blast riders with water cannons.
An amphitheater can seat 2,000 visitors — plus 10,000 standing and 8,000 on the lawn —for local and regional bands that will play throughout the day, plus occasional major groups.
• British Invasion is the park’s largest themed area. Its thriller is the Maximum RPM coaster: Board your “sports car” and a ride-in Ferris wheel rotates you to the track above.
Nights in White Satin: The Trip — also pegged as a major draw — is an indoor “dark” ride synchronized to the 1967 Moody Blues standard; cars glide over 720 feet of track in 4.5 minutes (speed: 1.82 mph), passing 14 scenes.
The Roadies Stunt Show will have live-action stunts and comedy. Punk Pit is a musical cousin to the Moonwalk, with separate areas for small fry and for large-size moshers.
• Lost in the ’70s is an indoor amusement arcade that mixes new games with classics such as Pong, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.
• Rock & Roll Heaven has Led Zeppelin — the Ride. It’s the park’s signature coaster, and is synchronized to the band’s 1969 hit “Whole Lotta Love.” The track is close to three-fourths of a mile long, has six inversions and a 120-foot loop. Maximum speed: 65 mph.
• Cool Country attractions include Midnight Rider, a coaster where you hear Southern rock; a giant swing ride; and Muddin’ Monster Race, a round-ride. Country on the Rocks is an 860-seat indoor venue with — rather improbably — a souped-up ice-skating show.
THEN AND NOW
Longtime visitors to Myrtle Beach may see ghosts of previous attractions at Hard Rock park:
• The exterior of Country on the Rocks originally was a Fantasy Harbor attraction called Magic on Ice, then Snoopy’s Magic on Ice. It was retooled as The Savoy, a big-band music venue, then Florida businessman Jon Binkowski bought it in 1999.
Binkowski turned it back to a skating show, but his Ice Castle closed the following year just as the outlet-plus-attraction site slid into financial troubles. While Medieval Times survived — it’s still in business, with a new show this year jousting, swordplay, horsemanship and falconry — the other theaters hit hard times.
• Mall 3 of Waccamaw Factory Shoppes has been repurposed. It holds Hard Rock Park’s headquarters (in the onetime Belk outlet); the Nights in White Satin indoor ride; and the Lost in the ’70s game arcade.
• Fantasy Harbor included a large artificial lagoon that at one point was a Jet-Ski concession. Hard Rock Park was seamlessly designed around it. The new Gibson guitar mega-statue on its shore is fitted with lasers that throw beams across the water after dusk; nightly fireworks explode over the lagoon.
The two swans that have lived there for the past eight years are now named Rock and Roll, and they’re quite used to noise: The entire park is directly under a major Myrtle Beach International flight path. The top of the Led Zeppelin coaster is just 13 inches shy of the FAA’s maximum-height limit.
• The frontage road still holds a derelict chunk of the Waccamaw Factory Shoppes. Investors hope to raze and redevelop the site as a retail-residential complex to be called Paradise City. The theme park is behind it.
A HIT OR A MISS?
Hard Rock hopes to attract 30,000 visitors a day and about 3 million a year.
But industry consultant Dennis Speigel wonders if Hard Rock can make those numbers in a troubled economy and when the industry is saturated with attractions.
“It’s a very hefty price at $400 million and the projections they have published are very ambitious,” he said. “Very few theme parks, with the exception of a handful, and primarily the Disney and the Universal Parks, have ever opened exceeding 2 million people in the first year.”
Jon Binkowski, the park’s chief creative officer, countered that there will be plenty of potential guests.
“There are 14 million visitors who come to Myrtle Beach and 13 million of them are families,” he said. After the family goes to the beach and eats out and plays miniature golf, they will want to spend the day at a theme park, he predicted. “We built this for the family.”
Steven Goodwin, the park’s chief executive officer, believes that Hard Rock may be more attractive to visitors than Florida’s theme parks.
“We’re 500 miles closer to the major population centers of the Northeast,” he said. “At $3.50 a gallon, that’s a big amount of money when you add it up. Plus there are a lot more affordable motels in Myrtle Beach.”
Story Credits: Mary Erskine, Myrtle Beach Sun; John Bordsen/Charlotte Observer; The Associated Press
