urbanSTL

addxb2 wrote: ↑

10:10 PM - Mar 06

Mid-America by Enchanted Parks will be the new name. Enchanted Parks has signed a 40-year lease with EPR Properties, so residents shouldn’t be worried about the company closing the park and selling to developers, he said. Harhl said he couldn’t disclose the monetary value of the St. Louis park, but Harhi called it the most valuable of the seven parks Six Flags is selling for a combined $331 million to EPR Properties. He said it initially wasn't included for sale. “It’s a unique park. We really pushed for Six (Flags) to include St. Louis,” Harhi told the Post-Dispatch Friday. “It’s a valuable property." 

Well yeah, it was the only park of the bunch that really made any money, so they needed it for the deal to make any sense.

But man, they're gonna have to spend a lot of time and money rebranding everything though, especially if they don't get to keep using the DC/WB stuff after 2026. Like, entire areas will have to be re-themed. JL alone cost like $15 million. Every SF branded thing will have to be replaced or painted over. The access road, the Holiday Inn, and the exit sign on I-44 will all probably have to be changed name-wise as well.

Harhi said Enchanted Parks will use this year to figure out what visitors want, which rides are popular and how operations work. He said the company looks forward to fixing up the amusement park and injecting it with life. “It should be seeing new attractions on a consistent basis,” Harhi said. 

Pretty concerning statement that a supposed amusement park operator doesn't already know how operations work. Also, all of the other info is pretty easy to get metrics-wise from existing data (even publicly available stuff), unless they're not getting the internal stuff in the purchase. Sounds like they're really just itching to tear down a lot of existing stuff, extract value as long as they can, then sell the land off to McBride or whoever in a few decades like SF corporate did with the other ~60% of the original land like 10ish years ago.