There used to be a water park in my hometown that had a bunch of slides and a wave pool. I used to go there all the time as a kid, and even went there as a senior on a trip. I went to birthday parties there, sometimes.

It closed in 2020 and never reopened because they had apparently been avoiding paying bills for years. It wasn’t just the pandemic. It was visible from the freeway, so I watched it slowly being demolished over the next couple years any time I passed by.

I haven’t found a water park that really compared to it yet. Most are either too small or part of a larger theme park, which is fine. It just seemed like the fact that it exclusively was a water park allowed it to focus more on the atmosphere and types of slides it had.

  • Yewb@kbin.social
    4·
    2 years ago

    The Texas from my childhood, most Texans dont give a shit about identity politics, you would think there are a bunch of brown hating cowboys - that was not the case Texas was incredibly tolerant.

  • Rainbows@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    Those wooden playgrounds. There was one I went to all the time as a kid. It was so much fun and had all kinds of rooms and nooks and crannies to play in. It got replaced with a generic plastic playground at some point, I think for safety reasons.

  • ivanvector@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    You perfectly described a water park in my home town, although mine closed down in the 1990s. It had a “silver bullet” slide, a bunch of conventional slides and a tube slide, a lazy river, a wave pool, a pretty decent arcade and a go-kart track, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember from spending big chunks of my childhood summers there. Birthday parties and school trips, too.

    After it closed down, some of the slides were moved to a golf course across town that wanted to expand, but it wasn’t as good and it was way too far to go by bus. The original park is the loading dock for a Home Depot now.

    • Hanhula@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      I feel that. Went back home for a visit last year and so much has changed. It’s bizarre, feeling disconnected from where I live and yet like home has moved on without me.

  • Clairvoidance@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    MY HOUSE
    Had to get demolished to make way for a lightrail
    kinda cool to have the key to a place that no longer exists at least

  • Tigbitties@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    There was a forest we use to play in behind my friends house . It had a few giant trees. They must have been hundreds of years old. One was 3-4 meters in diameter. We used to climb them using the coarse bark up to the branches and see how high we could go. You could see the whole neighborhood. Wonderful memories.

    That whole area is filled with Mcmansions now.

    • brownpaperbag@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      We had an incredible ravine that got destroyed for a highway that I’ve driven many times as an adult. It’s a rare trip that I don’t think back to the beautiful place where I spent countless hours of summer breaks being wild and free.

    • laivindil@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      Same where I grew up, worst part was the developer bought it like two decades ago, sat on it for five ish years (logged a single dirt road), then put in paved roads/utilities and a demo house for another five with empty lots cut, and the last ten or so have built maybe four more. So it’s not even utilized, they cut down huge swaths of forest and it’s just sat most of the time.

    • limelight79@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 years ago

      There are some woods in our neighborhood, which aren’t owned by anyone in the neighborhood. The risk is obvious. I would like us to buy those woods so we control them, but every time I say it, they start screeching, “I don’t want an HOA!” Neither do I, I have two RVs sitting in my driveway. But I would like some limited partnership simply for owning those woods…

    • irinotecan@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      This happened on a much smaller scale to me. My grandparent’s home was demolished to make way for a McMansion after they sold it. They were the only people to ever live in that beautiful house.

  • razorwiregoatlick@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    Hastings’s stores. They sold books, CDs, DVDs, tabletop game supplies, video games etc. It was always exciting to go and look even if my parents were not going to buy me anything.

  • EmptyRadar@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m getting old enough now where this is true for multiple things, but the ones that come to mind would be my schools - 2 of the 3 schools I attended have since been demolished. My high school is still standing, but the elementary and Junior High schools are gone now.

  • metaStatic@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    I graduated high school in 2000. we where the last free range generation, the next year high spiked security fences started going up around schools.

    I couldn’t imagine going to school behind a locked gate, man fuck that shit.

  • Sassygumsquatch@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    There was a roller skating rink called “Sweet Feet” that I had two birthday parties in but it collapsed sometime in middle school and was never rebuilt.