The beginning of Boardwalk and Baseball

Harcourt Brace and Jovanovic invested a lot of money into the new park. It spent a purported $18 million buying the property from Jim Monaghan, almost double what he paid for it a few years prior. Harcourt went on to spend $25 million to make Boardwalk and Baseball, a boardwalk like you’d find in Atlantic City in the 1800s with a vintage baseball stadium. In addition to the huge, beautiful stadium were smaller baseball fields, a clubhouse and training fields. It also had its own mini Baseball Hall of Fame, borrowing items of interest from Cooperstown, New York. In addition to what I listed above, Boardwalk and Baseball had a combination of re-themed and brand new attractions. “The Grand Rapids” was built on its own lake and was a very long and tall long fume. There was Park Place, a peaceful setting where gas style lanterns and benches were meant to fill you with nostalgia.

ESPN recorded a special quiz bowl game show called Boardwalk and Baseball's Super Bowl of Sports Trivia. I question the use of the name of a national football championship at a park themed around baseball, but whatever works, I guess! The quiz bowl aired in 1998 and 1999 with teams representing colleges in the United States.

Most traces of Circus World disappeared, except for the extremely popular Florida Hurricane wooden roller coaster and the western area, where Boardwalk and Baseball added a “Colorado Riders” parody show making fun of the founding of the state which was repeated twice a day. 

The early end to Boardwalk and Baseball

Boardwalk and Baseball was largely considered an improvement over Circus World, but it still failed to draw a big audience. That was in part because of all the other theme parks in the area for tourists and natives to choose from. Another reason was Richard Howard, the CEO of Harcourt. His priority was on building a perfect stadium for very minor baseball teams rather than adding rides to compete with Disney World and the like. The Baseball City Royals and the Gulf Coast League Royals, two single-A teams, were based there for a few years. There were plans and permits for more roller coasters, but they never happened. In fact, over its three active years it had made zero changes to the selection of rides and attractions. Grand Rapids was the only real “ride” aside from what was already available at Circus World. That combined with Howard’s poor management of the park in general made Boardwalk and Baseball a losing proposition almost from the start.

It wasn’t attendance that spelled the doom of Boardwalk and Baseball, though. Rather, an attempted hostile takeover of the textbook publisher that owned it, though avoided, left Harcourt Brace and Jovanovic billions of dollars in debt. They had to sell all of their theme park holdings to the beer company Anheuser-Busch for a little over a billion dollars. That included Boardwalk and Baseball plus Cypress Gardens and SeaWorld. Though they originally claimed otherwise, it doesn’t seem like Anheuser-Busch ever really wanted to continue Boardwalk and Baseball. They wanted to eliminate the competitor to their own theme park in Tampa, Busch Gardens. Likely for that reason, Boardwalk and Baseball closed in January of 1990.

The final demolition and how both parks live on

Pretty much everything was demolished except for the baseball stadium and the IMAX theater that had been on the property since Circus World. Once all the baseball teams had left in 2003, the stadium and theater were also destroyed. Like the locations of a lot of failed parks, the area turned into a retail complex. However, both Circus World and Boardwalk and Baseball maintain a fairly fervent fanbase.

Circus World has been the subject of a number of features including the aforementioned Jim Hill Media article and an article at LostParks.com. People have even hosted gatherings that reunite individuals who worked at Circus World or simply enjoyed going there. That’s a clear testament to the impact it had in its short time.  

There’s a great collection of photos you can look at here to get a sense of the fun and whimsy at the park while it was open. Boardwalk and Baseball and Circus World also share a Facebook page that’s full of facts about both parks and photos featuring the good times to be had there. They are two more underdogs that went up against the goliath that is Disney and failed, but nevertheless created a lot of happy memories and interesting history along the way.