Death of an Amusement Park

All photos © carnivalofchaos.com

Today, I want to talk about arson. When we're not on about writing, language, books, or writing, we usually like to blog about murder and theft. Sometimes both. But arson is its own thing. Sometimes, it's for money. Sometimes, revenge. Just as often, it's because, to paraphrase Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, someone just wants to watch the world burn.

In the case of Chippewa Lake Park, we may never know why someone, or several someones, began torching the buildings in the idle amusement park. 

For perspective, Chippewa Lake Park was a destination only a few miles from my childhood home. In fact, my uncle began his farming career by working for a dairy farmer whose property overlooked the lake and its coasters. Evenings, one could often hear music coming across the lake, and not just your local band trying to gain a career while playing cover songs. In the park's last year of operation, Cheap Trick played a sold-out concert there.

These days, as the property converts to a county park with some of the rides and buildings still standing, Chippewa Lake is known as a ruin, increasingly overgrown, trees growing through the Ferris wheel. Until 1978, it was mentioned in the same breath as coaster meccas Cedar Point and King's Island. The company that owned the venerable amusement park needed to modernize. However, the village of Chippewa Lake, one of three villages along the eponymous lake, would require an upgrade to local infrastructure. So the park closed at the end of summer, 1978. Even Cheap Trick never knew it was their last gig there.

For about four years afterward, many of those who owned individual rides and attractions stayed within the park. Some lived there, moving to open parks in Florida in the winter. The closure simply became a warm-weather off-season.

Until 1982. Up until 1982, everyone concerned felt the park's eventual reopening would happen, even if it took a decade. That year, someone burned the Penny Arcade. In modern parks, Six Flags, Cedar Fair, and Disney own everything in the park. In more traditional parks before the modern era, many of the businesses and rides were owned by individuals and families. When the Penny Arcade went up, the hotel and grand ballroom were still prepped for a still-unscheduled reopening. Sadly, many vintage arcade machines were destroyed, and the family who owned the arcade lost everything. At that point, people realized the park might not open again.

A second fire in 1988 destroyed the picnic pavilion on the lakeshore. By then, nature had started to reclaim the park. The actual death blow came in 1991, mere weeks before I moved to Cincinnati. 

One weekend, a group of vandals were caught trashing the Chippewa Lake Hotel, one of the largest structures left in the park. Police ran them off. However, they came back after sunset and lit the hotel up. It was one of the biggest fires in surrounding Lafayette Township in recent memory.

The 1991 Hotel fire.
You could still smell it a
week later when I visited.

A coworker was also a volunteer firefighter for the department shared between the three villages along the lake. We worked third shift together, and the Saturday morning after the fire, he invited me out to see the damage. Hardly anything remained of the hotel, once considered a local landmark. But more jaw-dropping was the state of the park. Trees not only grew up through the Ferris wheel, but they had encroached on the Big Dipper, the park's wooden roller coaster. It no longer looked like an amusement park. It looked like an ancient ruin.

My friend said he didn't believe this or the pavilion fire were accidents or vandalism. He suspected someone intended to cash in on the insurance money, though he wouldn't say that to the press.

The last fire occurred in 2002, when the Grand Ballroom went up. (Cue "Smoke on the Water," minus Frank Zappa and the Mothers.) No, a guy with a flare gun or spiteful vandals did not set it off. It was a child playing inside who accidentally started it. Normally, beyond the child's safety (he escaped unharmed), the fire would not have posed a threat to the surrounding village. Only the summer cottages inside the park had become permanent homes. The ballroom's destruction threatened to spread to the cottages, forcing residents to flee. Firefighters were able to contain the blaze. But any idea of clearing the trees and brush and salvaging the park went up in smoke.

This last fire had clearly been an accident. The earliest fire, a tool shed in 1980, had also been accidental and might even have happened if the park had remained open. However, in between, the arcade, the pavilion, and the hotel all fell to arsonists. No one was ever caught, aside from the hotel.

Other parks in Ohio disappeared. Geauga Lake, eventually a Six Flags park before closing for good in the 2000s, simply couldn't compete with Cedar Point, Northern Ohio's huge coaster mecca. Similarly, LeSourdesville Lake, called Americana when I first arrived in Cincinnati in 1991, would close for a season, make a two-year stab reverting to its original name, then find itself stripped for parts before the New Millennium dawned. And Coney Island, originally the parent of King's Island, finally closed its doors in 2024, making way for a new facility for the Cincinnati Pops.

None of them succumbed to arson, though, the way Chippewa Lake had. Chippewa's ruins were finally demolished in the 2020s with the Ferris wheel (and its attendant trees) sections of the Big Dipper, and a few other rides serving as artifacts in a new Medina County park. So once again, Chippewa Lake welcomes summer visitors, but not thrill seekers or music fans. That might have changed if a handful of firebugs put down the matches.

https://www.carouselofchaos.com/chippewa-lake-park-demise/