At the peak of their fame, some resorts appeared to exist to swallow endless applause: a ballroom that used to be broadcast live on television, a desert beach being sold as the next great vacation, a train station that was elevated as a temple to motion. and so the people dispersed and the money moved and the water swelled and the roads turned and the places where people used to vacation began to have vines and dust and noise.
The collapsed tourist attractions make the best cautionary stories but they are also the lost pages of cultural history still decipherable, even where the structures no longer show. Once designed to be enjoyed or viewed, the following places demonstrate how easily a must-visit may turn into a blank spot on the map and why some ruins receive a second chance and others do not.
1. Grossinger Resort Hotel (New York)
Catskill. Grossinger was a closed-circuit universe, the Catskills Borscht Belt, a resort including a pool, a theater, a golf course, a ski slope and even a landing strip. In the 1950s and the 1960s it attracted elite summer clientele and star comedians Mel Brooks, Danny Kaye and Jackie Mason into a circuit in which night life and black tie events were part of the offer. The economics of the resort broke down when both the vacation tastes shifted in the 1970s and the warm-weather travel shifted attention to other destinations. It was finally demolished in 1986, and the long period of dereliction came to the end in 2018 when it started being torn down; the final buildings were destroyed in 2022.
2. Astoria on Beam Suntory Resort (Kew Gardens)
North Beach also possessed its glamour, and the Deauville assisted in the production of glamour. The hotel, at that time, housed the ballroom, a then-unfamous broadcasting studio, in 1964, when the Beatles spent nine days in the place, and one episode of their Ed Sullivan Show was filmed and broadcast on this place. The attendees present at the time seem like a mid-century roll call: John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, but its downfall was caused by everyday incompetence: electrical fire in 2017, years of closure, and damage during Hurricane Irma. In November 2022, the site was destroyed, and the memory of an aired crowd where a ruin was to be situated was left.
3. Salton Riviera (California) of Salton Sea.
Salton Sea was an overflow of the Colorado River and it was sold as a miracle of the desert a resort area just outside Los Angeles which was a destination of celebrities, politicians and so on in 1950s and 1960s. Its degradation now cannot be discussed outside of the context of ecology: rising salinity and pollution, the shoreline that ceased to be attractive, and the communities drained out by approximately 1980. It is materially tempting even in abandonment; the region is addressed as a prospective location of lithium, a substance that is related to rechargeable batteries. The weird fact to the sightseers is more of the senses than of the scenery: the often spoken sulfurous smell that may make nostalgia into sickness.
4. Six Flags New Orleans (Louisiana)
Having opened in 2000 (as Jazzland), the park enjoyed the wider popularity of the city and lasted five years until Hurricane Katrina altered the physical location and business case. The complex which was 140 acres was ruined due to flooding and it was never opened.
The theme parks discarded, their rides of Southern and Cajun references turned into a landmark that people recognize with a measure of familiarity and disbelief and development plans faltered again and again. The outcome is a rarity of destruction: one born in living memory, still within the framework of a continuing argument as to what the land should be.
5. Rhyolite (Nevada)
The boom of the rhyolite was so sudden as to be melodramatic: in 1904, at the height of the Gold Rush, the rhyolite was established and it became one of the largest of the cities in Nevada, with more than 10,000 inhabitants, a school, a hospital, an opera house, a symphony, and a stock exchange.
It was the beat of permanence given by the social infrastructure, dances, sporting events, a night life nourished by the saloons and a red-light area. But gold towns are experts in sudden fatalities and by 1916 Rhyolite was a ghost town. The bank, the jail, the train depot and the reconstructed Bottle House are now monuments to the fact that city can be a dream and a temporary trial.
6. Glenrio (Texas / New Mexico)
Glenrio was a geographic genius in that it stood on a state border of a route 66 making it possible to purchase gas in Texas with lower taxes and then to enter New Mexico with different alcohol regulations. The fall of the town was not cataclysmic in the sense of infrastructural such that in 1975 Interstate 40 bypassed it. Devoid of the stalled traffic, Glenrio was turned into a roadside relic, which is mainly preserved intact today and is included on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. It is a lesson that tourist economy is as nothing more than the form of a road.
7. Villa Epecuén (Argentina)
The Villa Epecuene was centered around faith in the waters of Lago Epecuen which had been regarded as medicinal and tourists were attracted by the site throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1985, the town was ingested by flooding of over 30 feet of salt water. By the time the water started to dry in 2009 the spot was again an exposed wreck, streets and buildings not falling at once, but growing out. Its narrative has the tale of a gradual unveiling: not the immediate dumping of a fire alarm but a that which required decades before it became evident.
The abandonment in these locations is seldom due to one reason only, it is a strand of environment, infrastructure and economy. What is preserved is also determined by preservation and reinvention. The saying goes that the greenest building is the one that is already built, in case of architect Carl Elefante. The quotation has a practical suggestion to tourist ruins: the demolition of ruins will bring an end to one narrative, and adaptive reuse may begin another – as residential, cultural space, or a new vision of an urban icon. To tourists, decay is not the permanent attraction. It is the disturbing transparency of the realization of how soon leisure may be gone, leaving behind stage sets that simply do not require performers any longer.
