Flint’s grandest dream of the 1980s turned into one of city’s colossal failures of the century: AutoWorld.

Even today, memories of the short-lived and since-demolished theme park � conceived as a new element for the local economy and a boost to downtown � bring pain, snickers and ridicule for the community.

The story of the indoor park’s creation and collapse is rife with examples of poor planning and missed opportunities. Few today, in the wake of its failure and demolition, defend it, but that wasn’t the case early on. And some still think it could have been salvaged with changes and different marketing.

Conceived in the early 1970s as an automotive hall of fame, the first plans called for it to be built on a man-made island in the Flint River downtown.

That idea was jettisoned, in part because Midland in the meantime developed an automotive hall of fame.

While a dozen years ticked by, the plans changed several times as different consultants and designers were involved and civic leaders could not agree to proceed.

Backers said AutoWorld would make Flint a tourist destination, that it would provide entry-level jobs in the midst of a severe local recession, bolster new downtown businesses such as the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Windmill Place and help diversify the county’s tattered economy, which was dominated by General Motors.

By the late 1970s, the concept had evolved into a complex plan for a combination theme attraction and an automotive-related entertainment center. It was to be one of the first indoor theme attractions � a concept that has not worked out well in other locations throughout the country.

What began as a $30-million dream was on its way to becoming an $80-million reality.

Still, James S. Sheaffer, the former president of the Flint Area Conference Inc., which pushed for the construction of AutoWorld, the Hyatt and other downtown redevelopment projects, said he was proud to be associated with the planning of AutoWorld.

“Maybe AutoWorld was a silly dream, but I don’t think so,” Sheaffer said. “The people who were involved in the design and development of AutoWorld were very talented people, skilled and experienced.

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy to make it (AutoWorld) work. When it opened, the general overall quality was evident, with a couple of exceptions.”

Sheaffer noted that Flint was suffering high unemployment then, and that tourism was the fastest-growing industry in Michigan at the time.

He said many of Flint’s top community leaders in FACI wanted to tap some of those tourist dollars, even though many naysayers were predicting that tourists would never come to Flint. Supporters countered by pointing to nearby Crossroads Village, which had become one of the top 10 tourist attractions in the state.

As late as April 1982, the trustees of the Mott Foundation � a crucial financial backer � were undecided. A Flint Journal poll that month of seven of the 11 members of the Board of Trustees found only one � retired AC Spark Plug General Manager Joseph Anderson � who was solid in his support for the project.

“We aren’t going to go ahead with something that’s doomed even before the start,” said Harding Mott, son of foundation founder Charles Stewart Mott and father-in-law of William S. White, president of the foundation. “It’s a worthwhile attempt, but it would not be right for the community if it’s not going to work out.”

In early July 1982, White announced that the foundation would proceed with its funding for the project, which already had received commitments for state and federal grants, as well as $1 million from the General Motors Foundation.

Yet more than once, White announced that the project was in doubt because of delays in reaching agreement about the complex financing.

Then, during a three-hour trustees meeting Sept. 30, the board voted to proceed. It was not a unanimous decision, but the break-down in votes has never been made public.

White said that encouragement in the form of a letter by Mayor James W. Rutherford and a front-page editorial by The Flint Journal were key factors in the Mott board decision.

Rutherford, who was defeated by James A. Sharp when he sought his third term as mayor in 1983, said in a recent interview that he does not regret his support for AutoWorld.

Rutherford said that nowadays many people claim they thought AutoWorld was a dumb idea from the beginning. Few people were saying that at the time, he said.

“There were few people then who thought it wasn’t going to succeed,” he said. “I thought it would work out, that it was a good project for the community.”

Looking back, Rutherford said he thinks AutoWorld may have tried to be too many things for too many people, but he said maybe the problem was that there weren’t enough funds set aside for the huge start-up costs such a project would encounter in its first year.

Two weeks after the decision to proceed, just before the groundbreaking in October 1982, White was insisting that AutoWorld had to be ready to open on the Fourth of July 1984 � less than two years away.

Workers were still painting the huge facility on opening morning. There was no time to work out the bugs, of which there were many.

For starters, what was AutoWorld?

It was not an auto museum, although it had a small display of historic trend-setting cars and trucks; it was not a science center, although it had elements of that. And it was not a clone of EPCOT at DisneyWorld, although it borrowed some ideas from that huge attraction.

Features included a gigantic model of a car engine, a river running through a recreation of old-time downtown Flint � complete with “Vehicle City” arches � and a mishmash of entertainers, food vendors, rides and displays.

The gigantic sky-lit dome built onto the old IMA Auditorium to house half of the park was a spectacle and an engineering marvel in itself.

AutoWorld thus became a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas, as though the designers couldn’t decide what they wanted to do. The attraction was not easy to explain and probably impossible to portray in television commercials, which became part of AutoWorld’s troubled history.

Hollywood producer Richard Moore, who made the television commercials for the facility, made it appear that AutoWorld was a thrill park, which led many out-of-town visitors to be disappointed. He said he thought AutoWorld was “too boring” to attract people on its own merits.

In particular, the two so-called “dark rides” were a major disappointment. Costing millions to design and build, the rides were the major attractions inside AutoWorld. One was designed to be a humorous history of the automobile, with lots of Flint history, while the other was designed to capture the spirit of several of the nation’s leading auto race tracks.

Both were major duds.

“The two dark rides did not live up to expectations,” said Ghassan Saab, president of Sorensen-Gross construction company of Flint Township and one of the major contractors on the AutoWorld job. “They were supposed to rival the best of the Disney attractions, since they were designed by former Disney planners, but they didn’t measure up.”

In hindsight, Saab said he thinks after AutoWorld’s collapse, the owners should have been willing to spend the big money to build the kind of thrill rides that so many people wanted.

Still, the pre-opening situation looked encouraging when it was announced that Six Flags would run AutoWorld under contract, since the company had years of experience in running theme parks around the country.

There was considerable media interest in Six Flags’ weekly announcements about attendance figures.

The numbers told a grim story: a strong start, a week-by-week decline and an announcement in September � just two months after opening � that the company would no longer issue such reports.

All told, AutoWorld in its first year drew about 460,000 customers when 600,000 were expected.

Six Flags and AutoWorld’s ownership group, CRI of Rockville, Md., went to the Mott Foundation in January 1985 demanding a subsidy to keep AutoWorld open.

White reacted by announcing that he had no intention of putting up the funds. The Mott Foundation was not going to start giving subsidies to theme parks, White said, not even AutoWorld.

CRI fired back that it was going to temporarily close AutoWorld in two days.

The damage was done. AutoWorld was tagged as a loser and an object of ridicule by nearly everyone, including many former backers.

Rutherford, who had been defeated for re-election the previous year, said he was concerned at the time.

“Any business that opens and closes and opens and closes is in trouble,” he said. “If you don’t know if a clothing store is going to be open, you aren’t going to drive over there.”

Rutherford has said frequently over the years that AutoWorld would not have closed even temporarily if he had remained mayor.

“I would have persuaded Bill White and the Mott Foundation to do something to avoid closing it,” he said. “I think the Sharp administration didn’t care, so they did nothing.”

S. Olof Karstrom, city attorney in the Sharp administration, denied that, saying that City Hall came close twice to reaching agreement to modify AutoWorld, but the deals fell through. There were many attempts to fix the problems, he said.

“There were a lot of studies done on what to do,” he said. ‘The trouble with AutoWorld was that it was a one-shot deal. People came once and they weren’t interested in going back.”

AutoWorld reopened in May 1985 with a limited schedule, fewer employees and a reduced admission price, but the doom-and-gloom atmosphere never left, despite a $2-million effort to add new attractions, including a musical revue staged in an outdoor tent.

The Mott Foundation and CRI agreed to cover the first year losses, with the foundation paying $4.5 million and CRI contributing another $1 million.

After another year of red ink, Six Flags announced that it was bailing out on AutoWorld. CRI was forced out in December 1985, replaced by a Flint-based corporation, Flint Renaissance Inc.

Even though there were some brief and somewhat successful efforts to keep AutoWorld running with a reduced staff and limited hours, AutoWorld was tarred forever as a stupid idea.

Gary Haggart, director of the Downtown Development Authority under Mayor Matthew S. Collier, said he and Robert Lamb made an $82,000 profit in the year they ran AutoWorld with a tiny staff of a half-dozen full-time employees. They kept AutoWorld running by scheduling special events, such as boat and auto shows, in the late ’80s. There was also a short-lived effort about the same time to run the IMAX theater as an independent enterprise, but that effort soon failed.

Still, there was little support for keeping AutoWorld going, even with a small profit, he said.

“The politicians didn’t want to risk another failure,” he said. “Collier wanted to reopen it as a theme attraction, but his staff warned him he was risking his political future if it failed again.”

“It was done as a theme park, but it could have been resurrected as a new concept, a kind of convention center with a different twist. But there was no consensus to do it.”

Haggart said he tried to talk to White about its future when White was considering whether to demolish it.

“He (White) knew I had my heart and soul in it (AutoWorld),” he said. “He asked me before he decided to tear it down what I thought.

“I told him that I had done everything I could, but I couldn’t guarantee him that it would work. ... He said that all the alternatives had been explored. It was coming down.”

AutoWorld was permanently closed in January 1991, and demolished in 1997.

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