Posted on 05/24/2017 1:13:00 PM PDT by Red Badger
Walt Disney World's first water park, Disney River Country, closed 25 years after debuting in 1976. It has remained shut for more than 15 years. The park's pool was filled in with concrete last year.
Seph Lawless, a Cleveland-based photographer whose work includes abandoned spaces like the inside of the vacant Chicago-area Lincoln Mall, took photos of the empty Disney River Country for a series available in his forthcoming book, "Autopsy of America: The Death of a Nation."
You can check out more of Lawless' work on his website, YouTube channel and Instagram.
CORRECTION (May 24, 2017, 10 a.m.): Disney River Country was Walt Disney World’s first water park, not Walt Disney World’s first theme park, as an earlier version of this gallery said.
It is in the middle of the big lake at Disney World. There is no public access and no boats going there. It is posted. If you go there, you are in violation of park rules.
Also, IIRC, it is protected. Apparently buzzards like the island. They might be ugly, but they’re still protected as ‘raptors.’
It’s been a few years since I’ve been by it. It’s private property and has that abandoned look to it. I did go it in its heyday.
I'd never heard of this before, then I caught a show called Zombie House Flippers - zombie houses, not the flippers, themselves ;-p - where one of the homes had a pool where they were worried about this very thing. They had to empty it to repair it, and it had been raining a lot, so they wanted the repairs and refill done as quickly as possible. They were somewhere in the southern part of Florida.
Funny...doesn’t look a bit like an Ivy League university to me.
lawsuits
River Country is next to Fort Wilderness campground. The island in the middle of the lake was the original Discovery Island, which is now located at Animal Kingdom. The island is now called Bird Island and still has the old animal cages and buildings.
I understand removing the pool, but filling it? I would think it would be cheaper to remove the pool and fill with dirt than fill it with concrete. I would also expect that a huge mass of concrete would make the land less valuable in resale.
Could be a clue to what happened to Tom Petty.
I went to River Country in 1977. What a fun place! But I can understand how tough it must have been to keep the natural waters clean enough for people.......oh yuk, never mind.
It’s been idle for 15 years. They must have run out of Imagination..................
Disney doesn’t sell real estate....................
Because it will never have water in it again. Big hole in the ground is an attractive nusance
Correction:
They don’t sell THEIR real estate...................
This is not uncommon in Fl. If the pool is empty and we get alot of rain consistently,the ground water can actually force the pool out of the ground.
Theres a small hotel in my town
that filled in thier pool with concrete and turned it into a basketball court
You reminded me of the segregationist South of my youth. When all public facilities were ordered to integrate, municipal swimming pools were filled with concrete. I remember one tiny pool next to a fire station on the main road. One day kids were having fun all over the place and then, the next day, it was a level surface with the ground around it. Very few children understood. Further proof that Republicans didn't exist down here back then.
I went there with my Mom in the late 60’s and the wife and I took the kids there around 1990.
Why would someone fill in a pool with concrete?.....So they wouldn’t get sued up the Wazoo for someone drowning or jumping into an empty pool?
I wondered, too.
Why not just use fill dirt? Seems like concrete potentially makes for a lot of extra work later, if ever the site is to be used for something else.
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