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Abandoned fast-food drive-thrus, barren hallways, still escalators, vacant subway terminals, foggy alleyways, elevators, shadow-looming bus stops, gas station neon set against black night, parking lots, playless play-places. In 2019, there was an explosion of appreciation for the liminal space. A photo of a transitory area devoid of life, usually with a smattering of film grain, an odd shadow or two, the makings of something you might have seen at one point but can’t pull the memory enough to remember. Swing sets in the moonlight, gymnasiums, party rooms in the roller rink, empty airports. There’s a sense of unbelonging in these images, as though you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to see. There’s a magnetism to them. An addictive quality, in the same way that everyone has a little fun in a haunted house. It’s not hard to understand why these images garnered attention. At least, not when you see one, anyways. They invoke an eerie nostalgia. That is, they did. Now, random images get posted on forums meant for liminal spaces. It’s hard to understand what’s liminal about a living room. Or an arcade. Or a library. These places aren’t transitional. You don’t pass through a living room, you live in it. And so, as the internet is prone to do, it took an original idea, spammed itself through a thousand variations until, like a game of elementary school telephone, the current crop of liminal pictures are normal images of cityscapes… but with fog. Who knows where we started? Does it matter anymore? It’s been so long and I’ve seen so many that I don’t remember if the feeling that I’m feeling now is the same feeling I had then. But, this isn’t an essay about the evolution, or devolution, of the liminal picture. Believe me, I’d love to write that, but trying to capture internet history is like trying to catch the tail of a breeze, or measure distance with a kaleidoscope. No, this is an essay about theme parks. One park, in particular, but before we get to that, we have to digest the full scope of it. I had never actually been to a real theme park until I was twenty-three. That isn’t true, of course, my parents carried me through Carowinds when I was small, but since I’ve been conscious, I’ve never been to one. Then, after graduating college and meeting a girl who, after a week and a half of dating, invited me to move across the country with her and live in her camper, I got to see my first: Disneyland. Because we were shooting up the coast at a breakneck speed, we had one day, twelve hours, to see both halves of the park. Truth be told, I didn’t take much in. I enjoyed the trip, surely, but I can’t remember being struck by anything in particular. I had four brothers growing up, so there weren’t a whole lot of Disney movies on. The relationship crumbled. I know. The relationship where I moved into a fourteen foot space with a woman I had known for less than a fortnight didn’t pan out. Hold the surprise. It wasn’t until my next relationship, my lovely girlfriend of today whose apartment complex is firmly rooted to the ground, where I got the bug for amusement parks. On a whim, we drove to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and had a phenomenal time. It became our vacation idea. Instead of the beach or a ski trip, we traveled to different amusement parks. Hershey Park, Dollywood, Kings Dominion, Silver Dollar City, and finally, Universal Studios. If you delve deep enough into this hobby, you start to learn about credit hunters. These are the “try-hards” of theme park appreciation. You see, every park one visits, and every ride within these parks, counts as an individual credit. It’s a hobby of those interested in the idea to log the credits, compare the rarity, and watch as a credit becomes defunct. Mostly, it serves as a chip on the shoulder. A little sly grin as one drifts off to dreamy slumber thinking, why yes, I DID get to hit the original splash mountain. Of course, there’s an absurdity in this. It’s prescribing a competitive logic to what’s meant to convey whimsy. This is another consequence of the internet, stripping things down to the most digestible, elitist take. I don’t mean to look down on the credit hunters. I have the logride app myself, and it’s fun to see exactly how many decimal points of miles I’ve spent on roller coasters. It’s nice to have a list of parks I’ve been to, and there is a little part of me that smiles the small smile as I think of the Mach Tower in Busch Gardens crumbling to nothing, but not before I got a ride on it. It’s not what draws me to the parks, though. What draws me in is the commitment to place as a communicative idea. Painters have their canvas, directors their sets, and writers their world, but only inasmuch a reader can imagine it. Theme parks take little imagination. You want to see the world in my head? Well, bam, there it is. Unconfined. Go walk around it for a day. There’s a beauty in the staunch directness of it. Strip the imagination from the equation, paint every inch of the park in the grand direction of narrative. Of course, that’s all false, and the best park designers know that it’s the spaces between attractions that attract the most thought. A story untold just around the corner. A path undiscovered. There’s a science to this sort of thing: a science with as central a book as a religion. David Younger’s “Theme Park Design” is the titan of theme park writing. It’s a sprawling text book, at least a foot in length, and heavy enough to pull down a small tree. It goes into everything. Rides, shops, restaurants, tastes, smells, colors, paths, queues, characters, and a million other things. Its “brief” history of theme parks starts with gardens in the 19th century. It won’t only detail what a sidewalk in a theme park might look like, it will break it down into specific categories, show diagrams, explain why each path might be preferable, and then give examples of every one. It’s the kind of writing one’d expect from a real-life world designer, almost bogged down in the awful amount of considered detail. And yet, Younger writes, “Even with meaningful detail, it may sometimes be better not to provide an answer but to allow the guest to create their own [...]” There’s a fidelity to experience present in theme park design that pulls at the artist in me. Nowhere can this be better exemplified than in Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Orlando. I loved Harry Potter as a kid. I read what I could of the books, played the video games, watched the movies, and even had a themed birthday party where a bunch of 8 year olds stuck brooms between their legs and threw a tennis ball into a laundry basket. I grew up, lost the passion, though I still kept ABC on in the background when it was Harry Potter weekend, but it wasn’t until that trip to Florida, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, where all the feelings came back to me. My girlfriend had never read the books, never seen the movies, and we made it a goal to read and see them all. They’re good children’s stories. Perhaps a little over-inflated in some circles and over-hated in others, but they do one thing extraordinarily well: establishing a place. Hogwarts is adventure incarnate. It’s dripping at the core with whimsy. Reading the books got me thinking about the role a place plays in our lives. A kid needs a place. And for a while, they had them. Baseball fields, summer camps, creeks, lakes and ponds. There were skateparks and play places and treehouses and movie theaters. All of these places still exist, of course, but a drive through them will show that they aren’t brimming with youths like they once were. A lot of these places have even become templates for the foundation of liminal pictures. It’s ironic. The internet, which is a leading force in what keeps kids inside, is now romanticizing and commenting on the surreal nature of the abandoned outside. Because that’s something not-so-obvious about the idea of the liminal: it’s almost always drenched in nostalgia. None of this is better highlighted than in the hotspot for liminal spaces. The shopping mall. Logically, it’s plain to see why shopping malls are collapsing by the dozen. Online stores can offer a wider selection, a lower price, and a lack of hassle. Of course, the mall once represented a lot more than a place to buy a sweater. It was the hub. A kind of postmodern embrace of the capitalistic impulse of 80’s commercialism. Now, most of them are ghost towns, with stores barred shut and bright, sterile hallways empty. As a kid, I envied my older brothers who would put on their ripped jeans and Phitens and have our mom drop them off at the local mall to… come to think of it, I never knew what they did… but I was young and they were old and cool and out late. Malls had started dying by the time I was old enough to stay out. My friends and I messed around in an abandoned outdoor shopping center in our free time. It was built, but no shops were ever put in, besides a Dunkin, a dress store, and a few odd restaurants that came and went. Most of the buildings were vacant. It was the product of hopeful executives, who had placed all their marbles on a line that had gone up for decades, and depended on it to continue to do so. Amazon ruined all of that. This is not to bemoan the move to a virtual world. I’m not some soapless hippy pitched out in the Alaskan bush, nor am I a kid trying to fit in with the generations above me– a kind of finger wagging, scowl wearing group who loathe the pop stars, tweeting, and god forbid, electronic cars. No, this is just the unsubstantiated and gut-feeling analysis I have as a kid who lived through it. The virtual world isn’t weird anymore. My generation was born into it. Some of my dearest childhood memories involve Club Penguin. So, it feels like an oddity that the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, was opened to the public in 2019, the same year that liminal pictures started to carve their scene online. And I’m not kidding about the name. It’s called the American Dream mall. It’s enormous. Three stories with all the familiar trappings of a mall. A labyrinthine design, too many skylights, random inclusions of corporate art, you name it. I assume in an attempt to modernize the concept, the mall has embraced a priority for the paid experience rather than the object. Don’t get me wrong, there are stores, but within the walls, there’s also an ice rink, a legoland, a ski-hill, and even a waterpark. And then, tucked away in a corner of the mall is the Nickelodeon Universe indoor theme park. Winter came and my girlfriend and I shot up north for a visit. There is another indoor Nickelodeon theme park in Minnesota, but it was created in 2006, and even then it just filled in the space that was left by a Snoopy themed park. The Nickelodeon park in New Jersey was different. It wasn’t founded decades before the internet truly took off, filling in the theme for a park that already existed. No, this park was created in the midst of the move to the internet. Amazon was well established, Netflix was finding its stride, Discord was connecting people. This park launched as the interest in malls in general waned. So my girlfriend and I arrive at our hotel, the Hilton across the street from the American Dream mall, at 7:00 p.m. on a rainy winter night. We had tickets for the amusement park the following day, and because we weren’t sure how much of the mall we’d get to see, we took the five minute drive to putz around an hour before it closed. There was something immediately off about the mall. Like I said, it’s dizzyingly large, and yet most of the hallways were empty. Occasional souls littered the benches, and the food court had some traffic, but all the hallways branching out from that central point had little to no action. Shop workers looked up from their phones as we passed by, sometimes smiling, but mostly not. Corporate muzak hummed away about a fight song to no one but us. Industrially sized Christmas scenes sat vacant. It was eerie, but in its defense, I’ve worked enough jobs to know that any place gets a little wonky a half-hour to close. The workers are simultaneously restless and depleted, the only guests left are those either ignorant or apathetic to the closing time, and the hum of what is usually background noise now gets thrusted to the frontal lobe. Vacuums, air conditioning, locks clicking. It was easy for me to play devil’s advocate. It was January, a weekday no-less, school had just started, people were done Christmas shopping, they were about to close, etc. We went back to the hotel, and I was still convinced the theme park would have lots of foot traffic to deal with the following morning, and I slept well knowing that the eerie feeling of the real-life liminal wouldn’t be there to knock off my circadian rhythm. Nickelodeon Universe has twenty-eight attractions listed on the logride app. I’d argue that no more than ten of these rides could be ridden by adults without a weird glance from everyone else. That is not a criticism. It is a park themed after a kid’s television network. Of these ten, three were down for maintenance. Jimmy Neutron’s Atom Smasher, Sandy’s Blasting Bronco, and the holy grail of the park, TMNT’s Shellraiser. If there was one main appeal of the park, hell– of the entire mall, it’s Shellraiser. It’s a roller coaster that reaches speeds of 63 miles per hour, has seven inversions, lights up at night, and presents guests with the most uncanny roller coaster feature that I’ve ever seen. A 90° vertical climb that peaks right above the roof of the park, and then drops 121.5° towards the Earth. That’s mind boggling to think about. It drops beyond vertical. It’s practically upside down on the downhill. Take a second and google the Shellraiser’s drop. You’ll see what I mean. My girlfriend and I were so excited by it. It had been down for maintenance the month leading up to our trip, but opened the day before. Well, lo and behold, it was being worked on… along with the two other rides. We were bummed. That said, we’re not ones to sulk, so we pulled up our big-people-pants and tried to enjoy what was available. There’s a lot to love at that little park. The workers are kind and helpful, the rides that were open ran consistently, and they fill the expansive space with lights and colors. I contend that from the eye-line down, it’s the most well themed park on the planet. There’s dozens of sculptures, figures, and characters in wacky situations, some of them life size. There’s places for pictures and unique floor patterns and the walls are painted thematically. It’s a beautiful park, so long as you don’t look up. Of course, there’s the blimp, which has its own unique charm to it, but beyond that, it’s just… scaffolding. An inconceivable amount of it. It contorts and twists along in diagonal directions, connecting tubes to pipes to pillars to skylights, casting a web about the entire place. It stretches off until in the vague distance, one can make out the back windows. But we won’t get there yet. We arrived at the park fifteen minutes before they opened and watched as clueless guests descended the escalator, were told to turn around, and sulked their way back to the entrance. The park opened quietly, in a lazy Spring sunrise kind of way. At some point, without us noticing, a worker took down the stanchion and snuck the park open to the public. We rode down onto the floor, the great orange blimp oozing a creative green play area. There were maybe fifty people in the entire place. Our initial lap around the park showed off the impressive Shellraiser, the squealing of the Slime Streak overhead, the smell of popcorn. It had all the makings of a great day. The number one complaint against most theme parks is wait times. People hate standing in line. They’ll duck a ribbon to avoid standing still, and yet, while wandering around Nickelodeon Universe, getting on every single ride without a moment's hesitation, I couldn’t help but feel that I missed the congestion. I yearned for the dodging of walkway-blocking crowds, the spilled food, the downright concerning overheard conversations. There’s an added feature of theme parks that no one thinks about: the guests are as much of an attraction as the rides. There’s shared unity, an idea that everyone is here to enjoy. Strip that from a place, and one is left to do all the heavy lifting. There’s no awe in the air, it’s got to come from the self. We stayed at the park for a few hours, riding rides and playing in the arcade. Eventually, my girlfriend noticed a sign that had a picture of a Spongebob pin and loose instructions on finding a guest. We asked a worker, but he seemed to have no idea. Then we asked the man running the gift shop. Apparently, the workers are supposed to grab a lanyard every day that is covered with pins, and one of them, the one pictured on the sign, is a limited release. If a guest finds the worker and presents their own pin that they got in the gift shop, they’re able to trade and receive the special pin, which grants one a free-day’s access into the park. We had no interest in the free day. It was a long drive for us, but we wanted to see who had it. I’m not kidding, we probably talked to thirty workers, and only two or three even knew what we were talking about. Most didn’t even have lanyards. This is not a complaint about the place or the workers, and I’d feel mighty bad if someone took it as much, but I do think it serves as a good microcosm for the feeling of the park. It’s thoughtful, it’s full of cool ideas, but there’s just something… off about the park, especially in their off season. All the pieces are there to make a great thing, but it’s almost like a trick puzzle. Once the last piece is in place, you see it for the optical illusion it was the whole time. As the day progressed, attendance rose, but never to the point where the rides had wait times. See, the park isn’t like others. It doesn’t require a ticket to enter, only to ride the rides. The expectation, I suppose, is to bring more people into the park, but it never got close to filling up. We eventually left the park. That night, in our hotel which stared down at the American Dream mall, as my girlfriend was fast asleep, I started thinking about a conversation we had had the previous night in the mall. Walking down the vacant, fluorescent hallway, I said, “You know, when I was a kid, my brothers went to the mall to have fun. Or the movies. I never see any kids at places like that anymore. Where do they go?” “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’ve been seeing this trend on Tiktok called the ‘rot-in-bed-challenge,’ where people are trying to stay an entire twenty-four hours in their bed.” As with online trends of that nature, be it tide-pods or Bush did 9/11 jokes, it’s hard to differentiate between the sincere and the ironic. Some posts are intentionally rage-inducing, taken out of context to get an older generation angry at the younger one, a tale as old as time. No, we’re not really eating tide pods. And I can’t imagine many of us want to rot in bed, but as I stood in the back of Nickelodeon Universe, where the three attractions surrounding me were closed, and there was not a worker or guest in sight, I did feel as though a place was dying. There was a French existentialist weight in the air, a Don Delillo passage, a Modest Mouse lyric. Maybe the youths have lost their place. Maybe it was stripped from them by the internet. Maybe the conflict of generations comes from a place of guilt, not rage. A sort of, “Oh, all the things we progressed has led to something different, and we’re not sure if it’s better, and now it’s their problem, not ours.” And maybe the Nickelodeon Universe in the American Dream mall won’t last forever. It probably won’t. But here’s an idea. To a generation like mine obsessed with the idea of the liminal space and the third place. A generation intrigued by the eerie and abandoned. A group who didn’t grow up in modernity, or even post-modernity, but in whatever comes after that. The Nickelodeon Mall is, hands down, the best place to experience these weird feelings in real life. I don’t mean to embrace it in a this place sucks but let’s do it anyways type of way, I mean that the image of this park and the reality of its creation has clashed in such a way that it has created the perfect uncanny feeling. It was born into an era that was already moving away from it. It can induce and capture all those indescribable things in your chest. In a time where things are ironic or post-ironic or post-post-ironic, the Nickelodeon Universe has, unwittingly, thrown all those things into a blender and given it to the public. You can have an existential crisis next to Jimmy Neutron’s Atom Smasher… for free. You can take a lovely, quaint little ride on a train that weaves through the impossibly constructed coaster mess. You can browse the merchandise from the shows you loved as a kid, and see that they don’t only still exist, they’re keeping up with the times, cashing in on memes. During a visit, you’ll feel nostalgia stripped from you and validated, you’ll feel alone and comforted, you’ll see the death of one thing and, perhaps, the birth of another. Other parks might commit to communicating an eerie feeling with their whole heart. Jack-o-lantern’s on every corner, paid actors following you around, fog pumped into every acre of the park, but none of them can compare to the dread of isolation you’ll feel as you walk up the empty stairs to Slime Streak a fifth time. There’s a contradiction in the park, a paradox that unravels the longer you stay there. I’m not sure what it is. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I know one thing for certain. It’s something you need to see.

Fancy new machine.

I'm satisfied that one day I will have lower my expectations for the ride experience instead of lowering my expectations for being able to ride it at all.

yeah not the most exciting announcement.

Update: they are adding a Christmas event and opening late Nov - Jan 4.