NEWS: Chippewa Lake Park eyed for music venue overhaul

[jedimaster1227]

http://www.ohio.com/news/developers-eye-chippewa-lake-park-as-entertainment-spot-1.436843

 

Two brothers with lifelong ties to Chippewa Lake Park are seeking investors to turn the shuttered land back into an outdoor entertainment venue.

 

Scott and Brian Jones said their plans call for a pavilion and outdoor seating for 8,000 to host 30 musical acts a year. Their plans also call for 300 campsites on 30 wooded acres and an open-air market for more than 100 vendors.

 

Scott Jones, who runs Jerry Bruno Productions, and Brian Jones, president of Suburban Builders and Remodelers, hope to raise $2 million to purchase the former amusement park site.

 

“We’re not just reviving the park and bringing back the live music, we’re going to restore the beautiful land and contribute to its surrounding communities while preserving a legacy,” Scott Jones said.

 

The Medina County park closed in 1978 and development efforts have all failed. Most recently, in 2008, out-of-town developers sought to bring a resort to the lake. The deal failed and ownership reverted back to Continental Business Enterprises Inc., which has owned the site since 1969.

 

Many of the original amusement park rides and buildings are long gone. However, trees and weeds have swallowed up the remaining Ferris wheel, leaving the park with a spooky post-apocalypse feel. So creepy is the setting, the 2010 horror movie Closed for the Season was filmed on the site.

 

The Jones brothers hope to take the scariness out of Chippewa Lake Park, a spot the family had visited for more than six decades. The Joneses’ goal is to raise money to purchase the land and begin the development project. They intend to open the site for three seasons a year beginning in 2015.

 

They want to restore the site as an entertainment spot and have one or two of the old amusement rides left as monuments to the past.

 

“We’ve dreamed about doing this exact thing for years,” Scott Jones said.

 

To see drawings on their design plans, visit their website at http://flyingcages.com/.

[gisco]

Good luck to them. It seems that the lake front property would have attracted somebody by now to develop something on that spot.

[cfc]

It has one major handicap: It's in Ohio.

Edited October 16, 2013 by cfc

[Jew]

If this actually does happen, leaving those rides that had been left to rot would actually be a pretty cool side attraction for visitors.

[Hawkman]

I doubt this will ever happen. The first project that was proposed for the site stopped in 2009 and the bank took the land back in 2012.