The World of Sid and Marty Krofft

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The World of Sid and Marty Krofft was an amusement park in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, opened to the public in 1976. It was based on the various tv shows of the sibling duo Sid and Marty Krofft. It was notable for being the world's first entirely indoors amusement park. It was built in the Omni International complex. Due to poor attendance it was closed after just six months. Among other things, the lack of attendance was blamed on the fact that the Omni complex--the park's home--was not perceived as a safe place to visit at the time when the park was open. The complex has since undergone many different renovations and changes, most notably changing from a largely outdoor complex to a completely indoor one. The level of security is much higher today and the complex no longer has a reputation of being a dangerous place to visit. The amusement park occupied a 6-story section of the Omni which was several stories higher than the ground floor. The world's longest freestanding escalator was built for the park, and it was responsible for shuttling guests the 8 stories up to the entrance of the park from the ground floor level of the Omni complex. Today the CNN Center is in the building where the amusement park used to be, and the escalator is now used to shuttle guests to the entrance of the CNN studio tour. The Omni Center now contains a hotel and mall (in addition to the CNN Center), and it is connected to Philips Arena and the Georgia World Congress Center.

[edit] Park features

In keeping with the highly creative nature of the park's namesakes, the park featured elaborate attractions such as a large carousel adorned with crystals, and also a giant pinball machine themed ride in which the riders would sit inside large ball shaped pods and ricochet through the "machine" in a way similar to a ball inside a real pinball machine. When a person bought admission to the park, they received a "ticket booklet" with four tickets, one for each area. After riding the escalator up to the top floor, visitors worked their way down through the four areas of the park. Tranquility Terrace occupied the top 3 levels out of 6, followed by Uptown on the next lowest level, Lidsville on the next, and Living Island Adventure on the bottom level.