Demolition - Part I

Posted by Betsy Barron (Chester Springs, PA, United States) on 19 May 2008 in Lifestyle & Culture.

Okay I'm not usually big on spinning a tale regarding my images - but the series of shots up next require some background info... here goes:

"Fans of Wild West nostalgia in the 1960s had a haven in Adventure Village, a theme park off the Black Horse Pike in McKee City. It is being demolished.

Ten acres of trees have disappeared in a month, including the dense perimeter that separated the 19th-century vibe from zippy 20th- and 21st-century traffic. The buildings that still stand have been hollowed out and stripped since the last tenants left in December; the period buildings were apartments four times longer than they were jails and train stations. The family turned the buildings into 13 apartments, and within a few years the property was sold to another family, the Humes.
Brian Hume lived there and was the sometime caretaker from 1978 to 2000. Asked what it was like to live in Adventure Village, he laughed and said the place's name was just as apt as when it had been a Wild West park.
"Just renting out those apartments in that spot, I think it attracted probably a different crowd," Hume said, remembering a host of mostly young, single tenants who liked the accessible seclusion. "A lot of times it was calm, but other times it would get crazy there. ... The police weren't all that unfamiliar with the property."

The complex kept changing hands, and "it just kind of became a ghost town," Wood said. But even as the buildings eroded, the value of the land spiked - it sold for $1.6 million in August 2005, then for $2.4 million this January.
As tenants were ushered out, thieves moved in, stripping siding, yanking out aluminum fences and copper pipes, even destroying the vintage gaslights the original owners had wanted to keep.
"The vandals did a pretty good job," Warner said.

Within weeks, everything will be gone, clearing the way for an Auto Lenders Liquidation Center this fall."

SOURCE: Press of Atlantic City

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