Marineland Site Sold to Real Estate Group : Landmark: Plans for 450-room hotel and an oceanfront golf course may be revived, one of the new owners says.
As a boy, Jim York was a frequent and enthusiastic visitor to Marineland, a seaside amusement park on the Palos Verdes Peninsula where killer whales hurtled through the air, dolphins frolicked and an immense great white shark--stuffed and mounted--leered at delighted throngs.
Along with a generation of Southern Californians, York marveled as Orky and Corky--the popular male and female killer whale act--rocketed out of the water in awesome leaps. He laughed at the sea lions’ antics. He rode to the top of the 300-foot-high “sky tower” and peered over dramatic cliffs at the Pacific.
On Wednesday, he bought the site of the old park, closed by its former owner in 1987, for $28 million.
With an auctioneer’s shout in Downtown Los Angeles, York’s real estate partnership took title to the 102-acre Marineland site on the tawny southern bluffs of Rancho Palos Verdes. York said his group may revive plans to build a 450-room hotel and an oceanfront golf course on the land.
The sale marked the latest chapter in the saga of Marineland, where a public uproar ensued after its former owner, a well-known publishing firm, abruptly hoisted Orky and Corky from their tank one night eight years ago and closed the aging theme park.
Opened during the baby boom in the early 1950s, Marineland was enormously popular among Southern Californians who went there to entertain kids, work summer jobs or simply sniff the salt air. It featured the “Baja Reef”--where visitors snorkeled alongside iridescent clouds of tropical fish and petting pools stocked with sea creatures.
“I had two preschoolers at the time, and I used to go there with the other moms--it was the best resource we had,” said Susan Brooks, a Rancho Palos Verdes City Council member who visited the park more than 100 times. “The children would feed the koi--they’d eat right out of your hand. They were like huge goldfish.”
Marineland’s former owner, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, shut it down in February, 1987, trucking Orky and Corky to Sea World in San Diego in the middle of the night and firing 300 Marineland employees.
Harcourt officials said that they could not afford the $25-million cost of renovating the park, where profits were slim, and that the two famous whales should be in larger tanks at Sea World, also owned by the publisher.
But the closure angered many residents and turned into a public relations disaster for Harcourt.
The company became the target of hate mail and the butt of jokes by talk show host Johnny Carson. Pickets appeared outside Marineland and Sea World. Some schoolteachers and college professors refused to use Harcourt textbooks. Newspapers editorialized about “corporate greed.”
Seven Marineland animals--including Sundance, a star dolphin--died at Sea World. Officials at the San Diego park tried to rename Orky and Corky, but gave up in the face of vehement protests from the whales’ fans.
The park acreage was sold to Arizona-based developer James G. Monaghan, and state and local officials approved development of a luxury hotel and a nine-hole golf course on the land. But Monaghan declared bankruptcy, and the federal Resolution Trust Corp. acquired his mortgage from a failed New Orleans savings and loan. Last week, the RTC sold the note to York’s group.
Over the years, Marineland has deteriorated into a sort of ghost town by the sea, its windows smashed and walls defaced by vandals and graffiti-sprayers. Orky and Corky’s 650,000-gallon tank sits empty, and the sky tower forlornly reminds passersby of the old park’s demise.
York, a real estate investor who lives in Rolling Hill Estates, said that in the near term, his group plans to lease the land to farmers and movie producers and let charitable groups hold fund-raisers there.
He also plans to reopen the Catalina Room, with its spectacular ocean views, for weddings and receptions. He must dismantle the sky tower, under pressure from federal aviation officials.
York was in Arizona on business when the auction was held outside the offices of a Los Angeles legal newspaper, but one of his partners, Dan Platt, attended. After the sale was finished, in less than three minutes, Platt related how he, too, had attended Marineland as a child. But he struggled to remember details.
“It’s a long time ago, a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not one of those people who can remember everything about their childhood.”
