I was looking at video of the new restaurant and it appears to have metal siding. Kind of bums me out. The restaurant is very country contemporary looking. The video showed the light fixtures hanging from the foyer ceiling, and I didn't see 1880s anywhere. However, time marches on and the park has to accommodate over 2 million folk per year. Change must occur. The high quality is still there. I am chomping at the bit to get to see the new Rivertown area. Of course, I spent most of my time on park in that area at the diving bell, 1979-1984. Pretty much everything I remember in that part of the park has been wiped clean and all is new there. The only building original to the 1977 opening of the Deepwoods...later Riverfront...now Rivertown, is the old Wagon Works Barn, now called the White River Warehouse, which is adjacent to Tom and Huck's River Splash. March 17th is just a sneeze away. I'm excited about 2020 for SDC!
I agree. The metal siding appears to be a design change to save costs. It's still in theme and looks OK though.
This will only make sense to older SDC fans, but I'm also a little disappointed that the new ribhouse is so modern looking on the inside. From the video it looks like a lot of faux-rustic surfaces with plenty of bright lighting and lots of obvious fancy modern kitchen appliances. Some of this is unavoidable since you obviously need those appliances and it is a brand new modern building, but the old SDC way of doing things was to try as hard as possible not to take you out of the 1880-ish ambiance and now that isn't even a thought anymore. It's never been totally authentic, and obviously the whole park has always been very tough-in-cheek, but all the little things they used to do to hide technology added up and made the place more interesting even if it wasn't "real".
I know it's a topic that's been complained about many, many times on these boards, but some of the changes this year are a step up from what we used to think was going too far.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. Hardly anyone will notice that there has been a style change, and fewer will care or think it's a bad thing. For us old fans it continues to be hard to see the special ambiance of the city fade away into more generic-ness.
It also looks like the cinnamon bread is going to be a little different now? More like DW's version? Could just be the photo.
The city will keep evolving whether we like it or not. It just kind of sucks to see them slowly trending in the direction of making it more like a Cedar Fair park. There's still a lot of effort put into making it a great park at least.