Freestyle Music Park, formerly called Hard Rock Park, was a music-themed amusement park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Built on ,http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/hrp/ Hard Rock Park page – The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News the park was located at the intersection of US 501 and the Intracoastal Waterway. It included part of the former Waccamaw Factory Shoppes in Fantasy Harbour, and its headquarters was located in Mall 3.
The park opened to the public on April 15, 2008, but following financial issues, it closed later that year on September 24. It reopened under the Freestyle brand on May 23, 2009, but it closed permanently at the end of the season due to mounting financial problems and lawsuits. The amusement park sat abandoned and was frequently vandalized until its complete demolition in February 2022 to develop a FedEx industrial center on the site.
History 1999–2008: Development and opening
Jon Binkowski, a businessman from Florida who had worked in the amusement-park industry, bought a small theater in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 1999 or 2000. The theater, known as the Ice Castle, did not attract as many guests as Binkowski had expected. Binkowski and Rank Group executive Steven Goodwin began developing plans for an amusement park around the Ice Castle known as Fantasy Harbour. Early in the planning process, Binkowski and Goodwin considered theming the park to the four seasons of summer, spring, winter and fall. After investors said a season–themed amusement park would be too generic, Binkowski considered partnering with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to create an amusement park themed to MGM films, but this idea was too costly. Finally, in 2002, Binkowski proposed a Hard Rock Cafe–themed park in a late-night email to Goodwin, who himself had worked for Hard Rock Cafe in the late 1990s. They spent two hours drawing up plans for the park in a Kinko's store in Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Plans for a Hard Rock-themed amusement park were released in 2003, but at the time funding and licensing agreements had yet to be finalized. The park was budgeted at $250million by January 2005, and Binkowski and Goodwin sought $25million to $30million from the government of Horry County, South Carolina. However, as Binkowski and Goodwin were reluctant to submit detailed business plans, members of the county council refused to approve the bond financing. AVX Corporation CEO Dick Rosen and other investors including Ziel Feldman and Safe Harbor Capital Partners managing partner Amnon Bar-Tur created two companies. Myrtle Property Owners I, which invested in the proposed theme park and Myrtle Property Owners II which bought land from Rosen with the intent to build a hotel along the Intracoastal Waterway in October 2005. A feasibility study predicted three million visitors a year in the park's first year, with growth of nine percent the second year and decreasing growth rates after that.
By 2006, a licensing agreement with Hard Rock Cafe International (USA), Inc. was reached, two days before the Ice Castle had been scheduled for foreclosure. The Hard Rock name was licensed from the Rank Group Plc and later the Seminole Tribe of Florida-owned Hard Rock International, owners and operators of the Hard Rock Cafe and Hard Rock Hotel and Casino brands , to HRP Myrtle Beach Operations, LLC, which designed and built the park, for a fee of $2.5million per year. Africa Israel Investments owned the majority stake in the park. Investors also included Tim Duncan and AVX Corporation CEO Dick Rosen. Financing also included a loan of $385million, though the park only cost $225million to build. Most of the financing, about $305million, was junk bonds. Real estate owners and investors in Myrtle Beach also agreed to give the project $37million in cash, along with several parcels of land worth $25million, if they could obtain a partial ownership stake in the park.
A groundbreaking for the park took place on July 13, 2006, although few details of the park had been announced by then. Due to the various unexecuted plans for the site over the years, many local residents were skeptical of whether the proposed park could be completed. As late as March 2007, few details had been revealed about the park, even though its operators had begun hiring the first of 3,000employees and were looking for a $3million tax abatement from the government of South Carolina. Details of Hard Rock Park were officially announced in April2007 when its promoters began advertising the park in six cities. At the time of the announcement, Hard Rock Park was to be the first major new amusement park in the United States since Legoland California in 1999. The park's developers also opened a preview center where they displayed a scale model of the park, as well as renderings of attractions. Construction for the park took place during the same year. The park's primary attraction, Led Zeppelin The Ride, topped out during July 2007.
Even during Hard Rock Park's construction, questions arose over whether the park was viable. During the construction process, amusement industry expert Dennis Spiegel said the planned park was "questionable" since it could not operate year-round. Local businesspeople also expressed concerns about the projected guest counts, which they believed were overly high; according to Hard Rock Park's developers, the park was supposed to attract 30,000 guests per day. The park's financing consisted mostly of junk bonds, so the park would be forced to make extremely high interest payments on these bonds if they failed to meet the projected guest numbers. Park representatives planned to rely on word-of-mouth marketing instead of a dedicated marketing campaign, and they chose to only partner with certain "preferred" hotels rather than allowing all local hotels to sell tickets to the park. Although the park had been planned to operate for ten months per year, this ultimately turned out not to be the case.
2008 season: Hard Rock Park Following a soft opening in April 2008, Hard Rock Park officially opened on June 2, 2008, with a concert by Eagles and The Moody Blues. The park's opening ceremony was accompanied by a golf tournament that was closed to the public (although this had not been the original plan), where few celebrities showed up. The park featured six "rock environs" celebrating rock's culture, lifestyle, legends and irreverence. These rock environs included the All Access Entry Plaza, Rock & Roll Heaven, British Invasion, Lost in the 70's, Born in the US and Cool Country.Hard Rock Park Turns Up The Volume On The Family Leisure Scene , Press Release At opening, the park had amusement rides, live shows, interactive elements, kids' play areas, gardens, shopping and dining attractions. The park included an amphitheater with 10,000-person capacity featuring live daily shows and special performances. The attractions were divided between six zones and included three major roller coasters, in addition to a water playground themed to the country of Jamaica, several stores, and a 1960s-themed cafe. The park's headquarters, an arcade, and one of the rides were located within the abandoned Waccamaw Factory Shoppes.
The park opened to positive reviews. The Times of London's writer Chris Haslam concluded that America's newest theme park brought the genre "from the preschool plastic of Disney to a new age of insubordinate adolescence through a combination of nerdy attention to detail, startling irreverence and sly wit." Beth J. Harpaz, Associated Press travel editor, declared Nights in White Satin: The Trip as one of her all-time favorite rides from any park. However, in light of the frozen credit markets during the 2008 financial crisis, the park could not secure sufficient financing to underwrite its planned advertising campaign. As the 2008 economic downturn deepened during the summer, high gas and hotel prices coupled with limited advertising by the park led to lower-than-expected attendance. The park cited "macroeconomic conditions that significantly depressed overall demand in the travel and leisure industry" and a lack of cash to advertise. The park had borrowed a lot of money and could not convince investors to provide more help to keep the park going.
Despite the park operators' reluctance to offer discounted tickets, they began offering discounted tickets during Black Bike Week, as well as to hospitality workers and to residents of the Carolinas. As early as the beginning of August 2008, Hard Rock Park was in danger of bankruptcy, in part because there were so few visitors, and the park did not have enough money in its reserves to offset its lagging attendance. Changes were made to operating hours and planned operating days. The original closing time of 1 a.m. was moved up to 10 p.m. in August and the park moved to weekend-only operations after Labor Day. With an earlier end-of-season planned on November 2, the park scheduled no concerts past August 30. Hard Rock Park recorded only 370,000 guests during the 2008 season.
2008–2009: Early closure, bankruptcy and new owners In September 2008, Africa Israel Investments decided to write off its entire $10million investment in the park "due to liquidity difficulties the park is experiencing". Hard Rock Park then announced that they were ending the 2008 season over a month early, laying off most of the employees, and had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time of the filing, the park expressed hopes of reopening in 2009; the following month the company announced plans to sell the park. In January 2009, the company converted to Chapter 7.
In February 2009, the Delaware bankruptcy court declined to force an auction and approved the sale of the park to FPI MB Entertainment (FPI) for $25 million. FPI MB Entertainment was a joint venture of FPI US LLC, a company incorporated in Delaware, and MB Entertainment. The partners included Roundbox Advisors, Freestyle Park International, Baker Leisure Group, and two of the park's original owners, Thomas M. Hiles and D. Tim Duncan. Baker Leisure Group managed the day-to-day park operations. FPI had to completely re-skin and overhaul the park to comply with court rulings.
On April 2, 2009, the new owners announced that the Hard Rock name would be dropped. While Hard Rock International had been willing to continue use of the name if conditions could be met, the owners felt that changing the name would give the park a more positive image since the old name was connected with the bankruptcy; also, the "Hard Rock" name was not considered family-oriented. Because of the name change, the bankruptcy court required all Hard Rock souvenirs to be destroyed. Later that month, FPI unveiled a new name for the park: Freestyle Music Park, stating that it would pay homage to a variety of musical genres, including rock n' roll, country, reggae, beach music, pop, R&B, alternative, Christian, disco, and rap. The name does not refer to the Latin music genre, according to sales and marketing director John Stine.
In May 2009, HRP Creative Services Co. wanted to make certain attractions separate from the park the new owners planned, with former park CEO Steven Goodwin wanting the new owners to pay royalties. However, a Delaware federal judge said on March 30 that some of the previous owners still owned intellectual property rights relating to the original theme. The original owners then sued FPI, claiming they had not done enough to change the park, and that the new owners were using intellectual property that was not theirs. This action threatened to delay the reopening.