Six Flags Great America

Just east of Interstate Ninety-Four in Gurnee, Illinois, the wooden lattice of a racing roller coaster rises above the parking lots. That coaster, called American Eagle, opened in nineteen eighty-one and still holds a record: the tallest, fastest, and longest wooden racing coaster in the world, two side-by-side tracks pitting trains against each other over four thousand six hundred and fifty feet of track.

The park underneath it has a more corporate origin story than its patriotic name might suggest. On May twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-six, the Marriott Corporation opened a theme park called Marriott's Great America on this site in northern Illinois. It was part of a deliberate expansion by Marriott into the theme park industry: the hotel chain simultaneously opened an identical park in Santa Clara, California, with the same name, the same themed lands, and many of the same rides.

The parks were designed by Randall Duell, an architect who had worked on Universal Studios Hollywood. Marriott's concept was to organize the park around American regional themes, a layout intended to give visitors the sensation of traveling through different eras of the country's history.

The parks did not perform as Marriott had hoped. The theme park division became an earnings problem, and in nineteen eighty-four, Marriott sold the Illinois park to Six Flags, making it the seventh in that chain. The Santa Clara park eventually passed to other owners and remains separately operated.

The Six Flags era brought more coasters, including the American Eagle. The park became the dominant amusement destination between Chicago and Milwaukee, drawing several million visitors annually through the summer season.

The American Eagle, which originally opened with both racing tracks running simultaneously, had one side mothballed for years before a restoration project returned both trains to racing operation for the park's fiftieth anniversary in twenty twenty-six. Two trains leaving the same station, side by side, dropping a hundred and forty-seven feet. The Marriott executives who sold the park would barely recognize what it became.