Disney's Dead Rival: The Forgotten Story of Pacific Ocean Park

There is nothing there now. A clean stretch of Santa Monica sand, a warning sign about underwater hazards, and beneath the surface, a few jagged wooden pilings that can still open a surfer's leg to the bone during a low tide. Twenty-eight acres of the Pacific Ocean used to belong to a theme park. A place where bubble gondolas floated seventy-five feet above the waves, where visitors descended in hydraulic elevators through simulated ocean depths, where a robotic atomic submarine reactor hummed inside a building made of plaster and hope. In 1958, it drew a bigger crowd than Disneyland. By 1967, its gates were padlocked. By 1975, fire and demolition crews had erased every trace of it from the earth.