New Owners to Close Marineland Aquatic Park March 1

Marineland, the venerable aquatic park on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, will be closed March 1 by new owners who plan to develop the property “in an orderly and dignified fashion,” it was announced Thursday.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the company which bought the 33-year-old facility for a reported $23.4 million on Dec. 30, said it is closing the attraction because the picturesque park is losing money, and more than $25 million in improvements will be needed if the park is to break even financially. Marineland’s 300 employees will be given severance pay and help in finding new jobs, the company said in a prepared statement.

Jack Snyder, spokesman for Harcourt, could not be reached for comment, and Marineland spokeswoman Laurie Armstrong said she could not elaborate on the statement. Harcourt, known primarily as a book publisher, owns four aquatic parks, including Sea World in San Diego.

It could not be immediately determined what will happen to Marineland’s many animals. A telephone recording on Thursday still invited tourists to visit the park’s “many fascinating sea exhibits,” including the Baja Reef, billed as “the world’s only swim-through aquarium.”

Nor could it be determined what development plans Harcourt has for Marineland, whose more than 100 acres of prime oceanfront property falls under the jurisdiction of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes.

However, Harcourt’s statement noted: “The publisher of (poets) Carl Sandburg and T. S. Elliot (sic) does not desecrate what it touches.” Harcourt also said that any development would retain public access to the shorefront.

The Rancho Palos Verdes City Council on Monday passed an emergency ordinance restricting development of the land. Any future development plans could also be appealed to the California Coastal Commission.

When Harcourt bought Marineland after little more than a week of negotiations, it said it planned to continue to operate the park under the same name with present management.

As recently as Monday, Edward Asper, a Sea World vice president, told a reporter that Harcourt was still evaluating Marineland to determine its future. Asper said there were no immediate plans to make changes at the park.

But fears that Marineland might be closed surfaced when killer whales Corky and Orky, Marineland’s premier attractions, were trucked during the night of Jan. 20 to Sea World in San Diego. At the time, Marineland officials said the move was made so that the animals could breed with Sea World’s three killer whales.

Yet in its announcement Thursday, Harcourt said it moved the whales because they were “in danger” by being held in a tank that was too small. The cost of a new, 5-million-gallon pool for the whales was estimated at $17.5 million on top of another $8 million in needed park improvements, Harcourt said.

Without the improvements and the new whale pool, annual attendance would not reach the 1.2 million required to break even, the company said. And without the improvements, the park would lose up to $2 million a year, it added. Last year, 825,000 people paid to visit Marineland, and attendance has reached 1 million only once since 1971, the company said.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich owns Sea World parks in San Diego, Cleveland, Ohio, and Orlando, Fla., as well as another aquatic park in Florida called Cypress Gardens. The Orlando-based firm is planning to open a baseball-theme amusement park in Florida this year and will unveil a Sea World park in San Antonio in 1988.

“The real issue of this is whether they bought a pig-in-a-poke as their press release indicates, which is hard to believe,” said Bert L. Boksen, an analyst who follows Harcourt for Raymond James & Associates, a brokerage firm based in St. Petersburg, Fla. “Or did they buy the property because they realized that the real estate value was so significant and intended to close it from Day 1?”

Rancho Palos Verdes City Council members, fearing that the transfer of Orky and Corky was a clear signal by the company that it intended to close Marineland, adopted an emergency ordinance requiring the company to maintain the property and tear down any Marineland buildings that might be abandoned within two years.

“We wanted to make sure we didn’t wind up with (an) attractive nuisance and an abandoned decaying oceanarium sitting on the coastline,” Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor Mel Hughes said Thursday. “We wanted to get their attention and I think we have been successful.” Harcourt executives met with city officials on Wednesday afternoon. Although the executives discussed the closure of the park as one option open to the company, they did not say that a decision had been made, Hughes said.

Hughes said that during the meeting, the executives said they had no intention of requesting that the land be rezoned. The land is presently zoned commercial-recreational, which would prohibit a high-density residential development from being constructed on the acreage.

Marineland’s last owner, a Hong Kong developer, had considered building a hotel and restaurant at the park.

Rancho Palos Verdes officials said they were disappointed and sad that Marineland is closing. The aquatic park has served as the city’s most prominent landmark and its largest employer. Many high school and college students living on the Peninsula worked at the park, especially during peak summer periods, they said.

Councilman Robert Ryan said Thursday that he was “absolutely sick” that the park would be closing, and that his phone had been “ringing off the hook” from people who served as volunteers at the park.

“I really feel we have lost a fantastic attraction for the Los Angeles area,” Ryan said. “I don’t care what Sea World says. I will never forgive them for doing this.”

Marineland opened its doors in 1954, one year before Disneyland began. But the first aquatic park on the West Coast lagged behind other attractions in Southern California’s highly competitive theme park industry.

Unlike its glitzier neighbor to the south, Sea World, Marineland emphasized its roles as an educational attraction and sea life refuge as well as an amusement park.