Article & Art by Tasha Finkelstein
Florida gets a bad rap, which is fair. The politics are utterly cruel and the drivers extremely dangerous. Naturally, my biggest secret is that I have loved Florida for as long as I can remember. When winter break came to an end, I would lie in my grandma’s bed crying over the fact that it was time to go back home to the cold. But I loved Florida not because of the sunny weather or the various species of lizards or the warm ocean I learned to swim in. I fell in love with Florida because of Wannado City: The Promised Land for Overzealous Children. The real world just didn’t compare.
Wannado City was located in a part of Florida called Sunrise, though my mom describes the theme park as “subterranean” (she doesn’t remember there being any windows). You’d exit the sunny parking lot of the Sawgrass Mills shopping mall and enter a dreary castle of dreams, leaving your inclination for sunshine behind in place of something far more exciting: role-playing a 9-5 job in a pretend mini-metropolis. With its emphasis on the fun and endless possibility of entering the workforce, Wannado City seems like a symptom of late stage capitalism, marketed to parents who wanted their kids to get a head start in the working world. I think my parents were just happy they found a place for my brother and I to run around while supervised.
When I talk to my family about Wannado City, I like how all of our memories vary. My brother remembers a dinosaur themed restaurant that he loved. My mom doesn’t remember the restaurant at all. She just remembers the food being really bad. None of us can remember if there was real water in the hoses at the fire department.
My brother, Noah, is two and a half years older than me and remembers Wannado City feeling utterly massive, like the center of the world, which is as funny as it is surprising considering we grew up in New York City. It should be stated that Wannado City was just as corrupt as any other city, subject to its own set of laws and enforcement. According to my brother, they threw a kid in jail for chewing gum, another one for having untied shoelaces (basically anything you’d get in trouble for at elementary school). My brother’s clearest memory is of the jail cell, a small area guarded off by rubber bars. Though Noah had the job of policeman himself, he says he was really scared of getting in trouble and going to the cell because who knows if you’d ever get to leave. There was one kid who escaped jail — someone older and bigger and faster who decided to make a run for it. Noah says catching him was the proudest moment of his life at that point. His memories of being a fireman are more limited. They mainly center around sliding down a pole. He recalls getting in a firetruck, passing all the other kids in the city, and feeling like a part of something real.
My recollection of Wannado City is quite sparse in comparison to my brother’s, and what I do remember certainly does not feel real. Nevertheless, this surreal place houses some of my very first memories, however hazy they may be. I remember seeing a fire truck zoom through the streets of the dark city. I don’t remember my brother being on the back of it. I remember being in a nail salon and painting someone’s nails white. Or maybe I was the one getting my nails painted. It doesn’t make much sense that Wannado City would hire an adult to sit still so us little kids could paint their nails. But it also doesn’t make any sense that I would be trying a career out as a manicurist for it to end with getting my own nails painted. The whole thing puzzles me. All I can remember is white nail polish.
When my memory runs out, I ask my mom about what I got up to at this theme park. According to her, there were only two jobs I ever wanted to have: a manicurist or a nurse (eerily gendered, I know). I ask my mom whose nails I was painting. She can’t remember either. I ask her about being a nurse, and as soon as she describes baby dolls wrapped up in blankets in the hospital, one of my memories comes back to me like finding an old shirt you didn’t know you still had. There I am, the same but smaller, standing in a brightly lit room sectioned off into compartments where blanketed dolls lie under incubators. A simulation of the real thing, down to the details. I stare out of the glass window and see my mom in the hallway, watching me all dressed up in little-kid scrubs. Outside of her role as parent at Wannado City, my mom is a doctor and did really work at hospitals. I wonder how it felt to be on the outside of the glass, looking in on me doing a job she knew so well.
Trying to beat my memory leads me to interesting parts of the internet, parts I do not often explore. I find the Wannado City webpage archive, a frozen relic of the theme park’s old website before it closed. With some classic mid-2000s style graphic design choices, there is a picture of a kid, probably about 9 or 10, with a speech bubble attached. Written in a subgenre of comic sans, he says, “You can DO and BE so many things at Wannado City!” There are “Tons of Jobs!” listed for kids to try out like TV Director, Dance Club DJ, Police Chief, Rock Climber, Model, Theater Actor, Fashion Photographer, Bailiff, Theater Director, and Prop Master. My absolute favorite is Master of Ceremonies. I wonder who was getting married.
In my internet sleuthing, I find an article on Wannado City written by someone named Alex Novell. I honestly can’t figure out if this person was a parent or a kid when they went to Wannado City, but they bring up a question I had never thought of: what went on there during the school week? Turns out there are gaps that other people’s memories can’t seem to fill either. I try to soak up everything I can from the comment section of this article. One internet user says there wasn’t enough space for parents to hang out. Another user remembers there being a bar for parents. I relish the thought of kids running around the place in utter chaos while parents are drunk out of their minds. But more users seem to back up the point that the theme park didn’t have any designated space for parents. One of them says that if Wannado City ever comes back, the new owners should seriously think about changing that.
There’s something utopian about a place where adults don’t have a space for themselves when, more often than not, it’s the other way around. Being a young child in an adult environment can be both confusing and wonderful. You’re surrounded by large figures who you have to stare up at to see, and you know they are doing adult things and that you aren’t. The space wasn’t made for you but you’re content right where you are — close to the ground, understanding little to nothing of what is happening around you. I’d like to think that the isolation parents experienced at Wannado City is the inverse of what it feels like to be a little kid at a museum or dinner party. Maybe the parents were happy about it, maybe they weren’t. Whatever they were, it didn’t matter. Wannado City was about the kids.
Like any other city after 2008, Wannado City was dealing with its own set of financial problems. I find multiple articles referencing the “lost theme park” that Wannado City became after it closed in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis. But an entity as enormous as Wannado City seems too big to ever be lost completely. My family had already stopped going a few years before the place shut down, and I wonder if we lost anything in the process. Noah remembers the heartbreak of it all, never understanding why we couldn’t go back to this wonderland. I don’t remember ever being aware of not going back. It sort of just escapes me at a point.
When a place so ephemeral sticks in your mind, you get the sense there is a reason why. I imagine my four-year-old self is still at Wannado City, years after the theme park closed, wandering around the empty shopping mall. I don’t know if she’s painting nails or watching a fire truck go by or maybe, if she read the rules, spitting out her gum and tying her shoelaces. I don’t know what she’s doing now but I have a feeling she’s still there, watching the adults on the other side of the glass.