The amusement park off I-44 in Eureka opened its gates Friday for the first time under new ownership, greeting about 3,000 high school students on a warm spring morning as Enchanted Parks launched a new era for one of the region's most enduring institutions.
The park, known as Six Flags St. Louis in the more recent of its 55 years, is being re-branded as "Mid-America" after this season. It's a deliberate callback to its original name, Six Flags Over Mid-America, when it opened in 1971. CEO James Harhi said the name wasn't a difficult choice.
"The Mid-America name was just something that stuck out in connection to the history," Harhi told KMOX's Michael Calhoun in an interview on Friday. "We want to progress the park into the future with technology and experiences and rides, but at the end of the day it's successful because of the connection."
Harhi was on the grounds for the opening, and had been there most of the week. He snuck in a ride on Batman -- unanimously recommended by the staff -- and said he plans to ride every attraction in the park before the summer is out.
The transition has been swift. Enchanted Parks didn't formally take control of the property until April 7th, meaning the new ownership has had less than three weeks to prepare the park for its first operating day. In that window, the company adopted a new HR system, began transitioning ticketing and point-of-sale technology, and worked through a maintenance backlog on rides.
Harhi said only two attractions are currently offline, one of them a seasonal water ride that typically doesn't open until later in the season regardless.
"I'm really proud of how the team has come together," Harhi said. "A lot of people here have been with the park for decades. They have a lot of passion around it and they want to see it do better."
Six Flags, he said, has been cooperative throughout the handoff.
More Shows, More Characters
Entertainment is a visible priority. The park has added significantly more live shows to its calendar this season than in many years, is reopening the Palace Theater, and Harhi said getting costumed DC and Looney Tunes characters back out onto the concourses is a specific near-term goal.
He described entertainment as an area where new management can move quickly, unlike ride investments, which take years to plan and execute.
"Not everybody wants to wait in line to go on a roller coaster. They want to come and get a full experience. That gives us a broader appeal."
Crews are refinishing the park's water slides so they look, as Harhi put it, "nice and bright and inviting" rather than worn and faded. Additional cosmetic work including painting and woodwork touch-ups throughout the park is planned once the operating season winds down.
Harhi said he is trying to complete several projects that were left unfinished by the previous ownership and get them open to guests before the end of the season.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Screamin' Eagle, and Harhi said the park intends to celebrate it.
"The experience of a parent or grandparent riding a ride with a kid that they rode when they were young, and re-experiencing it through their child's eyes, that's something you can't put in a commercial," he said. "It's something that's just so unique about these parks."
Food Prices Coming Down
One of the more concrete changes guests will notice this season is at the concession stand.
Enchanted Parks has eliminated the Six Flags dining plan and reduced the price of most food entrees by 20 to 30 percent, bringing many items down into the mid-teens from prices that had been as high as $20 to $23 under the previous structure.
Harhi said the decision came directly from reading through more than a year's worth of guest reviews for the property before the acquisition closed. Food cost and food quality were, he said, among the most frequently cited complaints. He concluded that the parks had been forced to raise menu prices so dramatically to offset dining plan usage that ordinary day users and infrequent season passholders were bearing the cost.
"The math just doesn't work long term," Harhi said of the dining plan model at a park of this size. "While there were people who really loved it, holistically it was not the right thing for the company."
Season passholders will receive an additional discount on top of the reduced prices.
First Cone, the waffle cone shop just inside the front gate, is a nod to the ice cream cone's invention at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The smell of freshly baked cones that hits you the moment you walk in is half the experience. Harhi admitted he hasn't made it past all week without stopping.
"I walk by it and I'm like, you know, maybe I should just go in and grab a cone real quick," he said, laughing. "I'll probably have to sneak one in this afternoon."
Ride Wishlist
Harhi is not yet committing publicly to specific capital investments. He wants a full season of attendance and guest feedback data before making those calls. But he is already listening.
He said the single most common message he's received across all of the Enchanted Parks properties is a request to send The Boss, the park's jackhammer wood roller coaster, to Rocky Mountain Construction for a steel conversion. Enthusiasts call it an "RMC." He estimates about 80-percent of the people who write to him about it want it done; the other 20-percent are adamantly opposed.
KMOX asked Harhi about the status of Old Glory Amphitheater, which has hosted countless major musical acts from REO to Britney Spears before going quiet.
He declined to make a commitment on that or any other major move, saying he's still learning the property. He says he's been walking it every day this week. Any larger capital investments could be identified for 2027 and 2028.
A new Enchanted Parks app is expected to launch around Memorial Day.
A CEO Who Shows Up
The park's staff have spent years under a distant corporate structure. Six Flags Entertainment Corp. had previously eliminated Park Presidents, for instance, with St. Louis leadership reporting to a regional president in Chicago. Now, the local staff is apparently taking notice of a different management style.
Harhi spent part of Friday morning at the 1904 World's Fair food stand restocking supplies after an employee flagged they were running low on hot dogs and french fries. He also made a funnel cake and assembled a sundae for guests, neither of whom, he noted, likely knew who was making their order.
"We have to be touching the experience to make the right decisions," he said. "Our decisions are based on what the experience actually is, not from a boardroom somewhere."
Among the wider Enchanted Parks portfolio, which now includes Valleyfair near Minneapolis and Michigan's Adventure, Harhi makes clear St. Louis is the company's flagship -- a characterization he acknowledged has not been universally welcomed by Worlds of Fun fans Kansas City. He stands by it.
St. Louis, he said, is the largest-attendance park in the portfolio, has the strongest ride lineup, and sits at the center of one of the largest catchment areas in the Midwest.
KMOX asked if the park still draws, as the Cardinals do, from states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, and Iowa; he responded he was actually looking at a map with radiuses drawn on it and wants to draw families willing to make a three-to-four hour drive for a destination day out.
"There's a reason St. Louis is the gateway to the West and the Midwest."
