In fact, it was bustling just three days before it shuttered. I suppose that when a joint opens when you’re 2 years old, seven years seems a lot longer than it is.Īccording to a Statesman report from that year, Celebration Station didn’t close due to a lack of business. My initial shock: When Celebration Station closed in 1999, it had only been open for 7 years. MORE WEBB REPORT: Swede escape to an Austin-themed restaurant in StockholmĪs with any other question I need answering, I poked around the American-Statesman archives. So, whatever happened to Celebration Station? Where a generation of Austinites once dug into H-E-B sheet cakes for classmates’ birthdays and cashed their tickets in for Chinese finger traps, there’s now only a row of hotels. And go-carts, if you could still ride them.īut when you drive down Interstate 35 across Texas 71 these days, those carts ain’t running no more. It had everything: mini-golf, bumper boats, batting cages, arcade games blinking in a manic tempo, unsettling animatronic characters caught in an unliving hell between man and beast. Like Pandamonium and Gattitown, it was the place to be. Birthday parties, year-end field trips, extravagant weekends every now and then when Mom had the money. If you grew up in Austin in the 1990s, that South Austin amusement park and arcade might be sewn in the shimmery lining of your blurry childhood memories. Try as you might, it’s the kind of thing that sticks in your craw.Īfter I drove a gas-powered go-cart a little too wildly - out of ineptitude, not recklessness - and slammed into the car in front of me at the finish line as a kid, a ride attendant told me “That’s it, you’re done” at Celebration Station. You don’t forget the first place that banned you from riding the go-carts.
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