About

At the heart of the old offices of Economics Research Associates was a library.

It felt like a treasure trove of knowledge, meticulously organized by Dewey Decimal System and card catalogues. For hours, I would pore through the stacks, which held mimeographed reports dating back to the 1950s, chronicling the firm’s early work for Disney. Typewritten, carbon-copied dossiers detailed concepts like Disney World, Universal Studios, SeaWorld, and the first waterparks.

Studies for resort towns in Lebanon and the Middle East blossomed in the 1970s. Japanese-language materials and reports surged in the 1980s. Documents for Korea and Thailand flourished, then came to a sudden stop in 1997.

It was bittersweet, knowing these reports represented the hopes and dreams of generations of long-gone developers and investors.

But the library also filled me simultaneously with a sense of vast possibility and profound loss. Here was all this knowledge scattered across thousands of reports, some of it also hidden in mislabeled, long-forgotten folders, or at the bottom of a neglected computer subdirectory, and much of it locked away in the minds of our firm’s partners.

There was no central repository, no organizing principle, no way to search it all. One of my deepest fears was that all the information would be lost. And with the firm’s demise - it was.

The Park Database is part museum, part library, and part research institute for theme parks, resorts, museums, gardens, and all manner of attractions.

It’s my humble attempt to rebuild and host that store of knowledge that I once wished existed. By providing most of it for free, it’s my hope that you, too, will feel the same sense of clarity and insight I did when stumbling on an especially juicy chart, table, or passage in the hidden recesses of those stacks.

Yours,
Won

All inquiries, questions, and feedback welcome. Contact me at [my name]@[this domain], or connect with me on LinkedIn.