Troubled Production / Real Life

Automobiles

• The AMC Pacer was intended to be the compact car that would keep American Motors going through The '70s, the company anticipating that small cars would be a growing market. Instead, its problem-plagued development had a major hand in killing the company.
  • Development started on the Pacer in 1971. The seeds for its problems came in AMC's smaller size and budget compared to the "Big Three" Detroit automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), forcing it to rely on outside suppliers for many parts rather than its own internal supply chains. Regardless, many of its design features were quite innovative — it was extremely wide for a small car (comparable to a full-size Cadillac Eldorado) so as to create more interior room, it was designed with aerodynamics in mind for fuel economy purposes (presaging the Ford Taurus by fifteen years), the passenger-side door was longer than the driver-side so as to make it easier and safer to load the backseats in the two-door car, it was only the second compact car (after the Ford Pinto) to have rack-and-pinion steering, and it featured early versions of many safety innovations that, later in the decade, would become mandatory in American cars.^note Even when the US government toned down its proposed safety regulations due to protests by the Big Three about the costs of implementing them, leading AMC to delete features like the roll bar from the Pacer, the car's design was noted to be exceptionally robust for a compact car.
  • The problem came with the engine. AMC had originally designed the car to run on a Wankel rotary engine, initially sourced from Curtiss-Wright and later from General Motors, in order to reduce weight and increase performance. However, in 1974, just before the car was to enter production, GM canceled its rotary engine project due to reliability issues, fuel consumption, tooling costs, forthcoming emissions regulations, and concern that its performance dynamics (rotaries tend to need high revs to reach their full power) would scare off Americans accustomed to low-revving, high-torque engines. By that point, AMC had poured $60 million into the project, too much money to cancel it, and so they hastily redesigned the Pacer to accommodate their existing straight-six engine. With much more weight under the hood, the Pacer only got 18 mpg in city driving, compared to the mid-20s for its competitors with smaller, four-cylinder engines.
  • The Pacer arrived in showrooms in 1975, and initially sold like hotcakes as one of the few credible American compact cars that hadn't been tarnished by poor reliability (like the Chevrolet Vega) or safety issues (like the Ford Pinto). While American Motors initially expected to sell 80,000 Pacers that year, high demand saw production boosted such that, ultimately, 145,528 were sold, nearly double expectations. However, this massive ramping up of production led to problems with build quality and fit and finish. Furthermore, the car's massive windows led to an unforeseen problem: plastic parts and leather seating slowly fell apart through constant exposure to direct sunlight. As competition stiffened, the Pacer's flaws and its controversial styling slowly killed it and gave it an unflattering reputation as a "nerd car". The Pacer's long-term failure, after the princely sum that American Motors had spent on it, helped throw the company into a death spiral in the late '70s, culminating in it getting bought out by Renault and later Chrysler in The '80s. The car has become something of a classic since then, but a Cult Classic more than anything, remembered as a symbol of '70s kitsch that was just a bit too far ahead of its time.
• The Bugatti Veyron supercar, as this article by Raphael Orlove on Jalopnik lays out. Ferdinand Piëch, the CEO of Bugatti's corporate parent Volkswagen, had issued an executive mandate to Bugatti to make the Veyron the fastest production car in the world, capable of topping the record of 252 miles per hour, more as a Bragging Rights Reward than anything. It was a very difficult task — even discounting all other problems, the Veyron pushed the upper limit of what was physically possible with the technology of the time. And then you get into those problems.
  • Set to be launched in 2003, Bugatti's plans went horribly wrong after the Veyron's debut drive for journalists at Laguna Seca ended with the pre-production test model spinning out and almost crashing due to its handling problems. Since Bugatti operated outside Volkswagen's engineering structure, critical design flaws were never caught until they had already built a prototype for testing.
  • The car's release was delayed for two years after its inauspicious debut. During this time, its suspension, brakes, and aerodynamics were all adjusted, while its Y-layout, 18-cylinder engine, which they couldn't get to make more than 555 horsepower, was replaced with a W16. All of this occurred without the original designer's input, since he had retired from the company.
  • The new project manager, Bernd Pischetsrieder, took a hopefully-final version of the car for a test drive... and he hated it. Sending the car back for further refinement, an all-new steering rack had to be designed.
• Piëch had another one of those with Volkswagen Phaeton. Intended to thrust VW above Mercedes-Benz and BMW in terms of luxury (despite VW already owning two major luxury marques, Audi and Bentley), it was built with Piëch's demands in mind. Most famously, it was supposed to be capable of being driven all day at 300 kilometres per hour (186 mph) with an exterior temperature of 50 °C (122 °F) whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 22 °C (72 °F) (even though its top speed was limited to 250 kph and this kind of driving would require frequent refueling stops). This led to delays and development costs going out of control. Ultimately, customers were largely unwilling to look beyond the VW badge and styling too reminescent of the mass-market Passat, which led to sales lower than expected (which was bad news, considering even with sales expected by Volkswagen the Phaeton project would fail to break even). In later years, it became somewhat of a Cult Classic for being as luxurious and more rare than its counterparts while being very inconspicous and relatively cheap (since new Phaetons depreciated very steeply).
• Porsche experienced a minor and unfortunate case of this in March 2019 when a freighter carrying, among other vehicles, four 911 GT2 RSes to customers in Brazil caught fire and sank off the coast of France, taking all its cargo with it. Porsche had to put that model (whose production run had ended in February) back into production in order to meet their orders.
• The Cadillac Allanté was the brand's attempt in 1987 to create a flagship luxury roadster that would rival top-level Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar models. Although a fondly remembered car filled with excellent technology for the era, it never quite took off as the car was just as expensive as its rivals while offering lesser performance, two factors which can be blamed on the car's odd production quirks.
  • The car was sold as a mix of American and European engineering, which was possibly a bit too true. Pininfarina, the famous automobile design firm that handled the car's styling, also built the Allanté's body shells in Italy which were then flown to Detroit in a specifically-converted Boeing 747 for final assembly. This convoluted production process is blamed for why the car was so expensive in the showroom.
  • For performance, it was front-wheel-drive and equipped with a V8 engine that only made 170 horsepower (upgraded to 200 horsepower in 1989), which was a blatant downgrade over the car's European competitors. In 1993, it finally got a suitable engine with the 290 horsepower Northstar V8^note Which the FWD drivetrian wasn't really capable of handling, right in time for the car to be discontinued.

Construction

• The development for the famous Flamingo Las Vegas was a tortuous process that could be described as murder. Literally.
  • The tract on which the Flamingo would eventually stand was purchased in 1945 by Bill Wilkerson, the owner of The Hollywood Reporter and of several nightclubs on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip. In contrast to the Western-themed "sawdust joint" casinos which had already opened on the Las Vegas Strip, Wilkerson envisioned his establishment as an upscale, luxurious resort for the rich and famous. However, thanks to high material costs related to the ongoing world war, Wilkerson was forced to hunt for new financiers.
  • Enter The Mafia. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, a feared leading member of Murder, Inc., came to Las Vegas around the same time to gain a foothold in the city's gambling industry. Unable to take control of the El Cortez casino thanks to unfriendly city officials, Siegel began looking for a suitable site outside of Vegas' city limits. Hearing that Wilkerson was seeking funds for his casino, Siegel and his partners approached him and directly bought a two-thirds stake in the project. Siegel gradually changed the terms of the deal to gain sole control of what would become the Flamingo, threatening Wilkerson with death if he didn't comply.
  • During the final phases of construction, Siegel micromanaged the project and demanded the finest amenities money could buy despite the ongoing wartime shortages. Almost immediately, the budget went out of control; by October 1946, costs had ballooned to over $6 million ($62 million in 2020 dollars). Siegel's checks began bouncing, leaving him unable to pay back the money lent to him by mob associates who had invested in the project.
  • The Flamingo opened its doors on December 26, 1946, and its first night of business went anything but smoothly. Because of inclement weather, only a handful of celebrities attended the grand opening. Because the hotel portion of the building was still unfinished, the party was constantly interrupted by construction noise and certain areas were inaccessible to patrons. Siegel was informed of the mounting losses as the evening progressed, becoming increasingly irate and throwing out at least one family. After two weeks, with its gaming tables $275,000 in the red, the Flamingo closed.
  • Siegel doubled down and put all of his resources into renovating the Flamingo, and the casino turned a profit when it opened a second time on March 1, 1947. But by then, it was too late for Siegel — his mob benefactors, who had reportedly become convinced that either Siegel, his girlfriend Virginia Hill, or both had been stealing their money, soon put out a hit. On June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot dead while visiting Hill's home in Beverly Hills. The following day, mob partners David Berman, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum took control of the Flamingo.
• The entirety of the Millennium Dome project seemed like this, from its constantly-delayed boondoggle of a construction, to the lack of planning about what exactly it was meant for, to underwhelming attendance figures, to confusion as to what exactly to do with the thing after the millennium celebration had concluded. It's quite difficult to improve on Andrew Rawnsley's description of the Dome as "a magnificent shell enclosing a vacuum of banality" and "a vacuous temple to political vanity" that embodied the worst features of its age: "the vapid glorification of marketing over content, fashion over creation, ephemera over achievement".
• The Central Artery/Tunnel Project (CA/T), more commonly known as "The Big Dig", is the most famous construction project in Boston's history for all the wrong reasons. It was simple enough on paper: Reroute Interstate 93 under the central part of the city into an underground tunnel and tear down the Central Artery^note also known as "The Distressway", "the largest parking lot in the world", and "the other Green Monster", a notoriously ugly elevated roadway that cut the historic North End off from the rest of the city, and then use the newly opened space to create a park and new entertainment venues and attractions. Started in 1982 and initially planned to be completed in 1998, it wasn't until 2007 that it was formally finished and only after a series of events that included escalating costs, scheduling overruns, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one fatality (caused by a faulty ceiling panel collapsing on a car and killing a passenger) and an estimated cost of $14.6 billion, an overrun of 190% of the initial calculation of $6.0 billion^note adjusted for inflation. And even today the tunnels are plagued with problems that require nearly constant repair, such as an estimated 25,000 light fixtures that will eventually have to be replaced to the tune of $54 million. The entire clusterfuck has made Bostonians wary of any big projects since then, and may have had a hand in dooming the Boston 2024 Olympic bid (see the sports page for more details) and the Grand Prix of Boston. While everyone agrees the end result did accomplish its intended purpose, the process of getting there was a disaster.
• Along with the Big Dig there was the Deer Island Tunnel, one of the longest and deepest tunnels in the world, which was designed as part of a court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor (made famous by The Standells' song "Dirty Water") and the final piece of the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant. It took over a decade to be completed while a federal judge breathed down their neck to get it done, and after a back-and-forth series of arguments with OSHA over worker safety a series of safety plugs were put in place at the farthest end of the tunnel to protect the tunnel workers in the unlikely event of an accidental influx of ocean water. The problem was then getting the plugs out once the tunnel was done, so the construction firm decided to hire commercial divers to remove the plugs, but the catch was this could only be done after all the life support equipment for the workers had been removed due to said wrangling with OSHA, necessitating the divers to bring their own oxygen. During the removal the gas mixer the team used (which the horrified manufacturers, who were unaware of what it was being used for it, said was intended for use in food packaging instead of human life support) malfunctioned and caused two divers to die of asphyxiation nearly 10 miles underground and leaving the three survivors with severe PTSD. See here for the whole saga.
• Another for Boston was the site of the former flagship store for Filene's in Downtown Crossing. After Filene's was bought by and converted to Macy's, the latter chain opted to sell the Filene's store (as they had been present in the former Jordan Marsh store downtown since the 90s). The store was torn down and the property was bought by Vornado Realty Trust of New York with a plan to build a 39 story tower consisting of a hotel, restaurants, stores and residences. But then the project ran out of money in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, leaving the original Filene's facade halfway standing as a shell of its former self and a gaping hole right in the middle of one of the busiest sections of the city. After an ugly tug-of-war between the developers, Mayor Thomas Menino and city officials that went on for years the city finally revoked their permit in 2012 and another firm took over and began construction in 2013 of a 60 story building that was eventually finished in 2016, renaming it the Millennium Tower.
• The California High Speed Rail has gradually shaped into this over the many years it's been in development. Initially voted in with promises of a trip to from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back within a day, the project's budget ballooned from $9.89 billion to $67 billion and had slowed to a halt due to repeated litigation and other assorted forms of resistance from NIMBYs, as well as difficulties in acquiring the land needed to build tracks, tunnels, and stations. In addition, over the years it's been in existence, people voted into governmental office in some districts have been making serious attempts to dismantle the entire project altogether to allocate the money into building and repairing conventional roads, who have been increasingly gaining power as the rail has continued to be caught in Development Hell and little is getting done. As Barack Obama gave the project $2 billion to get it going, it wound up in the crossfire from people who dislike Obama. By April 2017, the CEO of the project, Jeff Morales, had stepped down. In short, the California High Speed Rail has gotten caught in a statewide altercation between rail advocates and car advocates.
• Tijuana's SITT ("Sistema Integral de Transporte de Tijuana", translated as Integral Transport System of Tijuana), it went from a promising project that would fix many of Tijuana's ailments with the city's public transportation, which even today, it is notorious for being the worst and the most expensive public transportation system in all of Mexico (with terrible service given in poorly-maintained vehicles which have been modified to forego safety features to cram more people inside, rude drivers, redundant routes that oversaturate many areas and leave others without service, poorly defined routes that end up causing confusion to its users, and said drivers have even ran over pedestrians with their reckless driving just to squeeze more people into the vehicles) into a political quagmire that almost laid it low for a decade before being done, albeit in a drastically watered down service. It all started in the year 1998 with an initiative by then-mayor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, who envisioned a light tram running from La Presa (which at that time was the east end of the city), run around one of the main arteries of the city, and lastly unto the San Ysidro border crossing and then to the downtown of the city. Then, his successor, José de Jesús González Reyes sought to build it albeit now as a bus rapid transit line, and when he started construction of the first station, the transportation companies of Tijuana banded together to block avenues so that their interests were not threatened (which weren't, as the route did not overlap with them). And then, his successor, Jorge Hank Rhon, decided to just play nice with the transportation companies and sent this project to languish in obscurity. The project was revived, again as a local BRT system, under mayor Carlos Bustamante Anchondo in 2013 as a single main route and made compromises with the transportation companies. However, once the construction started in 2015 under the tenure of Jorge Astiazarán Orcí, the transportation companies banded together again to attack the construction workers, vandalize the stations, and launch failed grassroots protests against the construction of the BRT system. However, the municipal government decided to continue with this, and threatened to destroy the cab and bus companies that continued to engage in this behaviour. The project was finished in early 2016, but due to the pressure by the aforementioned companies against this project, the official launch was delayed until the start of the tenure of the new mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum. However, he made again more compromises with the cab and bus companies to get the line running, until the buses were attacked by one of the transportation companies; while Gastélum contemplated to shut down said companies, he decided to just slap a fine on them and call it a day. And as of 2018, while the BRT is working, it is doing so at a diminished capacity, the buses get stuck in traffic constantly due to ignorant drivers and cabs willingly violating the rapid transit lines, the innovation of using prepaid cards to pay for the service were never implemented, and the stations get constantly vandalized by goons from the cab and bus companies, causing many inefficiencies and waste of resources on trying to keep the stops safe and illuminated, due to many of them lacking interior illumination at night.
• In 2018, Florida International University in University Park, Florida erected the FIU-Sweetwater UniversityCity Bridge over Tamiami Trail in order to connect the campus to the town of Sweetwater, where many students lived, after a student was run over and killed trying to cross the busy road. Just five days after it was put up, the bridge collapsed and killed six motorists. Subsequent investigation revealed that the bridge had been subjected to multiple delays and cost overruns that were just asking for a disaster to strike.
  • A key component of the bridge was that it was built in a revolutionary new construction style called accelerated bridge construction (ABC). Instead of being built conventionally, which would have caused traffic delays on the Tamiami Trail, the central span of the bridge was to be built next to the road and then lifted into place, away from traffic. While perfectly safe if done correctly, this technique does require that all of the piers and abutments be in perfect alignment and that the completed span fit to them exactly, unlike in conventional construction where there's some wiggle room if things aren't perfectly placed. In addition to the bridge's practical benefits for the campus, FIU hoped that the project would establish them as a leader in bridge architecture and construction, with FIU President Mark Rosenberg praising the bridge as capable of standing for a hundred years and withstanding a Category 5 hurricane. (Any similarities to proclamations that the Titanic was "unsinkable" are purely coincidental.)
  • Problems began in late 2016, when the Florida Department of Transportation requested that they move the bridge's northern pylon in order to allow for future widening of Tamiami Trail. The pylon was moved 11 feet to the north, a change that raised the cost of the project by over $600,000 and, more importantly, required revisions to the plans. Even seemingly minor changes can invite errors if every last detail is not accounted for when making these changes, and a number of engineers who looked at the collapse said that a change of this sort was ill-advised, with Robert Bea, an emeritus engineering professor at UC-Berkeley, saying that moving the pylon further out, forcing it to support more weight than it was designed to carry, may have caused it to flex. Video of the collapse showed that it started on the north end of the bridge, the side whose pylon had been moved.
  • Federal budget cuts, meanwhile, forced the US Army Corps of Engineers to delay the approval of permits for the bridge as they pushed through a backlog of such.
  • The two firms involved in the bridge's construction, Munilla Construction Management (MCM) and the FIGG Bridge Group, both had recent safety complaints related to bridges they had built. MCM in particular had been sued just ten days prior to the collapse, after a TSA worker at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport said that a temporary bridge they had built there had collapsed under his weight, while FIGG had been fined $28,000 in 2012 after four workers were injured when a portion of a bridge that they were working on fell apart.
  • Two days before the collapse, an engineer flagged cracks in the bridge.
  • It was fortunate that FIU was on spring break when the bridge collapsed. The incident happened at 1:47 PM on a Thursday, a time when students likely would've been traveling around the campus and to their homes on the other side of the bridge, meaning that, if school had been in session, the tragedy likely would've been far greater.
• The World Trade Center Transportation Hub, built to replace various rapid transit stations around the World Trade Center that were destroyed on 9/11, has been dubbed one of the world's most expensive train stations, or the world's single most expensive station, for its massive reconstruction cost of approximately $4 billion. It came in 10 years later than originally projected and overbudget:
  • The station was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, known for building many train stations, bridges and other buildings around the world. His plans for the rebuilt PATH station was something called the Oculus, which would be larger than Grand Central’s main concourse, with a roof of two movable wings that could open to the sky. Calatrava likened it to a bird taking flight.
  • Calatrava designed the rest of the hub, too — the underground mezzanine, train platforms and connecting concourses. What concessions he could not gain with his considerable charm were often won by obstinacy.
  • The Port Authority’s board authorized a $2 billion project in 2004 — $1.7 billion from the Federal Transit Administration and $300 million from the authority.
  • The Bloomberg administration upended the project in 2005, when the NYPD did a security assessment that compelled significant revisions. To improve blast resistance, the Oculus had to have twice the number of steel ribs. The birdlike structure began to resemble a stegosaurus.
  • In 2005, the Port Authority finally authorized a construction contract with a joint venture called Phoenix Constructors. But the two sides could not agree on a guaranteed maximum price for the overall project, so Phoenix was allowed to sign subcontracts that cumulatively drove up the price. The Federal Transit Administration would cite this as a crucial failure. And in 2008, the Port Authority rejected money-saving suggestions worth over $500 million.
  • When plans were dropped in 2005 for a building at Fulton and Greenwich Streets that would have allowed daylight to reach the hub mezzanine, Calatrava proposed an expanse of skylights set into the pavement. At night, they would glow from below.
  • The Bloomberg administration strongly opposed the plan. It wanted a landscaped corner for the National September 11 Memorial instead. The administration prevailed, so the mezzanine roof had to be re-engineered to support the greater weight of trees, topsoil and irrigation.
  • As the costs of labor, materials and fuel climbed rapidly — in part because so much construction was underway simultaneously in New York — the authority was told in 2007 the final budget for the hub might reach $3.4 billion.
  • Consistent direction was rendered almost impossible by constantly changing leadership: four New York governors who appointed five executive directors of the Port Authority, and five New Jersey governors who appointed four chairmen.
  • Complicating matters even more, different projects were undertaken within inches of one another at Ground Zero. For a time, a plastic tarp was all that separated the Hub from the National September 11 Memorial Museum.
  • Contributing to the bloat in the budget was the authority’s practice of using it as a catchall for any related work performed on abutting sites, on common passageways and on shared mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems — over $400 million in all. The authority did move to trim costs in 2008 by reducing the size of the Oculus and eliminating the movable roof, but these weren't enough.
  • The Port Authority rebuffed suggestions from independent engineers and architects that the Oculus be even smaller, that parts of the temporary station be reused and that columns, rather than a bridgelike structure, carry the IRT Broadway Seventh Avenue Line across the hub’s interior. Calatrava and his partners insisted that the impact and utility of the Oculus would be diminished if it were shrunken further, that the temporary station did not meet requirements for circulation of air and pedestrians, and that columns would interrupt visitors’ movement and provide a potential target for bombers.
  • At this point, Mayor Bloomberg assailed the hub as “too complicated to build” and demanded that the memorial be completed by September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Bloomberg's prodding hastened the project but made it more complicated. With the deck for the 9/11 Memorial in place, cranes could not lower materials and equipment to the hub mezzanine below, so the authority had to use flatcars hauled in via PATH tracks instead.
  • In 2010, under orders from the Port Authority and its steel contractor, a Spanish steel manufacturer called Urssa began operating its factory around the clock to speed up delivery of parts needed at the hub. In all, Urssa racked up about $24 million in extra costs for accelerating the work, according to a lawsuit it filed against a contractor and the authority over payment disputes. When it had not been fully paid by early 2011, Urssa ordered that a shipment of steel to New York be halted at Southampton, England, and returned to Spain. Urssa later moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
  • Several hundred million dollars more were added to the costs by damages from Hurricane Sandy.
• The Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea was derided as a vanity project and caused more than a little anger as Lotte Group was thought to have used undue influence on the government (among other things, Lotte got the Republic of Korea Air Force to change how planes land at a nearby airbase rather than adjust the building's design) to force approval of its construction without proper surveys and inspections.
  • This was borne out as workers were killed by crumbling sections of the structure and exploding pipes.
  • Cracks became conspicuously visible on the floor of the tower's shopping section. Lotte dismissed these as being "decorative".
  • Major water leaks became serious safety hazards as water seeped into the important electric junctions. What's more, the tower's aquarium's water tank to spring leaks after it was open to the public. This led to the public sections of the tower being closed for months as repair work was done.
  • Sinkholes formed in the surrounding neighborhood and a nearby lake's waterlevel began decreasing, leading to speculation that the tower was being built on land that was too soft to support its weight.
  • Despite all this, construction was forced through to the very end both because Lotte Group staked so much into the building and because an abandoned construction project of this scale would have been a propaganda coup for North Korea.
  • The tower's troubled construction resulted in people staying away out of fear that something might collapse. It took months before people started trickling in in larger numbers.
  • In the end, the project proved to be a success, with the tower becoming a major landmark visited by droves of people everyday.
• Berlin Brandenburger Airport was likely the most famous troubled construction project in Europe during the 2010's. The idea was to replace Berlin's three ageing airports (Tegel, Schönefeld and Tempelhof) with a single new one, combining some of Schönefeld's existing infrastructure with a brand new airport, creating what would be the third busiest airport in Germany. The idea originates from German unification in 1990, and construction finally began in 2006, with Tempelhof being closed in 2008 in anticipation that Brandenburger would open in the next few years. It wasn't, thanks to a massive list of technical issues and construction flaws; most famously, the building's unique fire suppression system was designed to counterintuitively funnel smoke under the building for aesthetic reasons. A regional rail and S-Bahn station that serves the airport was complete in 2011, but saw empty trains periodically run through the tunnels for the next nine years to prevent it from getting too humid. In 2018, 750 display screens had to be replaced since they had reached their end of service life despite the airport never having opened. The airport finally opened on the 31st October 2020.
• Block 37 has become something of a Running Gag in Chicago, becoming the construction equivalent of Vapor Ware. It started with a contentious court case to tear down a landmark building dating back to 1872 and snowballed from there. After all the fuss to get the site cleared, in was vacant from 1989 to 2005, except for the Art Deco concrete transformer building that feeds a large section of downtown. After construction finally began, the company financing the project found itself investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for sketchy business practices, with contractors reluctant to take on the project for fear of not getting paid. The property was foreclosed on by bank lenders in 2009 at the height of the real estate bubble-burst, a process that dragged on for another two years. As construction continued to lag, announced retail tenants walked away, and ambitious plans for a subway station only complicated the work required. Other proposed features of the project like a food court and cinema were cancelled, then added back, with three-quarters of the finished space unoccupied. Only in 2016 was the project considered fully completed.
• Despite being one of the world's most recognizable buildings, construction of the Sydney Opera House was a nightmare from start to finish:
  • The Labor Government of New South Wales put heavy pressure for construction to start early and quickly because they feared potential political backlash from delays and cost overruns, meaning the process started before architect Jørn Utzon could finish the actual designs. This led to things such as walls being built only to be torn down again to allow for construction of other parts of the building. As a result, construction quickly became 47 weeks behind.
  • Despite Utzon's design being the winner of a prestigious design competition for the Opera, it was also the least detailed entry. In the words of art critic Robert Hughes, it was "nothing more than a magnificent doodle". This meant that literal years were dedicated to figuring out the exact shape of the Opera House's iconic "shells": the then cutting edge technology of computer simulation had to be used to study the structural mechanics of countless parabolic and ellipsoid designs, all of which proved to be impractical since the lack of repeating elements would cause construction to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Finally, either Utzon or his engineers (accounts differ) came up with the idea of having the shells be spherical sections, which would be far easier and cheaper to build. Unfortunately, the now substantially altered design caused a backlash in the press.
  • While all this was going on, the New South Wales government was replaced with the Liberal Party, heavily vocal critics of the project, and put it under the tutelage of the Public Works Minister Davis Hughes, who vowed to fire Utzon the very day he was appointed. Hughes proceeded to make Utzon's life miserable at every turn, from preventing him from using preferred suppliers to withdrawing funding to such a degree that Utzon could no longer pay his own staff. When Utzon finally threatened to resign, Hughes merely replied "I accept your resignation. Thank you very much. Goodbye." Utzon returned to his home country of Denmark and never returned to Australia, thus never seeing his finished creation in person.
  • Utzon was replaced by Australian architect Peter Hall. Further problems arose when Utzon's original interior designs had to be scrapped since the main hall could only seat 2000 (despite the competition clearly asking for designs that could accommodate 3000). The changes updating the seating capacity proved to be disastrous for acoustics, which the Opera House still struggles with to this day. Further problems with the original brief not being clear with the actual purpose of the Opera House has caused the rather ironic situation of actual opera being held in the Opera House's smallest theater, which also has its own share of acoustic problems (the orchestra pit's cramped nature and location actively damages musician's hearing).

Conventions

Fan conventions are often run by amateurs with no experience in event planning or logistics. When they get in way over their heads, that's when this kind of thing happens.

• Dashcon was a fan-run Tumblr convention held in suburban Chicago. It became an infamous epic failure overnight, for several reasons:
  • From the beginning, the event was plagued by poor organization. Everyone got caught up in the initial excitement, and the organizers didn't ask questions about anything. Anyone and everyone was invited to form a fandom committee, no experience needed. Committees were asked to submit wishlists of possible guests, most of which wound up being far too ambitious for a first-year con to even attempt. With no communication between the managers and the individual fandoms, fan committees wound up dissolving quickly, leading power to be consolidated into some of Tumblr's most popular fandoms — those of Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock, Friendly Fandoms collectively known as "SuperWhoLock". They quickly dominated the event, leading to accusations of bias from the admins.
  • No one cared about legality. The organizers quickly called the event "TumblCon", without thinking whether the company would allow them to use their name (they didn't, hence the name change to Dashcon). They registered as an LLP in Ohio, but the con was in Illinois. They happily showed movies and TV shows to the audience without any permission to do so from the copyright owners. Much of this con was outright illegal, and they were lucky they weren't sued into oblivion.
  • The organizers, ever optimistic, predicted that 5000 people would attend. Actual attendance was 1500 at most, possibly as low as 500, and most of them were below 16 years old and likely not awash with disposable income.
  • Security at the event was poor. A member of 4chan's /pol/ board tested it and was able to walk in with no identification. He took the opportunity to film the event with impunity.
  • The guests were left to their own devices. Cartoonist GingerHaze's moderator failed to show up, and he had to moderate his own panel. Steam Powered Giraffe pulled out months before the con, but the organizers continued to sell tickets for their performance up until the first day of the con itself. The organizers apparently tried to entice the guests to moderate their own panels with hotel mints.
  • But the big problem was money. The con organizers claimed midway through that they got a bill from the hotel that had to be paid right away (the hotel denied it), and they needed to raise $17,000 in two hours. No one knows what happened to the money; the organizers never said where it went or even what the bill was for to begin with.^note They did claim, days after the con, that it was for parts of the bill that had not been immediately obvious to them, which just raises further questions. They were accused of pocketing the money, although some believed they just lost it. They were pressured into refunding the money after the con, but they required donors to prove they had donated — difficult to do when it was done in cash on the convention floor with no receipts or documentation — and gave them a comically short window to submit a claim. In a video of the "donation drive", one mother can be heard yelling, "This is extortion!" — and it's hard not to agree with her.
  • The guests got stiffed, too. Nobody was paid, not even travel expenses — despite the organizers claiming otherwise. Nobody had a place to stay; the Welcome to Night Vale people and the Baker Street Babes had to find an AirBnB, and GingerHaze wound up sleeping on one of the Night Vale writers' couch. The Night Vale people, having taken time out of their busy tour only to be told they wouldn't be paid, backed out of the con — and attendees who bought tickets to their event didn't get refunded, with the rules changed during the con to ensure that. But treatment of guests was uneven — apparently Doug Jones did get paid (and thoroughly enjoyed his experience). Others, like Mark Oshiro, were used to footing the bill themselves and had their own perspective on the con's insanity.^note Tumblr users, unpleased with Oshiro's take on things, called him a straight white man who was "appropriating the gay" for profit, even though he's a gay Hispanic man. This escalated to death threats from the Tumblr users, the Internet's usual reaction to things.
  • The highlight of the con was the ball pit, an inexplicable kiddie pool-sized attraction. After the Welcome to Night Vale event was cancelled (which the organizers only announced an hour after it was supposed to start), they gave ticketholders not a refund, but an extra hour in the ball pit (usage of which wasn't charged or measured in the first place). A whole hour! How generous! The sparseness of the events meant that the ball pit sat more or less on its own in the cavernous convention hall, providing a lasting image for the complete catastrophe that was Dashcon. Even other cons referenced it.
  • The organizers clearly learned nothing from the experience, because they tried it again. The newly rebranded Emoti-Con never got off the ground, but it somehow racked up another $120,000 in debt before it was cancelled. Tumblr details it here.
• Austin-based anime convention IKKiCON and its subsidiaries, being small indie conventions, have dealt with some of these:
  • At the 2009 IKKiCON, voice actor and regular guest Greg Ayres suffered a mild heart attack, causing some non-mild panic among the attendees. Thankfully, Greg immediately got proper treatment and walked out of the convention feeling better.
  • Subsidiary convention Anime Overload became more of a mess every year. Staff members and volunteers were horrendously disorganized, and the main panelist organizer was so bad at his job that they had to fire him. IKKiCON had to pull funding from the event. Fortunately, it revived itself as AnimeCTX in 2017 with a different staff, and the problems subsided.
• Tentmoot was a putative Tolkien's Legendarium convention in Portland, Oregon, supposed to be the largest Tolkien con ever. Like Dashcon, it was overly ambitious, poorly managed, and quick to fall apart. Unlike Dashcon, it led to a tell all book and a criminal investigation. This article goes into all the details, but briefly:
  • The underlying fan community, Bit of Earth (BoE), was a well-regarded fan group. They had done smaller community service projects, including the planting of a children's reading garden in front of a literacy center. That one caught the attention of Sean Astin, who played Samwise in the Lord of the Rings films — and this was right around when they came out, so this was a big deal. When BoE announced a series of more ambitious events, including a summer music festival, and culminating in Tentmoot, they got a lot of volunteers to show up and pitch in.
  • BoE was led by a couple, Jordan Wood and Abby Stone. Wood was reputed for telling wild stories (like how he was being chased by the IRA) and a feminine appearance which he claimed was the result of a disease that prevented his body from properly absorbing testosterone (this will be important later). So it wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that he was a bit of a smooth-talker. Several volunteers moved in with Wood and Stone to help plan the slate of events, only for their house to be foreclosed on. The summer festival fell through when the check to the park bounced, even though the organizers donated a lot of money for it (one gave $800 from their college fund) and no bands were even booked to begin with. All this raised serious questions of where the money would come from and where it was going.
  • With only months to go until Tentmoot, Wood and the planners moved to Los Angeles, ostensibly to greet the Lord of the Rings actors who were invited (the event itself would still be in Portland). Wood claimed to be from the area but had trouble navigating the city, let alone finding living arrangements. As the movies were still being released, not all of the actors were available, but some did agree to come, including Jed Brophy. Wood claimed that he had made a deal with Air New Zealand to fly everyone over, but at the very last minute claimed the deal had fallen through. Brophy, meanwhile, had already checked in for his flight in Auckland. With no hotel arrangements for the actors, he wound up sleeping on the floor of Wood's apartment.
  • As you might expect, Wood stiffed the convention center. He smoothed-talked them into lowering their prices and not having to pay a deposit. He did so in part by promising that 1500 people would show up. But with only days to go before the convention, only 21 passes had been sold. There was no way Wood could paper that over, and Wood attempted suicide. The convention wound up being cancelled, days before it was supposed to start.
  • Volunteer Jeanine Renne, who had stepped in to pay for the plane tickets, did some digging and found that there wasn't any proof of an arrangement with any airline to begin with. She contacted the Oregon Department of Justice and asked them to investigate. They found that BoE wasn't even incorporated. All the money just vanished, whether donations or proceeds from events they held. Most of their charitable programs were fraudulent, and the children's literacy program which they claimed to support didn't even exist.
  • Then came the biggest twist of the whole story. A man named Michael Player turned up in Oregon looking for his daughter Amy, who had disappeared and left a suicide note saying that the love of her life, Abby Stone, had run off with a man named Jordan Wood. But when Michael Player showed pictures of his daughter around Oregon, it was said that Amy looked remarkably like Jordan Wood. And therein was the twist: Amy Player and Jordan Wood were the same person. Wood had used the entire sordid affair — Bit of Earth, Tentmoot, everything — as a way of starting a new life with his new identity.
  • When all of this came to light, Wood was legally prohibited from ever soliciting money for any charity in Oregon for the rest of his life. He was also told that if he ever showed his face in Portland again, he'd be arrested. Which he was — standing line to see Return of the King — but the DA declined to press charges.
  • Wood eventually underwent gender confirmation surgery and legally changed his name to Andrew Blake. He then moved to the Harry Potter fandom and became a Fandom VIP for his popular fic Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness. But then he was involved in a triple homicide that claimed the life of one of his friends. He survived, but used the incident as an excuse to solicit donations to travel to New Zealand.
• For whatever reason, this happens a lot to Brony conventions. Part of the problem was oversaturation; when the Brony phenomenon kicked into high gear, everyone wanted to be a part of the action, and there wasn't enough to go around.
  • Las Pegasus, held in Las Vegas in February 2013, was beset by difficulty from the beginning. It was immediately decried as one too many Brony conventions in the U.S. Ambitiously for a first con, they announced three special guests. Staff members didn't show up, there was no direction for artists or vendors on where to set up, and lines got long really quickly. Attendees were encouraged to exchange real money for "Unicon Bits", which upset con merchants who expected to be paid in real money. Sponsors were promised executive suites but given junior suites. Names were misspelled on official placards. The organizers promised a free buffet that never eventuated. They served eggplant to Tara Strong even though she was allergic to it. But the kicker was the money; they got into debt very quickly and solicited donations even after the con (using the clever hashtag "#LasPegAssist"). They expected 4000 people to show up, but less than 1000 actually attended.
  • Bronycon Sydney, held just six months after Las Pegasus, was similarly decried as oversaturation — Australia had already had the long-established Ponycon AU, and a second con was just too much. They didn't check on copyrights when they announced the name and had to hastily change it to "Sydneigh". They were clearly in over their heads trying to attract guests. First they announced Andrew Francis as a special guest. Then they announced a Pozible campaign to get Michelle Creber and her band to play at a nighttime concert, but they failed to meet their target. Then they signed up Ashleigh Ball, but a month before the convention they had to drop Francis to keep the con solvent. That was a red flag, but their PR insisted the con would go ahead, leading to people from all over Australia and New Zealand to book flights and hotels. Three weeks later, their PR manager stepped down due to Creative Differences, and the convention was cancelled due to "unexpected costs". They refused full refunds and attempted to refund only 70% of the ticket price (which, by the way, is illegal under Australian consumer law), and the venue was revealed to not even have been fully booked or paid for. Morale got so bad that a group of Bronies independent from the Sydneigh team planned an emergency convention to house everyone who had committed to it.
• Spooky Empire, a major horror convention in Orlando, Florida, suffered a minor case of this in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew forced them to cancel their October event, with media guests unable to reach the convention due to all flights in and out of Orlando being canceled. Fortunately, they eventually managed to reschedule to December.
• The Polish "New Face" Demoscene party, which took place in Poznań in July 1994, became infamous for barely getting off the ground. It's not clear what exactly happened (as various articles and reports disagree with each other), but apparently the organizers had royally screwed up the arrangements, causing the party to extend until after the closing hours of the hosting venue. In any case, the party ended on the first day with all participants being forcibly escorted out by police... and finding themselves stranded at night in an unfamiliar city while toting around heavy, valuable computer equipment.
• The First Annual Pokémon GO Fest, held in Chicago's Grant Park in July 2017 and organized by developer Niantic Labs, was meant to celebrate the game's one-year anniversary. And it went awry quite infamously. Over 20,000 players crowded the park, and many more stood in line outside for as long as four hours. They tried to organize everything with scannable wristbands that didn't work. The servers and cellular networks were overloaded, meaning nobody could actually play the game they were there for (and they were hoping to capture a rare Legendary Pokémon). The crowd got agitated, chanting at Niantic to fix everything; Niantic CEO John Hanke took the stage to try to calm them down, only to be booed and heckled. Niantic resorted to offering a full refund, $100 worth of Pokécoins, and a free collectible Pokémon; they also extended the event radius by two miles. It was a classic case of Demand Overload; Niantic had done things like this before with Ingress, which was nowhere near as popular as Pokémon, and they just weren't ready for the influx. Later Pokémon GO events were reasonably successful^note one had to be halted because of a sudden thunderstorm and Niantic dealt with it reasonably enough, and early in the COVID-19 Pandemic they were able to hold the event virtually, and even the first one wasn't too bad, but angry attendees were fairly unforgiving.
• GamerCon Dublin, held in March 2017, was the first major gaming convention in Ireland, and was quite ambitious — exclusive Playstation VR gameplay, gaming contests, cosplay, the works. But the entire management consisted of only five volunteers, and it showed. They sold 25,000 tickets for the event — but their venue had a maximum capacity of 9,000. Predictably, there were really long lines outside in the dreary Irish weather, and inside it was dangerously crowded. They had forgotten to make sure that the content had been downloaded and updated beforehand, so nobody could play anything until that was done — and with everyone connecting to the Internet at the same time, this made things really slow and unplayable. The event was cancelled after the first day, and the parent group GamerCon Europe pretty much ran out of cash refunding the angry customers.
• Fandomfest, an annual comic convention in Louisville, Kentucky, was hit with this in 2017. Only two weeks before the festival started, the venue was abruptly changed from the Kentucky Convention Center to an abandoned Macy's at Jefferson Mall, presumably due to the organizers failing to secure a contract. In addition, a vast number of celebrity guests pulled out at the last minute, including headliner "Weird Al" Yankovic. According to reports, the former Macy's was not suitable for a convention, as most of the store fixtures were still left behind and the elevators were not functional. People who had paid to meet specific celebrity guests were denied refunds. And the fire marshal declared that the former department store space was unsuitable for more than 1,700 people at a time, despite the con's projected attendance of 30,000.
• RainFurrest was a Seattle-based furry convention that quickly emerged as one of the most popular on the West Coast. However, after a string of successful years, its infamous 2015 iteration at the Hilton SeaTac hotel wound up being its last. Internet Historian made a comedic video regarding it, and one of RainFurrest's founders discussed the matter at length.
  • The organizers went all-in on "inclusiveness", which led them to loosen or waive many rules of conduct typical of furry conventions — including a willingness to admit attendees who had been banned from prior conventions for misbehavior. Ostensibly, the organizers were afraid of alienating socially awkward individuals who may have been banned due to a silly mistake or misunderstanding — the deliberate decision to not update the harassment policy was a notable point of contention with one of the organizers, who felt that anyone who would feel targeted or alienated by such an update was exactly the kind of person who they didn't want there to begin with, but those protests fell on deaf ears. They were similarly lax in hiring staff members; they did no background checks, and the head of convention operations refused point-blank to revoke a single badge. Two staff members wound up committing assault (one physical, one sexual), and communication was so poor that it was two hours before the hotel staff found out about it. This led to attendees being allowed to do pretty much whatever, as the security wasn't going to do anything about it.
  • It was immediately apparent that the con had a huge drug problem. Two attendees were hospitalized for a drug overdose. A RainFurrest security person was seen using marijuana. After the event, they found over 2,000 discarded cartridges of nitrous oxide, which had clearly been used as an illegal inhalant. People were walking around very clearly drunk or high in public areas.
  • Vandalism was rife. An attendee tried to force open an elevator door and broke the door cable. Another shoved towels down the drain of a hot tub and busted the pump. People left half-eaten food in the gardens and stairwells. Posters advertising the con were stolen or vandalized. Used adult diapers were scattered throughout the parking lot. Someone loosened a toilet bolt, and the next person who flushed it flooded the entire bathroom so hard that it leaked into the room below — which housed the hotel servers. The worst was an attendee who tampered with a guest room smoke detector so they could hotbox the room, which almost caused the entire con to be booted halfway through.
  • Gross public indecency was a major issue, especially combined with the vandalism and public intoxication. Attendees openly wore fetish gear, even in public areas of the hotel, and nobody reined them in. This led to diaperfurs in soiled adult diapers interacting with the general public. The incessant partying also disturbed other hotel guests, who inundated the hotel staff with complaints. By the final night, the Hilton had become so exasperated that they threatened to evict any attendee over a single complaint.
  • After the con, the Hilton refused to host it ever again — and most other hotels in the Seattle area followed suit, as the event's infamy spread like wildfire. RainFurrest tried to find a new venue for 2016 and secured a hotel in Spokane — clear on the other side of Washington state — which lasted a week before they backed out. Seattle-area furries were eventually told to just go to Furlandia in Portland. A former RainFurrest board member eventually posted a post-mortem analysis of the whole thing.
• Universal FanCon was in the works for two years, and billed specifically as a place welcoming to women, LGBTQ, disabled, and persons of color. Then just a week before it was set to launch, the organizers abruptly announced they didn't have enough funds to do the event like they wanted and it would be postponed. This left everyone who'd been planning to attend with useless and non-refundable travel plans, and many called out the announcement for having an overly flippant tone like they didn't care at all how much inconvenience they'd caused, in some cases putting people's finances in serious jeopardy as they'd been planning a big sale of their work.
  • In addition, when sending out the announcement via email, the organizers forgot to BCC in at least two cases, leaking thousands of email addresses. (Luckily, nothing too bad seems to have come of it, but still.)
  • One of the con board members was Thai Nam Pham, who was allegedly connected with several failed conventions, Pride Con and what might be Akihabara Con, both of which played fast and loose with backer money. Pham's Linked In profile at one point listed one of his tasks on the board as "collaborate with finance team to ensure event is within budget", which it was not.
  • Several board members resigned suspiciously quickly, or, in the case of Jamie Broadnax, the head of Black Girl Nerds, demoted herself to "member" and claimed ignorance, which many saw as facetious as Jamie had previously described herself as a cofounder.
  • Compounding this was that many, many fans from marginalized groups now feel they were scammed by their own, lured in with promises that Universal Fancon would fix the bad experiences they'd had at other cons, which made it all the more heartbreaking when things went wrong.
  • However, at least one good thing happened: people pulled together and managed to run a pop-up con called #WICOMICON, so vendors were still able to sell and no one's plane fare, time off, etc was completely wasted.
• Botcon 1996 is infamous in the Transformers fandom for being completely mismanaged by convention organizers Men In Black Productions (who for no apparent reason, tried and failed to theme the entire convention around Pulp Fiction). TFWiki.net has a write up of everything that went wrong here and MIB Productions obviously weren't brought back for any future Botcons—though this didn't stop them from trying to form their own unofficial Transformer fan conventions in '97 and '98, both of which went just as ineptly as their Botcon had.
• TanaCon was an event hosted in June 2018 by social media celebrity Tana Mongeau after a bad experience at VidCon 2017, where her requests for a "featured creators" badge (and the added security that comes with it) were declined, which led her to try and start her own YouTuber convention with big names like Bella Thorne and Shane Dawson joining her. At TanaCon, everybody would be a "featured creator" and fans' interests would be taken to heart. It would be held at an hotel in Anaheim, not far from the convention center where VidCon was held, on the same weekend.
  • As detailed in this article by Julia Alexander for Polygon, it spiraled into disaster—not surprising, given that, by all accounts, it was thrown together in two months, even less time than the previous year's colossal event failure, the Fyre Festival, to which TanaCon was often compared.
  • The first sign of trouble was the "sale" of the first round of free tickets in May. Two minutes after they were made available, they were gone. No one at the actual con ever recalled seeing anyone with one.
  • Expecting 5,000 people for her first convention, at a hotel whose ballrooms were capped at 1,150, organizers planned to rotate the crowd in and out of the building. On the first morning, however, an alleged 20,000 showed up.^note Many Twitter users, including Tana herself, would repeat this number, though initial investigation and later confirmed estimates prove that the actual attendance was only a fraction of that, though still grossly overcrowded at 4000 to 5000 attendees. Many had hoped to purchase tickets at the gate and stood in long lines outside in the heat for hours without getting in. Photographs of their sunburn became the defining social media image of TanaCon, joining the sandwiches from the Fyre Festival and the ballpit at DashCon. Those who finally made it to where they could pay the $65+ admission found that their heavily-anticipated gift bag had only a condom and some stickers. The former were frequently blown up for use as beachballs by the crowd. Many were given VIP passes, but only because that was the only ticket available.
  • It was little better inside, where a big part of the marketing push was that the YouTubers in attendance would mingle with the crowd rather than having to wait in line for a limited number of expensive meet-and-greets. However, that had been abandoned without informing the attendees. And worse, the meet-and-greets were only available to those who had RSVPed online—something few fans had been informed of. Lastly, the meet-and-greets were subject to caps because of fire-code rules, so many had already been fully RSVPed before (again) attendees even found out.
  • Those who missed out on this found themselves largely confined to a hall with none of the promised creators available, no vendors and little food. They were told that if they left the building they would not be allowed back in. But at least they had their condom beach balls. Ultimately, the fire marshal had to shut everything down, with Dawson promising refunds out of pocket in case Mongeau wasn't able to.
  • Some eager fans returned the next morning, buoyed by reports that Tana was getting things together, including a new venue. Again there were long lines in the parking lot, but at least this time those in them learned this early in the day... hours before Tana officially announced it. The announcement led to a small-scale riot as disgruntled attendees threw their gift bags at the registration tent and demanded refunds. Tana's arrival in person also sparked an outburst; many fans were mollified when she promised refunds.
  • After its cancellation, a police report filed June 26 revealed the actual number of attendees to be about four-to-five thousand, as was planned to attend, and that the venue holding the convention could only hold a little over a thousand people. Considering many are starting to see this as a huge scam, and at least one person was taken to the hospital for injuries from the crowd, Tanacon was doomed from the start. More info can be found here.
• TouhouCon, a convention dedicated to Touhou Project in Anaheim, California, ran for only two years. The first year, in 2014, wasn't too bad, barring an incident that got a staff member fired and banned from attending all future iterations of the event. The second year, in 2015, the convention organizers decided to invite a number of big-name, big-budget guests from the Touhou doujinshi industry, including the band Yuuhei Satellite and musicians/DJs REDALiCE and Masayoshi Minoshima (best known for his iconic cover of "Bad Apple!!"). Outwardly, everything seemed like it was going well, but staff soon realized that the number of badges they were selling were well below expectations, and started making last-minute efforts to draw in large amounts of revenue to recoup the costs, such as handing out a $999 "Strongest Badge"^note named and priced after Cirno, who is memetically known for calling herself the Strongest Fairy as well as a labeled HUD screenshot that labels her with the number 9 and the word "idiot" that grants admission not only to TouhouCon 2015 but all future iterations of it as well, and selling last-minute badges for a mere $9. The con came and went and as far as attendees were concerned, everything went well. But the convention could not make back the cost needed to have the guests over, so the hotel that was hosting the convention slapped charges of about $1,500 per room on those guests because they needed the room payments from somewhere,^note Normally, in an agreement like this, the convention fronts the room payments, but the guests are responsible for providing an incidentals/damage deposit, preferably with a credit card. This is in case the guests break or steal something from the room — something the convention emphatically wouldn't want to be responsible for — it falls on the guest who did the damage instead. But without sufficient funds from the convention to cover the costs of the room payments, it had to come from the guests themselves. Needless to say, the guests getting a surprise bill of that size were not happy about it. ending the convention's short run and souring the American Touhou community. In the following months, the head of the organization behind the convention made a teaser website and a video promising something for those who bought badges for the 2016 iteration of the con (which ended up not happening, due to all of the above issues) as well as those who bought the Strongest Badge, but ultimately was followed up with nothing. It would take until the 2020s until another Touhou-themed event of this scale, TouhouFest, would be hosted in the U.S. again.
• CONQuest is a major convention dedicated to all things nerdy (anime, games, technology) in the Philippines that had its roots in the province of Iloilo but eventually moved to the capital city of Manila has been quite successful thanks to its mass appeal and getting several great guests. In 2023, they decided to up the ante by bringing in some of the biggest guests ever, including major content creators like Sykkuno, and voice actors like Adam McArthur, Sean Chiplock, Anne Yatco, Khoi Dao, and Laura Stahl among others, with a lot of the names present being bolstered by Genshin Impact being a big hit in the country and their characters being fan-favorites. While Friday was relatively well-managed thanks to most people being at work or school, Saturday and Sunday really showed the logistical problems first-hand.
  • First was the decision to sell more tickets after the initial batch sold out after a few days and allowing for same-day purchasing of tickets. While in-theory a good way to encourage people to come, with how limited the capacity of the SMX Convention Center (where the artist alleys and guest booths were) was, long lines started forming even before the gates opened, and when they did they moved at a snail's pace. This was not helped by the Philippines' notorious outside heat which coupled with many being in bulky cosplay, made bearing it a task in of itself. Inevitably, many people fainted from heatstroke, claustrophobia, impatience, or a combination of the three.
  • Second was the inability of the staff and security to handle the lines, as due to the limited amount of space around the area, lines were forced to snake around in a maze-like pattern which made for a confusing layout and many opportunities for people to jump the line and security being unable to prove it. Even worse was how unless you had a friend willing to spot for you, if you lost your spot just to buy food or go to the bathroom, you had to go to the back which could mean waiting several more hours. It didn't help that staff and security in general were rude and unhelpful to both guests and attendees.
  • Third was the decision to have some events occur at areas outside of the convention center, which while nice in theory, made going to them a risky prospect since as mentioned above, going out of line or out of the convention center for any reason would force you to the back. They also didn't help themselves by making raffles for the meets which one had to step out just to participate, meaning they could lose hours of progress for nothing. Not helping matters was that the raffles were allegedly "first-come, first-served" but they just plucked random people from the crowd anyways.
  • Even upon entering it wasn't much better, as the crowd inside made getting to the second floor a chore and miscommunication between organizers and staff meant some were allowed to go upstairs and others weren't. It wasn't helped by there only being one entrance and side entrances being closed off after several people cheesed the lines by going through them the previous days, thus funneling the thousands of attendees into one area.
  • Problems continued to happen on the second floor where most of the fun happened, as thanks to the claustrophobic nature and most attendees being there, personal items and merch were stolen, and navigating became difficult for many. And even when those who braved the lines just to meet their favorite voice actors were almost able to, staff allegedly told them that there was no line or that they had to buy merch just to say hi and gift them something which turned people off and went against the spirit of the booths. Fans took to Twitter to voice their sadness at not being able to gift them with stuff.
  • All these factors combined made for a miserable experience for many, who due to the limited hours that the con was open, spent most of their time in the line, with others just outright being unable to go inside and the guests having to apologize that fans weren't able to so much as just talk to them or gift them stuff. You can tell you did something wrong when the mismanagement and long lines manage to make national news. While the organizer would put out an apology and promise refunds to those who couldn't go inside or didn't bother getting their tickets anymore along with most agreeing that the artists and guests themselves made going inside worth it, to many the damage was done and made Filipinos worried about if a con like this was possible again. You can read more about the mismanagement and horror stories about the lines here.

Esports Events

• Gaming Paradise 2015, a Counter-Strike and Dota 2 e-Sports event in Slovenia, wound up degenerating into a disaster, as detailed in these articles from Kotaku, HLTV, and Dot Esports.
  • The event was the brainchild of Sasa Bulic, CEO of a company called The Gaming Resorts, who had no organizational experience, but made a deal with tournament organizer Gaming.rs; the latter would organize the infrastructure of the actual event, while Gaming Resorts acted as a sponsor providing the financial handling.
  • The first canary in the coalmine arrived during qualifying matches in May, where teams were flown in but stranded until 3 AM as the buses that were supposed to drive them to their hotels came extremely late. The next day, the entire venue was hit by a massive storm that would be inconvenient on its own, but since the games were being played in tents, the stage had to be delayed.
  • Come a week before the next round in August, the person who was supposed to deliver the tournament PCs went MIA, and when the organizers finally got some working computers, it was found that they didn't have the tech to run the games to expected professional standards. Because of this, the tournament's Sunday kick-off had to be pushed back ten hours, but even after they were upgraded using tech supposedly found from bitcoin miners, they still underperformed throughout the tournament.
  • Combined with PC inadequacy, the broadcast itself was plagued by technical issues, to a point where the Dota 2 portion of the tournament had to be canceled entirely, leaving the teams that showed up for it with nothing to show for the trip they made to Slovenia.
  • The kicker came when it was discovered that Gaming Resorts failed to pay the expenses for the hotel, the venue, and the production equipment, resulting in equipment being confiscated by police along with the players' passports (since they were now on the hook for food and lodging). This left many players not only unable to attend another tournament in Dubai scheduled for later that week, but stranded in a foreign country without computers until Gaming.rs stepped in to negotiate.
  • The questions among players wondering if there was any prize money left became more pronounced until Sasa Bulic confirmed a resounding "no", announcing that in order to deal with their failed pay deals, teams had to wait an additional 90 days to receive any of their tournament winnings, which they begrudgingly agreed to. Once the tournament concluded, however, Gaming Resorts filed for bankruptcy and Bulic disappeared, and to date, no teams have received any of their prize money.
• The 2016 Shanghai Major was a Dota 2 event hosted by Valve Corporation, which in spite of the company's history of top-notch tournaments ended up in a flaming freak storm of controversy and production issues, detailed by PC Gamer, Dot Esports, and SBNation as one of their most infamous snafus:
  • One of the biggest issues came through the abrupt firing of the entire English production team during Group Stage a week before the main event, with major attention towards then-host James "2GD" Harding, who was fired for dropping the C-bomb and making crass on-air jokes about masturbation and government censorship/surveillance. The replacement production crew was sent into a scramble to set up the international broadcast within a few days.
  • Come the event, behind-the-scenes was a complete mess lacking in coordination and featuring sparse-to-nonexistent crew accommodations, no doubt cascading into the technical issues which ended up plaguing the entire event. A two-hour delay caused the opening ceremony being cancelled, another game was delayed after a staff member lost a player's keyboard, and as a consequence of stadium policy and poor scheduling, the entire crowd had to empty out during a climactic lower bracket match. Sound and internet problems bled drastically into the broadcast, causing the livestream to be borderline unwatchable if it was even online.
  • Even once the tournament completed, it still wasn't over for the players. In the morning after the finals, the practice rooms in their hotel were unexpectedly torn down by cleaning staff without prior warning, and many players' personal equipment and other belongings (including one player's car keys) were lost, forcing the police to get involved.
• The Fighting Game Community's premiere tournament, Evolution Championship Series/EVO, didn't become the fighting game tournament without troubles along the way. Just about every Evo since it was known as the B series has had difficulties, ranging from lacking equipment, power outages, and sheer dumb luck. No matter the odds, the team behind Evo always pulled through. However, the one event that barely made it completion was Evo Japan 2019.
  • Evo Japan 2018 went off without a hitch (the only complaints being the venue being somewhat cramped and hot contrasted against an abnormally cold Tokyo winter). After the dust settled, it was revealed that the event went over a million dollars in the hole. Many questioned if Evo Japan would return for 2019, but sure enough later that year Evo Japan 2019 was announced.
  • The first sign of trouble was the confirmation that the location would change from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Logic being venues would be cheaper there and the close proximity to Korea and other South East Asian countries would increase international participation, but what Evo didn't expect was a major BTS show happening at the same venue in Fukuoka right before Evo Japan. This meant that lodging was difficult to find.
  • The second issue was the extremely long time for any announcements for Evo Japan 2019. Usually the official games for any Evo are announced a good 6-7 months in advance so competitors will know what games to practice and for developers to finalize any patches before the event. The final game lineup wasn't announced until December 2018, nearly two months away from Evo Japan's start date. The roster was expected but solid (Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Soul Calibur VI, Guilty Gear Rev 2, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, and The King of Fighters XIV), yet there were two notable exceptions. Dragon Ball Fighter Z ^note not unusual as Shueisha was blocking tournaments in America from having Dragon Ball Fighter Z at other events and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate ^note no reason was given but its December 2018 release might have been too close to Evo Japan's start date were not at Evo Japan 2019 as official games. With such a long time for the official lineup to be announced, attendance figures for all games were considerably lower than Evo Japan 2018's.
  • When the event started, there were several issues that would persist the whole weekend. The venue (Fukuoka Convention Center) was far out of Fukuoka's city center and transportation was limited to just buses, meaning competitors were frequently late. And the venue was just too small for an event like Evo. The tournament was cramped, it was hard to move around the venue, and it got hot very quickly. Evo also encouraged competitors to stay up to date with the brackets by using the free wifi provided, but it was spotty.
  • The tournament structure was also criticized. Normally large fighting game tournaments are ran with a pool system, as in there are smaller, 16 person brackets and the top two/three from any given pool moves up to a larger bracket. Evo Japan 2019 was ran like a giant double elimination bracket. Some competitors noted having to wait up to two hours just to play their loser's round match and many simply disqualified themselves instead of waiting.
  • Probably the thing Evo Japan became the most known for (maybe other than Arslan Ash's Tekken run, more on that below) was the infamous "Core Values" incident. A Dead or Alive 6 exhibition got a little too steamy for Evo, and they pulled the plug on the exhibition. Evo founder Mr. Wizard stated in a now deleted tweet that the DOA6 stream "didn't represent Evo's core values." Unfortunately, this ended up blowing up in Mr. Wizard's face as it went viral instantly. Mr. Wizard and the other staff behind Evo kept a low profile in the aftermath of the exhibition, not even showing up on the main stage for finals day.
  • Arslan Ash's Tekken 7 win needs to be noted, as it wasn't an easy one. Multiple flight delays and visa issues blocked his path, and by time he got to Japan he had difficulties exchanging money. As soon as Ash got to Fukuoka he had to play cold, but he persevered and put himself and Pakistan on the map for Tekken competitive play.
  • Overall, Evo Japan 2019 was regarded as a hot mess by all who attended. Once again, Evo Japan's future was put into doubt, but sure enough Evo Japan 2020 was announced at that year's Evo in America. By all accounts, the Evo team learned their lessons and Evo Japan 2020 went MUCH smoother than 2019. After the COVID-19 Pandemic became a global issue, Evo moved to an online tournament format for its events during 2020. All was well until Evo co-founder and president Joey Cuellar was accused of sexual misconduct by various people, prompting multiple companies to pull their games out of the online events, along with players and commentators backing out in protest. Evo Online was promptly cancelled for 2020, and Cuellar stepped down from his position.

Military

• All three of the United States Navy's first 21st-century surface ship programs have been... troubled, to say the least:
  • The Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carriers were conceived to gain back weight and stability margins lost with the weight gain of the Nimitz-class, as well as introduce new technologies to improve self-defense and sortie generation. Practically all the new systems have proved troublesome. Reactor issues caused months of construction delays. A problem with the water twisters caused a four-and-a-half year delay with testing the advanced arrestor gear. The dual-band radar system ended up an orphan due to the failure of the Zumwalt class destroyers, detailed below. Four years after commissioning, the lead ship is still not considered fully combat-ready due to ongoing reliability issues with the new electromagnetic catapults and advanced weapons elevators, not to mention over 25% over the original cost estimates. The one bright spot is that the following ships of the class seem to be benefitting from the lead vessel's teething problems and their constructions have so far been much less troublesome.
  • The Zumwalt-class destroyers were conceived as a replacement for the Spruance-class destroyers, with a new, post-Cold War focus on littoral operations in anti-submarine and land attack warfare. Unfortunately, the development was rocky to begin with. The original DD-21 program was canned in 2001 amid political spats and Navy debates over the littoral mission despite the design being largely finalized. Already the ships had been delayed by a year, and program costs had increased by two-thirds in 4th quarter 1999 alone. Despite reworking the program, including making the ships somewhat smaller and less well-armed, costs continued to balloon due to the fact that practically everything in the ships was new technology. Worse, the doctrinal questions only intensified, with advances in land-based anti-ship missiles making the ships far more vulnerable than expected. The order was progressively cut from 32 to 3 ships, making the per-ship costs skyrocket even higher, and leading to the cancellation of features such as the AN/SPY-4 search radar and the Long Range Land Attack projectiles for the main guns - the latter of which was the only round available for the guns, leaving them useless upon commissioning. Oh, and both Zumwalt and the second ship Michael Monsoor have suffered engine breakdowns during their extended trials, with Monsoor requiring outright turbine replacement due to blade damage. Despite all this, the ships are big, stealthy, and extremely seaworthy, making them suitable for conversion to blue-water surface warfare vessels armed with hypersonic missiles, albeit after a refit to remove one of the main guns in favor of more missile cells. In the end, the Navy chose to instead order more flights of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which has been in continuous production since the late 1980s, very successful, and easily upgraded to keep up with the times.
  • The Littoral Combat Ship was the other half of the planned littoral mission, a small, very fast corvette-sized ship that could engage successfully the small boats that had given the US Navy significant grief in the Persian Gulf. They were also intended to be modular, able to swap out mission packages so that they could act as ASW patrol ships and mine warfare vessels. Unfortunately, the first four ships ran into immediate problems. Financially, they came out 220% over the original estimated cost. Both lead ships Independence and Freedom suffered severe structural problems - galvanic corrosion for Independence and cracking for Freedom on top of thousands of other bugs. So bad were the problems that the US Navy retired the first four ships of its two LCS classes, and placed it in reserve, between 2021 and 2022, barely ten years after Freedom and Independence were commissioned. The remaining ships have to deal with the fact that their mission modules have been stuck in Development Hell due to delays prompting Congress to cut funding, which causes further delays, and then further cuts. And then there's the crippling transmission issues that plague the Freedom class...

Railroading

• The restoration of Chesapeake and Ohio 1309, a 2-6-6-2 that holds the distinction of being the last steam locomotive constructed by Baldwin Locomotive Works, became an infamous discussion among railroad fans. The engine was acquired by the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad in 2014 after its own engine, the former Lake Superior and Ishpeming 2-8-0 34 (in the guise of Western Maryland 734) had to go out of service for its federally mandated inspection. After its acquisition and transport from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum, the newly-christened "Thunder" was intended to be running by 2016, in order to bolster the line's revenue and by time for 734 to get its turn in the shop. But what started as a simple restoration turned out to be anything but.
  • The locomotive's overall condition, despite initial inspections, was found to be much poorer than anticipated. Because the C&O had only purchased this group of engines as a stop-gap measure until they could purchase diesels about a decade later, they only performed just enough maitenance to keep it running, to the point that the drivers were completely shot and needed a total overhaul. On top of that, 50+ years of exposure to the elements didn't help the already problematic condition of the 1309, and it needed a much heavier rebuild than anticipated. Rather than simply patch it up to make it run, the railroad made the decision to do a top-to-bottom overhaul so they could have it brand new by the time it was ready to roll. This meant the 2016 date couldn't be met.
  • Problems continued to worsen when, due to the engine's poor condition and the sheer amount of manpower needed to get it running again, money quickly dried up, halting the restoration multiple times between 2016 and 2020. No work on it could proceed until the state of Maryland could provide a sufficient grant to allow the restoration to resume.
  • On top of it all, the railroad found that they needed to upgrade their existing trackage and facilities to be able to accommodate their new arrival, as it was simply too big for the current line.^note For those not familiar with railroading, the 1309 is the second-biggest operating steam locomotive in the entire world. That meant more money needed to be sunk into the railroad that it simply didn't have lying around.
  • Worse yet, an employee stole parts off the locomotive for scrap, resulting in the restoration being delayed again until a replacement set of parts could be made.
  • COVID-19 was the last to strike the project, slowing down the project further due to a lack of manpower.
  • As all of this played out, constant Trains Magazine-sponsored trips were postponed or cancelled outright while the entire debacle played out. Fortunately, the story does have a happy ending, for it finally saw steam in 2020, right as New Years Eve concluded, and conducted a test run in 2021 to ring in the new year.
• Pennsylvania Railroad 1361 holds the distinction of being one of only two steam locomotives of the famous K-4 class of 4-6-2 Pacific types left (the other being 3750, at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg), one of the two state steam locomotives of PA (the other also being 3750), and one of the most troubling restorations in history. The locomotive was built 1918 by the railroad's Altoona shops, and had been spared from the torch in 1957, being displayed in the center of the world-famous Horseshoe Curve^note Pennsylvania's circular cut through the Allegheny Mountains, built as a bypass around steeper grades, and a National Historic Landmark that is maintained by Norfolk Southern and the Railroaders Memorial Museum—the same organization that owns 1361. It was restored back to service in 1987—and that's where the trouble began:
  • Only a year after it returned, 1361 was hauling a low-speed excursion in York, PA when it suffered a minor derailment. The incident in question did little damage, but it dislodged a crucial component under the axle, causing a critical failure en route back home. Due to the incident, it was taken out of service, then, in 1996, dismantled piece by piece to the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA for a complete overhaul.
  • Said overhaul proved to be particularly costly, due to the fact that the engine was significantly older and required a much steeper set of rules to be placed back into service^note The Federal Railroad Administration requires much stricter guidelines for the operation of older locomotives, as part of its 1,472 day mandated inspection. Since 1361 was built in 1918, it falls under these guidelines, compared to the aforementioned C&O 1309, which was built in 1949, and thus not held to as strict a standard.. Despite receiving significant funding, little, if any work, was accomplished, in part due to the sheer undertaking required. As a consequence, it largely sat in the Scranton shops as an empty shell.
  • Naturally, the RRMM were not happy about their star attraction being stuck in its current state, and demanded its return. Thus, in 2013, 1361 returned to Altoona—its very birthplace—in pieces to the museum's newly constructed roundhouse, where it was kept in pieces until what to do with it could be determined. Debate went on about either restoring it to full service for tourist work, or doing partial work for local operation, since the nearby Norfolk Southern line was too busy for mainline service.
  • Some hope did finally come when former Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman provided personal funding to get the engine back into service as a state-wide tourist hauler, complete with a new boiler and a fresh set of modern upgrades to make her mainline worthy again. Her tender was completely overhauled by 2019—and then COVID-19 hit, setting her back once again as work slowed to a crawl.
• Milwaukee Road 261, dubbed by Trains Magazine as the "Energizer Bunny of Steam" for having made at least on excursion a year between 1993 and 2008, was taken down for her 1,472 inspection at the end of the 2008 season. The hope was to have her running again by 2010, but circumstances almost took her out of service for good.
  • Any efforts to get 261 back on the rails had to be temporarily halted in 2009, as the world-famous Southern Pacific 4449 needed the Friends of the 261's help to getting to Train Festival 2009—a fundraising event held by the Steam Railroad Institute of Owosso, MI to raise funds for the famed Pere Marquette 1225's (alias The Polar Express) own overhaul. The Friends loaned the 261's own consist, including the Cedar Rapids observation and the famous Super Dome, to the Daylight, as well as providing access to the shops in Minnesota for en-route maintenance. Work was supposed to resume once 4449 left back for Portland, but—
  • The team didn't own the locomotive outright. Rather, she was being leased from the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, WI, where the engine was originally donated to. For whatever reason, the NRM wanted to increase the lease to $225,000 a year, and the Friends understandably didn't want to pay that high of a cost. Much to their chagrin, the decision was made to end the lease, meaning the engine needed to be reassembled and returned to the museum, never to see steam again. There was discussions about leasing out another engine, or having someone else by the 261 and let the Friends continue operating it, but nothing seemed to go anywhere. The engine's overhaul was halted and plans were made to simply take it back to the museum after it had been put back together.
  • Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending. Rather than returning it to the museum, the Friends were able to buy the engine for the $225,000 price tag they had wanted for the lease, and work resumed in 2010, culminating in the engine's return to service in 2013.
• The Budd Metroliner was intended to be America's first premiere high speed train. However, the design ended up being at the mercy of in-fighting between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Department of Transportation. The former wanted each car to be a self-propelled railcar for maximum flexibility, and the latter wanted it to be a traditional electric multiple unit. In the end, a married-pair design was selected as a compromise. The rushed development resulted in an unreliable train, requiring Amtrak to have them rebuilt, and they cost more than purchasing the sets. Even with the rebuilds, they had deteriorated so badly that they were actually put on the chopping block when Amtrak got the AEM-7s, which led to several of them being converted into cab cars and the rest put in storage and eventually scrapped. They did inspire the much more successful Amfleets though.
• The Ottawa Confederation Line is a low-floor light rail line that was built to partially replace a BRT lane while giving the city a modern rail-based rapid transit option. Unfortunately, despite a relatively smooth inauguration the line has become massively unreliable in regular service, with two derailments within a month in 2021 shutting down the line completely until its operations can be evaluated. The line is a victim of trying to build a system that does absolutely everything on a checklist, when cutting some features to build a more focused product would've done it huge favors. Looking at some of the decisions made during its creation makes it easy to see where some of the failure points lie:
  • The is operated by Alstom Citadis trams, which have demonstrated themselves to be fine vehicles in other markets but have proved disastrous in Ottawa. The Confederation Line is intended to support large numbers of passengers at peak hours on a linear system, whereas the Citadis is designed for lower density lines with more frequent service and smaller peak demand. This mismatch has resulted in the trams seeing far more wear and tear than they were intended to take: For example a common failure point on the line were the tram doors breaking or becoming stuck. Other trains install sturdier doors to handle the number of commuters trying to go though them at once, but the Citadis was designed with no such rush in mind. Because the Citadis' interiors are also not designed with high capacity (instead of longer trains, the trams are linked together to fill the platform), this has led to severe overcrowding both on the trains themselves and on the platforms, where service isn't frequent enough to make up for the small trains serving them.
  • So why use trams instead of proper commuter-focused trains? The original plan for the line was that it would involve a portion of street-running where low-floor trams make sense. It was turned into a fully grade separated line later, but the train specification wasn't updated to reflect that. This means the line lost the advantages of using trams while exaggerating the downsides of them, such as the less comfortable ride quality and the smaller interiors, both of which are even more perceptible in low-floor vehicles compared to high-floor ones.
  • Other issues with the line itself come down to its in-use design. The construction is technically sound, but features sharp turns that put extra wear on the trains, as well as a lack of sidings for trains that develop a fault to be moved to with minimal disruption.
• When it comes to quirky rapid transit systems, there is little dispute that the short-lived Berlin M-Bahn is the reigning king of them all. The physical partition of Berlin in 1961 severed the U-Bahn connection between the major interchanges of Potsdamer Platz and Gleisdreieck, and a transit solution to reconnect the suddenly isolated residents of Potsdamer Platz to the rest of the West Berlin transit network was needed. The result was the M-Bahn: A short three station maglev line that would restore this connection. This Zeerust vision of the future was sadly not to be thanks to its infamously troubled commissioning period. It was constructed in around three years, but a month before its public opening in April 1987 a major fire in its middle station resulted in the destruction of the two trains they had on hand at that time. In December 1988, another train was destroyed when it overshot the end of the line during a test, and it would take until August 1989 for passenger services to begin, albeit during a testing period with inconsistent service and no fares being charged. Full commercial service finally began on July 18, 1991... for thirteen days, when the system was permanently closed after German reunification made the line redundant.
• Seoul is loved as one of the world's best urban rail cities, but even it has its black sheep: Line 9, an experiment in creating a privatised rapid transit line that has been lovingly dubbed by locals as '지옥철' ('Hell Subway'). The story is as follows:
  • In the early 2000's context of South Korea as a nation that was coming out of its 1997 recession, the idea of letting a fully private franchise finance, build and operate a new line on the Seoul Metro was an appealing one. Line 9 was to take a highly valuable route connecting Gimpo Airport to the massive financial centre of Gangnam, passing the National Assembly and the Express Bus Terminal along the way. Future expansions westward in two additional phases was also in the initial plan. A range of international companies were involved, ranging from the local ROTEM Group handling the construction and rolling stock, the line's operations being primarily the responsibility of France's Veolia Transport, and financing being led by Australia's Macquarie Group. The line opened in 2009, and appeared to be a success at first. However, cracks began to show when ridership outpaced the line's forecasted demand.
  • By 2015, it was reported that at peak hours Line 9 had ridership that was 238% above its acceptable crowding levels in spite of its relatively short length. For reference, the next closest line was Line 2, at 208%, and the average for Lines 1 to 8 altogether was 158%. It was discovered that the line was unprepared for becoming so crowded this quickly because the forecast ridership had been intentionally underestimated earlier in construction: As Line 9's operators had a minimum revenue guarantee to cover any potential shortfall in the first years of its operation, it was within the Seoul Metropolitan Government's intrest to reduce their ridership expectations to reduce the chance of making those payouts. On Line 9's side, as the line was already expensive to build due to its route and the decision to build express tracks, the lowered forecast was used to cut costs: The line opened with 4-car trains, half the length of every other line, and maintenance operations were outsourced. The line lacked the ticket and staff offices that were standard on Seoul Metro stations, and the line's staff was one-third of the per-kilometer headcount of all other lines. As conditions for the line's riders declined, Line 9 became a punching bag in Korean news sources.
  • In 2012, in a bid to try and free some congestion, Line 9 raised its fare to 1,550 Won, above the 1,050 Won fare that was standard across the Metro. This created a high-profile dispute between Line 9 and the Seoul Government, which eventually ended with Line 9 scrapping the planned increase, which Seoul took as a sign that it could exert more influence over the line's operations. Seoul reformed the line's ownership and finances, but faced difficulty with lengthening the trains as the private investors in the line meant that they could not use federal funds intended for public projects. Phase 2 opened with a free Line 9 supplemental bus intended to provide an alternative for riders fearing the rush, and though Seoul was slowly able to extend the trains to 6-cars, a full expansion to 8-cars was dubbed not financially feasible.
• St. Louis Southwestern Railroad, better known as the Cotton Belt, boasts a lesser known 4-8-4 of the preservation era numbered 819, the last steam engine built for the line right out of their own shops. The engine was saved from the torch in the 1950s, but years of exposure to the elements left it a rusting hulk. Thus, a small group of volunteers fixed it up in the 1980s, and got it running again to the point it enjoyed a pretty decent excursion career, most notably appearing at the 1990 NRHS Convention in St. Louis. It went out of service in 1993 for an overhaul—an overhaul that, by 2021, is still ongoing. Reasons have varied as to why the work has been so slow (ranging from claims of a lack of funding to the volunteer staff being toxic to work with), but even if the locomotive was able to get steamed up again, she has nowhere to run; Union Pacific does not allow any steam engines besides its own to run mainline excursions on its tracks, and the museum only has access to the UP main. She's safe for now, but whether or not she'll see steam again is another matter.
• During the 1970s, Amtrak was in desperate need of a new electric locomotive to replace its aging fleet of former Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotives, most of which were nearing their 50s. General Electric provided that replacement in the form of the E60, or at least that was the idea. Flaws in the truck designs made these engines derailment prone, causing them to be limited to 90mph. Such limitations led to the EMD AEM-7 replacing them during the late 1970s, with all of the E60s retired by 2003, and only one from the line save at Strasburg. Ironically enough, their intended replacements, the Bombardier-Alstom HPP-8, was even more unreliable, and lasted a lot less longer, when they and the AEM-7s were replaced by the Siemens ACS-64.
• The EMD SDP40F had an even worse service life than the E60. Much like the E60 it was intended to replace Amtrak's aging locomotives it inherited. However, the locomotive proved to be too heavy and had an uneven weight distribution, which has been implicated in a number of derailments. The host railroads soon began to ban the train as it had wrecked the tracks they owned. The locomotive's demise was further hastened by the 1977-1978 blizzard, which put the steam-generator fleet out of commission, causing Amtrak to expedite production of HEP trains. Amtrak decided to pull the plug and began sending the train back to EMD to be recycled into F40PHs. The remaining locomotives were sold to Santa Fe, and appeared to have had a much longer service life than on Amtrak, ultimately being retired in 2002, which was around the same time the locomotive's replacement the F40PH got retired from Amtrak service.
• Santa Fe 2926, a massive 4-8-4 2900 class steam engine (the heaviest of its type in existence in fact) had spent the last several years resting in a park in Albuquerque, New Mexico, exposed to the elements and undergoing heavy decay. A small group, the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society (a sister organization to the San Bernardino Railroad Historical Society, the same group that restored fellow Santa Fe 4-8-4 3751), decided to get the engine back into service so they could run it on the mainline. The project began in 1999; the first time the engine turned a wheel under its own power was in 2021! The long and troubled road to get there is a fascinating tale in and of itself.
  • The engine was first moved out of the park in 2000, before it was taken to its home base in 2002 to being the restoration project. Unfortunately, the team wasn't all that experienced compared to the SBRHS (who took 5 years to get 3751 back up and running, from 1986-1991), so they decided to build up some experience by tackling the engine's massive tender first. That project was completed a few years later, so they had half the engine done, but they still needed to work on the more important half—the locomotive itself. Of course, the big 2900 was no walk in the park, as 50 years of rust and decay had settled in. To ensure it wouldn't have any problems for its eventual return, the crew decided to do a total top-to-bottom teardown of 2926. The intention was to have it running by 2012 so it could officially participate in the centennial of New Mexico joining the Union. But then...
  • A band of scrap thieves broke into the shops sometime around 2012 or so and swiped several critical components, meaning the engine wouldn't be able to make the date. It was fortunate that five other 2900s existed, so the group reached out to the Pueblo Railroad Museum in Colorado to borrow parts from 2912 (itself undergoing its own restoration, which was cancelled due to the downtrodden economy) so they could be cast-molded and replicated for 2926. It still set the project back by several years, as the group not only had to install security fencing around the engine, but they eventually had to build a massive shed for 2926 so nobody would try swiping parts from it again.
  • Several years later, by 2019, the engine was almost ready to go. It had a few steam-ups (though not under its own power), it looked almost brand new, and it was ready for a little test run around the site...then the engine derailed while being backed into the shed. Not only did the crew have to spend money to get the locomotive off the ground, but they had to use critical funds to repair the damaged section of track and prevent further derailments in that spot. And if that wasn't enough, a planned steam-up date in 2020 was postponed when COVID-19 hit and New Mexico went on lockdown, meaning that limited work was all that could be performed on the site.
  • Come 2021, and the engine finally got to move under its own power—but it's still not out of the woods yet. With COVID still raging, and with the big 2900 still needing a spot on the mainline to run, it's clear that 2926 had a rough go to even turn a wheel again, and still has a big challenge ahead of it. And that's not even getting into how it's intended double-header with 3751 will have to wait since that engine is undergoing an overhaul.
  • Fortunately, the 3751 returned to service in September 2022, but the 2926 will still need to be able to have a connecting track to let it reach on to the mainline.
• A minor example compared to a lot of the other steam restorations, but Union Pacific Railroad's intended restoration of Big Boy 4014 was literally completed at the last-minute. The engine had been sought after in 2012, and reacquired in 2013, for the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad's completion. Moving the engine took almost an entire year due to logistical planning over a heavy-freight route (not to mention extracting a 1.25 million pound engine over a parking lot to the UP main), and work on the engine didn't actually begin until 2016 since their regular locomotive, 4-8-4 844, had to undergo an early overhaul when a change in the water treatment clogged its boiler tubes; UP was forced to not use any excursion engines for two years since neither 844 nor 4-6-6-4 Challenger 3985 were able to run (and indeed, the 3985 was retired in 2020 after 4014's career resumed due to budget constraints), the Big Boy had a long way to go before it would run again, and it's historic diesels were down for repairs that still haven't been completed. Once 844 was done, things went a little smoother, and 4014 returned to service in 2019, just days before the final event it was reacquired for was set to take place.

Software

• The CED (aka SelectaVision) was the Creator Killer of RCA, once one of the biggest media and electronics companies in the world. A simple idea — use vinyl record technology to reproduce video in addition to audio — was a good idea on paper, but in practice was rather inefficient and limited in comparison to the other video formats (VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc) available at the time. And it underwent Development Hell to the extreme. Development began in 1964....and it didn't emerge until 1981. So what happened? Well, everything:
  • RCA had major issues with even getting the intended technology to work, and it was mostly in fits and starts until the mid-1970s. The ultimate construction of the discs meant they had to be enclosed in protective caddies to prevent the discs from being contaminated.
  • There was serious tension between RCA Labs, the inventor of the actual technology, and the rest of the company, stemming from Labs' cushy, government-funded status and how Labs would invent Awesome, but Impractical things and the other divisions would have to figure out something to do with it.
  • At the time of the format's conception, home media in any form was almost impossible to think of, but magnetic tape was in particular thought to be far too bulky and costly for home use. RCA attempted a magnetic tape format of their own, but it had shortcomings and never left development. So the development of VHS and Betamax, as well as DiscoVision, put RCA's format at a disadvantage.
  • RCA shared development assets with Japan's JVC, who promptly cloned the format with some improvements as the VHD format, which basically became the Japanese equivalent of CED and never made it to wide release overseas, mostly due to Thorn EMI (JVC's UK backer for the format) getting cold feet on releasing it in both the UK and the US after seeing how the CED performed, which VHD lived on in its native Japan until 1990.
  • General executive turnover and turmoil at RCA — David Sarnoff's son Robert attempted to turn RCA into a diversified company, which led to them buying out all sorts of unrelated businesses (even RCA's own executives joked RCA now stood for "Rugs, Chickens and Automobiles"). This led to a lack of support or investment in the videodisc product, and it was nearly scrapped, until a combination of corporate pride and the amount of money they'd poured into the project already convinced them to press on.
  • By the time it staggered onto the market, VHS, Beta and LaserVision had beaten it to the market; RCA had actually been releasing VHS decks since 1977, under the SelectaVision name no less. RCA hoped the low cost of players and discs (in comparison to VHS in particular) would help sales, but those who wanted to own movies went with the LaserDisc and the vast majority of consumers preferred to simply rent videotapes instead.
  • With RCA's financial trouble from their aforementioned diversification and NBC's poor performance under Fred Silverman, the CED proved to be a fatal blow. The system was phased out in stages (players ceased production in 1984; discs continued to be produced until 1986) and RCA was ultimately sold to GE, who took NBC and discarded the rest of RCA (their consumer electronics division going to Thomson of France, who continued to manufacture RCA-branded products into the 2000s, when they sold the business and became Technicolor); these days, RCA is a trademark anyone can license for low-end electronics, fully disgracing the Sarnoff legacy with it. To the point Technology Connections mentioned how dead RCA is in the present day:
  Alec Watson: I'd like to mention here that RCA... is dead. But the brand lives on as one of the brands that doesn't mean anything at all. You might find an RCA-branded whatever on store shelves, but let's be real, it's probably crap. Maybe you'll find the odd gem here and there, but seriously, it's not like the legacy of David Sarnoff lives on in this countertop dishwasher.
• Microsoft Windows Vista was the product of one of these that took twice as long as a typical Windows release cycle.
  • In the time they took to ship Vista, Microsoft originally planned to release 2 operating systems. The first was codenamed Longhorn, which would include modest improvements over Windows XP, similar to how Windows 98 was a relatively minor update to Windows 95, or what Windows 7 would eventually be to Windows Vista. The second was Blackcomb, which would be a more major overhaul of Windows that Longhorn would pave the way for. However, Microsoft's designers lost sight of this idea, and began packing more and more major, complex features in to Longhorn, the supposed minor update, which caused it to fall way behind schedule thanks its lack of clear direction and scope.
  • It soon became clear that Longhorn would not meet its intended release date, which prompted Microsoft to abandon their two-release plan and combine Longhorn and Blackcomb into one, which would be long overdue by the time it arrived. However, Longhorn had by then become so unworkable that most of the work that had been done was scrapped, forcing the team to start over from scratch, leaving them with just over 2 years to complete the major overhaul of Windows that would be expected by then.
  • While all this was happening, a series of major high profile malware attacks caused Microsoft to pull staff way from the Vista project in order to patch Windows XP's security. In addition, after having announced just after XP's release that Internet Explorer would no longer receive stand-alone version updates, Microsoft were forced to spin the team developing Longhorn's web browser off into a new Internet Explorer team after it turned out that Internet Explorer 6's security and standards compliance were both horrendously broken on a fundamental level, leaving the new team to develop an Internet Explorer 7 that plugged up the major holes, while in the longer run creating an Internet Explorer 8 that was built on an entirely new code-base.
  • Vista's development coincided with the computer industry's transition to 64-bit processors. Intel and AMD, the two major vendors for PC CPUs, each came up with their own very different ideas for 64-bit architectures. AMD's x86_64 was a simple 64-bit extension of the x86 architecture^note Much in the same way that the 32-bit x86 had extended 16-bit x86, while Intel's Itanium was a radical, entirely new architecture that sought to leverage instruction-level parallelism to dramatically improve performance. A brief war ensued between the two as to which would become the new industry standard, forcing Microsoft to devote resources to maintaining separate x86, Itanium and x86_64 builds for both Windows XP and Longhorn betas, which strained things even further. By 2004, however, it was evident that Itanium was a colossal failure and that x86_64 was the future of the industry, allowing Microsoft to terminate their support for the former architecture and base the rebooted Longhorn on the x86_64 version of XP, which had the fortunate side-effect of plugging up a lot of security holes. However, this left all the development work on the older betas essentially useless.
  • In 2005, Apple unveiled their new version of macOS, Mac OS X Tiger, which introduced many features that had long been thought impossible on desktop computers, such as fast searching. This caused Microsoft executives to panic, since their long-overdue new OS wouldn't have these features, which led them to insist that they be included in Vista, reintroducing the feature creep that had caused the project to become so unworkable in the first place.
  • When it was eventually released in 2006/2007, it was criticized for being bloated, slow, incompatible, and full of new features that were more annoying than anything.
• Windows 8 obviously wasn't anywhere near as troubled as Vista, considering that it only took half as long to release, but it had its problems. And this time, the problems weren't the result of feature creep or over-ambitious developers, but rather corporate politics:
  • For the first year or so of development, things went reasonably smoothly, with the development team continuing their approach from Windows 7 of trimming and optimizing the OS's kernel and core components. During this stage, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, along with Steven Sinofsky, who took over as director of the Windows division shortly before the release of 7, decided on a "grand unifying version" of Windows that would serve both x86 computers and the increasingly ubiquitous ARM-based portable devices. A good idea on paper, seeing how Apple derived MacOS and iOS from the same codebase. However, it proved less workable in practice since Windows had a lot more legacy baggage than Apple's two OSes. Furthermore, while Apple's mobile and desktop operating systems shared the same core, they still took care to give each one its distinct interface tailored to the type of devices and marketed them under different names to avoid confusing customers.
  • Sinofsky believed that touchscreen interfaces were the way of the future, and ordered the OS's entire user interface re-architected around such an interface, with the classic desktop only kept around for compatibility purposes. The design team warned him against making such a strong commitment to a novel form-factor and input method, citing the large amount of effort they put into optimizing Windows 7 for netbooks, only for that product category to become extinct virtually overnight once the iPad arrived on the scene, but he stuck to his guns.
  • As development wore on, several members of the Windows team became increasingly concerned that they were developing something that people wouldn't want to use on a day-to-day basis. They tried to appeal to Sinofsky to keep Windows 7's user interface for desktop users and keep the new UI for tablet and touchscreen users, but he bluntly refused, claiming that much like how the Ribbon interface had been contentious when it was introduced in Office 2007, people would initially complain, but see that the new UI was better. It even got to the point where the Xbox team were ordered to use the Metro interface for the Xbox 360, which for the most part was met with a shrug by the console's userbase (who had already been through two major UI redesigns since the console was first launched in 2005), and the lack of any major controversy over the change just persuaded the top brass at Microsoft that they were on the right track.
  • Some of the developers tried appealing directly to Ballmer, but he admired Sinofsky's vision and take-no-prisoners attitude, and warned said developers that the next person who went over Sinofsky's head would be out of a job. Ironically, the relationship between the two men reportedly disintegrated during the project's final months, due to Ballmer's fears that Sinofsky intended to mount a boardroom coup that would have seen him become the company's new CEO.
  • The release of a public beta on February 29, 2012 revealed the biggest change in Windows 8's design; the complete absence of the Start Button (and Menu) for the first time since it was introduced in Windows 95, with the classic desktop being firmly relegated to being a cut-down secondary UI. Reaction to this change among users and developers was almost wholly negative, but both Ballmer and Sinofsky publicly described the Start Button and classic desktop as being yesterday's news, giving the impression that Microsoft were arrogant and disdainful towards their users.
  • Its final release later in 2012 gained an even more negative reaction than Vista had, leading to Sinofsky departing the company before the year was out. Ballmer hung in there for a bit longer, before being forced to announce a timetable for his retirement midway through the following year, due to a combination of poor uptake for Windows 8, a series of acquisitions having under-performed financially, and a bad reaction to the reveal of the Xbox One that all but confirmed that Microsoft was out of touch with their users.

Shopping malls

• Forest Fair Mall/The Shops at Forest Fair/Cincinnati Mills/Cincinnati Mall/Forest Fair Village in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio may be the best example in the history of retail:
  • Originally, the site of the mall was going to have just a branch of Bigg's, a regional discount department store/grocery store. However, Australian-based developers LJ Hooker bought the land early in development and proposed to make the Bigg's store the anchor of a 1.5 million square foot shopping mall — the second-largest in Ohio at the time. This was seen as impractical by retail analysts due to the proximity of Northgate and Tri-County malls (the latter undergoing an expansion at the time), combined with the high-end fashion tenants proposed despite the mall being in a working-class neighborhood. The other anchor stores were to be Cleveland-based Higbee's and four other upscale regional department stores that LJ Hooker bought with the sole intent of forcing them into the mall: Bonwit Teller, B. Altman and Company, Parisian, and Sakowitz. Right after the Bigg's wing opened in 1988, Higbee's backed out of the project; B. Altman was hastily moved to their intended spot and Dayton-based Elder-Beerman took B. Altman's original place. The rest of the mall opened in 1989, featuring such lavish tenants as an Australian brewery, the first licensed day care center in a US shopping mall, a huge arcade called Time Out, a movie theater, and two food courts.
  • Between Forest Fair and a myriad of other ill-fated expansion plans in the United States, LJ Hooker filed for bankruptcy in 1990 and withdrew to Australia. The bankruptcy took B. Altman, Sakowitz, and Bonwit Teller down with it; their absences from the mall caused tenancy to plummet to nearly nothing. A group of lenders took over the mall and managed to replace B. Altman with a nightclub and Cincinnati's first Kohl's department store. New ownership in 1996 managed to land Bass Pro Shops, starting a move toward a mix of discount/outlet stores (including Off Fifth, the outlet division of Saks Fifth Avenue), "big box" retailers such as Guitar Center and Burlington Coat Factory, and even a second theater. In 2002, the mall was sold again to Mills Corporation, whose other properties were known for a similar mix. They remodeled the mall, renamed it Cincinnati Mills to fit their Theme Naming, and held a grand reopening in 2004. However, the decline of the retail sector in the coming years saw the demise of many key tenants such as Media Play, Steve & Barry's, Bigg's, and Elder-Beerman. Mills itself was financially struggling (and under scrutiny of the SEC) when it was sold off to Simon Property Group, the largest shopping mall owner in the United States, in 2007.
  • Simon quickly passed the mall on to a series of other developers, none of whom seemed interested in doing anything to it. In addition, the retail sector had shifted further north in the intervening years, with Liberty Center and Cincinnati Premium Outlets pulling away most of the tenants from Forest Fair and Tri-County alike. Later developers had plans to add an ice rink and a Candlewood Suites hotel that never materialized. Bass Pro Shops also proposed to move out of the mall as early as 2013 in favor of a new store in nearby West Chester, but the chain's merger with Cabela's (which also has a store in West Chester) stalled those plans. The mall, with no internal guidance and nothing replacing its vacated stores, withered away to nearly nothing by The New '10s, leaving a ghostly behemoth with only five tenants: Bass Pro Shops, Kohl's, a gym, an arcade, and a children's play place. Despite this, a Christian media company out of Nashville expressed interest in converting part of the mall to office and studio space, and Kohl's announced that they would be moving out in 2021. Additionally; by 2020 a series of building code violations such as graffiti and sealed emergency exits as well as a report by Cincinnati ABC affiliate WCPO-TV 9 that Amazon Prime deliveries were being staged on the parking lot fueled speculation that the mall was on its last legs, as both Butler^note primarily Hamilton and Fairfield, OH and Hamilton^note primarily Cincinnati proper counties submitted plans for demolitions. By December 2022; the mall was officially closed save for the Bass Pro Shops and Kohl's due to repeated fire code violations.
• Another troubled mall was Eastland Mall on the east side of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was to have been opened in the 1970s, but sat half-finished for years due to a myriad of problems, one of which was a worker who fell to his death during construction of a Dillard's department store. It finally opened in 1984 and was initially successful, but the first domino fell in 1999 when anchor store Service Merchandise went out of business. After this, JCPenney closed in 2001 due to poor sales, Mervyns pulled all of its Oklahoma stores in 2006 (they would go out of business entirely in 2008), and Dillard's downgraded to a clearance center before closing as well. The rapid departure of anchor stores completely gutted the interior mall of tenants as well. By 2007, it was converted almost entirely to offices, retaining only a couple eateries and small service shops for use by office workers. The mall's short life was due not only to its troubled beginnings and poor anchors, but also a bad location. It was put on the far east side of town, a direction that development just never followed — the mall building is still largely surrounded by fields, and literally the only peripheral development was a single strip mall that also wound up converting largely to non-retail use. It also didn't help that nearby highway expansion provided easier access to the other, more successful malls in the Tulsa area.
• There's also Illinois Centre Mall in Marion, Illinois. When it was built in 1991, nearby Carbondale already had a fairly succesful mall called University Mall, whose Sears relocated to the newer center. Many retail analysts thought that the newer mall would win out with its proximity to Interstate 57, along with the fact that its other three anchor stores (Dillard's, Target, and Phar-Mor) were all new to the market. Instead, the newer mall never caught on: University Mall fired back with an expansion that snatched away potential tenants, and Illinois Centre lost Phar-Mor less than a year after opening. As the latter was at the back of the mall, it lacked visibility and was converted to offices. The original developers sold it after only five years, and it was only 60% leased in 2000. Despite a rename and another change in ownership in the noughties, it continued to bleed tenants. Also not helping was very poor visibility from both Interstate 57 and Illinois State Highway 13. A 2015 newspaper article revealed that three of the five new owners had been jailed for violating the Sherman Antitrust act; the leasing company was completely unresponsive to inquiries from the tenants; and leasing was further complicated due to the parking lot and each anchor store having its own ownership. Sears closed in spring 2018, and the few remaining tenants were evicted in fall 2018 (except for Target, Dillard's, a furniture store in the old Sears, and the offices in the old Phar-Mor).
• Fashion Mall, in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida suburb of Plantation, was built in 1988 as an upscale mall. However, it struggled right out of the gate, maintaining low occupancy due to the existing Broward Mall just across the street. It still managed to stay afloat until anchor store Lord & Taylor closed all of its Florida stores in 2003, while Hurricane Wilma destroyed Macy's and part of the mall proper in 2005 (Macy's stayed in the area by buying out Burdines, which had a store at Broward Mall, in the same year). Tenancy plummeted and the mall was shuttered in 2006. The first redevelopment plans in 2008-09 were crushed by the recession, and later redevelopment was stalled by a myriad of legal issues, including a developer that filed for bankruptcy. Demolition finally began in May 2016.
• Perhaps the most famous "dead mall" of all is Dixie Square Mall in the Chicago suburb of Harvey:
  • Built in 1966, the mall was initially successful with a fairly typical lineup for the era, including JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, Woolworth, Walgreens, and a Jewel supermarket. An expansion in 1970 added Turn Style, a short-lived discount department store then under the same ownership as Jewel. However, Dixie Square was quickly plagued by crime and poverty, with many shootings, thefts, and other incidents occurring. Between these and the demise of Turn Style, the mall was gradually closed throughout 1978.
  • A school later used the former Turn Style building for a short time after the mall closed, but its most famous use was in the movie The Blues Brothers, where the former JCPenney wing was fitted with fake storefronts for the Signature Scene in which Elwood and Jake drive a car through a mall while being chased by police. The abandoned mall quickly became a haven of vandalism and crime, despite a police station being built in the parking lot. The city of Harvey was unable to get the building demolished, so it sat well into the first decade of the 21st century, at the mercy of harsh Midwestern winters, scrappers, urban explorers, and vandals. Fires were also started in the former Woolworth and a space once occupied by a nightclub, further compromising the structure's integrity. The area around the mall continued to decline as well, leaving it surrounded by blight.
  • The first redevelopment plans were announced in 2005, at which point the mall was to be demolished for a Costco, with a furniture store taking the former Montgomery Ward space. However, this was scuttled when it was discovered that the mall was loaded with asbestos, and the company that had begun demolition did not acquire a permit. The mall's power plant was demolished (still illegally) one night, and accidental demolition of the Montgomery Ward building had also begun until the mayor of Harvey happened to drive by and stop them. Over the next several years, the property passed from developer to developer while the proper permits were acquired for demolition, but another fire had also started in the former JCPenney. Finally, the mall site was cleared in 2012.
• The American Dream Meadowlands megamall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, part of the vast Meadowlands Sports Complex that includes MetLife Stadium (home field of the New York Giants and Jets) and the Meadowlands Arena (former home of the New Jersey Devils and the then-New Jersey Nets), was first proposed in the early '00s by the Mills Corporation as the Meadowlands Xanadu, described as "a new standard for bringing lifestyle, recreation, sports and family entertainment offerings together in one location." This would be no ordinary mall — it would have an NHL-sized Ice Hockey rink, a minigolf course, an indoor water park and theme park, an twelve-story, 800-foot indoor ski slope, a 26-screen movie theater with an outdoor lounge overlooking Manhattan, a concert hall, an aquarium, a LEGOLAND Discovery Center, and to top it all off, the Pepsi Globe, a 287-foot-tall Ferris wheel. This profile in GQ describes it as something "ripped from the pages of David Foster Wallace's dystopian novel Infinite Jest." The project was announced in 2002 and ground was broken in 2004, with expected completion in two years. It did not begin to open until late 2019, with the $5 billion that has been sunk into it making it the most expensive retail project in history.
  • The first problem arose when the Mills Corporation was hit by the Securities and Exchange Commission for financial chicanery, forcing them to sell the mall off to Colony Capital in 2006 before declaring bankruptcy the following year. Meanwhile, as the original timetable for completion proved laughably unrealistic for a project of this scope, opening day kept getting pushed back.
  • Many people in the area thought that the complex, with its colorful checkerboard-and-stripe outer appearance, was butt-ugly, feeling that it looked like shipping containers. Among those who agreed was the original architect, David Rockwell, who claimed substantial Executive Meddling from his original design and quit the project.
  • The real disaster came with the onset of the Great Recession. When a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers (the firm whose collapse started the whole mess) missed its payments in 2009, other lenders started pulling out, causing the Meadowlands Xanadu to lose half a billion dollars' worth of funding. The mall, about 80% finished at the time, would likely miss its opening day (pushed back to 2010 by this point) again, causing retailers who had leased space inside the mall, including big anchors like Cabela's, to shelve their plans to open their Meadowlands locations. Related to this, three of the proposed major tenants (Borders, Circuit City, and Virgin Megastore) filed for bankruptcy and went out of business.
  • In 2010, having missed yet more deadlines, Colony Capital gave up and handed the mall over to a group of five lenders. The state of New Jersey stepped in, and the following year it was announced that the Triple Five Group (owners of the Mall of America and the West Edmonton Mall) would be taking over the project, renaming it to American Dream Meadowlands. Triple Five added the indoor water park and the DreamWorks theme park to the plans — a move that was fiercely opposed by the New York Giants and Jets, who filed a lawsuit to get them to drop the expanded plans, citing traffic concerns and claiming that the complex was now far larger than what they agreed on. A settlement was reached in 2014 allowing the expansion to go forward, but it held up construction even further.
  • January 2011 broke snowfall records in the area, with the vast quantity of snow and ice dumped on the mall causing a large section of the eastern wall to buckle and collapse in early February.
  • In 2016, Universal bought out DreamWorks Animation. This presented a problem, since the theme park was going to be DreamWorks-themed, and Universal, which already operates its own theme parks on the East Coast, had little interest in cannibalizing its business by supporting a competitor, causing them to pull out of the project. Nickelodeon subsequently acquired the rights to the mall's theme park, hoping to create a new Nickelodeon Universe location like the one at the Mall of America. (The water park, however, would remain DreamWorks-themed, as Universal's East Coast water park Volcano Bay is a much smaller part of its business.)
  • The mall finally met completion in the last quarter of 2019 and began a phased opening, only for the March 2020 restaurant and shop debuts to be postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the region that month, which also shut the rest of the operation down and (due to the pandemic's devastating effect on retail) led to the loss of Forever 21 and Lord & Taylor as tenants. On September 3, 2020, it was announced that the mall would finally receive its full proper opening, retail and entertainment included, as well as the reopening of Nickelodeon Universe, on October 1 — but with all that has happened since March 2020, it will most likely be a very long time before American Dream Meadowlands can make money. As of mid-2022, many of the retail spaces remain unoccupied.
  • Many have come to view the American Dream Meadowlands as one of the biggest boondoggles in New Jersey's history, its equivalent of the Big Dig given how much public money in the form of loans, bonds, and tax breaks has been given to the developers, especially given how many malls already exist in northern New Jersey. Five separate state governors^note Jim McGreevey, Richard Codey, Jon Corzine, Chris Christie, and Phil Murphy oversaw the project, and it became a joke akin to Duke Nukem Forever or Chinese Democracy within the state, such that Terrence T. McDonald, a reporter for the Jersey Journal, suggested on Twitter that a future New Jersey governor will be saying that "voters elected me in 2077 to get this thing done and we're just about there."
• City View, a strip mall in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Garfield Heights, was built in 2006 on the site of a former landfill. This immediately caused foundation issues and methane leakage in the center's Walmart, which abruptly closed after only two years. The issues caused by the site abruptly aborted construction, to the point that several outbuildings were left only half-finished, or in the case of a few restaurants and Home Depot, never even begun. With Walmart gone, the other stores in the center trickled out over time (including Circuit City and AJ Wright, both of which went out of business entirely), and the Great Recession happening soon after didn't help either. This leaves just a small cluster of stores on safer ground closer to I-480, a Giant Eagle supermarket all the way at the other end, and several mostly-unfinished rotting structures in between. Across I-480, developers planned to build another shopping center called Bridgeview Crossing, which would have had Target, Lowe's, and JCPenney. This too was brought down by City View's reputation and the Great Recession, and the land has stayed dormant (outside a few barely-started outparcels) ever since.
• Oviedo Mall, formerly Oviedo Marketplace, in the Orlando suburb of Oviedo. The mall opened to great fanfare in 1998 with department stores Dillard's and Gayfers, Major tenants included a movie theater, Bed Bath & Beyond, and "superstore" locations for both FYE and Foot Locker. However, its small size and poor freeway access meant that it never got above 80% occupancy. Also, the Gayfers anchor underwent several changes within the first few years. Dillard's bought out the Gayfers chain only seven months after the mall opened, so their store was sold to Parisian. This lasted only two years due to the store's unfamiliarity in the market, so it was hastily converted to Burdines in 2000 — only for Burdines to sell to Macy's in 2003. However, Sears joined as a third anchor in 2000. Occupancy continued to dwindle as shoppers preferred other, larger, and easier to access malls nearby. In addition, many of the other key tenants left as well: FYE closed its large store due to record stores falling out of favor, Foot Locker left as it began to phase out its superstores, and Bed Bath & Beyond moved out because its store was too large, ultimately becoming a gym. One large space originally intended for a restaurant was never even tenanted until a Paul Mitchell cosmetology school opened there in 2012. Macy's closed in 2017 and Sears in 2019.
• Kyova Mall, formerly Cedar Knoll Galleria, just outside Ashland, Kentucky. Due to a lack of foresight, Ashland ended up getting two malls built in the same year by competing developers: Ashland Town Center was built on the edge of downtown in a still thriving retail core, while Cedar Knoll Galleria was built on a remote lot far southwest of town with almost no development surrounding it. (Both were preceded by the much larger Huntington Mall across the Big Sandy River in Barboursville, West Virginia.) Cedar Knoll struggled right out of the gate, losing Phar-Mor almost instantly and Kmart in 2002. Two more anchor slots were proposed but never built out, meaning that two of the mall's hallways dead-end in grassy lots. Still, it hung on with about 50% occupancy, anchored by Sears and Elder-Beerman. A major restaurant in the mall closed due to issues with liquor licenses, creating another huge vacancy. Both Target and Meijer had expressed interest in anchoring the mall, but neither came to fruition. The Kmart later became a flea market and then a short-lived Steve & Barry's sportswear store, but after the latter went out of business, the mall only continued to lose tenants, and not even the name change to Kyova Mall helped any. Jo-Ann Fabrics and many other inline tenants moved to Ashland Town Center. While a movie theater and restaurant moved into the former Phar-Mor and a Rural King farm supply store filled the former Kmart, the mall has continued to grow increasingly vacant, never having been anywhere close to full occupancy and still surrounded almost entirely by forest. Sears finally closed there in 2014, while Elder-Beerman's parent company The Bon-Ton went out of business in fall 2018. Meanwhile, both Ashland Town Center and Huntington Mall continue to hold their own. Kyova Mall was renamed Camp Landing Entertainment District in 2021, and was partially repurposed as an entertainment complex.
• Scottsdale Galleria in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale went through this very quickly. It opened in 1991 as an upscale mall featuring an IMAX theater, an aquarium, and all sorts of other amenities. However, originally planned anchor store I. Magnin backed out, leaving the mall with no major department store (not that it mattered, since I. Magnin went out of business soon afterward). Also, the nearby Scottsdale Fashion Square expanded, luring away potential tenants. After only two years, the mall was foreclosed on and largely closed except for the theater and a TGI Friday's, while plans were drawn up to turn it into a sports complex. These plans failed, as did plans to turn it into a planetarium and a museum. Scenes from Tank Girl were also filmed in the complex during its long period of abandonment. It was finally converted to offices at the Turn of the Millennium.
• Brandywine Town Center was first proposed for Wilmington, Delaware in 1983, and was slated to be built on the site of an abandoned racetrack. The mall was supposed to have brought upscale merchants to the area, such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. However, the property was hotly contested for years, as many felt that such a mall would have killed the existing Concord Mall down the road, and analysts pointed out that such upscale stores would have performed poorly in Delaware, especially since most of them already existed across the border at King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. By the time construction began in the late 1990s, Target and a Regal Cinemas movie theater were chosen as the anchors, while most of the mall space was taken up by "big box" stores, including both Home Depot and Lowe's, along with Bed Bath & Beyond and Dick's Sporting Goods. A large arcade/entertainment center owned by Regal Cinemas was abruptly closed, leaving a vacancy that was later filled by a call center before closing as well. Several of the "big box" stores in the center closed within a couple years (including Cost Plus World Market and a furniture store), leaving more glaring vacancies. The actual mall concourse consisted of only about a dozen stores, most of which were never tenanted. As a result, the concourse was eventually removed entirely in favor of a different furniture store, while other large pieces of the sprawling complex remain vacant.
• Newmarket North Mall in Hampton, Virginia eventually fell hard into this.
  • The mall opened in 1975 as the largest shopping center - along with the nearby Mercury Mall^note later Mercury Plaza Mall, now demolished and Coliseum Mall^note named for the nearby Hampton Coliseum, since redeveloped into an open-air shopping center named Peninsula Town Center - in Hampton, part of the northern section (called the Peninsula) of the Tidewater or Hampton Roads region of Virginia, with anchors including a Sears, Miller & Rhoads^note a Richmond-based department store chain and Leggett^note one of a series of partnerships with the Belk department store chain. Belk would buy all of these partnerships out in the late 1990s, resulting in the Belk name being used through the entire chain.
  • Things went relatively well for the mall until a string of developments began taking its toll on the mall. First came the 1987 opening of Patrick Henry Mall in nearby Newport News. Both Coliseum Mall and Newmarket North Mall attempted to counteract with remodeling, with pastel colors replacing the original earth tones decor, and by 1990 the mall was renamed Newmarket Fair Mall.
  • The next shoe to drop came when the Miller & Rhoads chain folded in 1990, which along with the early 1990s recession and the 1992 opening of the Monitor Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel (allowing easier access to malls in Norfolk and Virginia Beach)^note Newmarket was located near the James River Bridge, which along with Route 17 were the only ways to get from the Peninsula to the Southside region covering Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake when the mall first opened added to Newmarket's rapidly growing list of woes, to the degree that the mall had a vacancy rate of almost 40% by early 1994.
  • Following attempts to convince local start-ups to move in with no success and the Leggett being downgraded to an outlet store, By 1997, non-retail use for the increasing number of vacant spaces were being considered.
  • After Thomas Nelson Community College^note now Virginia Peninsula Community College and Colonial Downs turned down offers, Bell Atlantic^note now Verizon moved into the vacant Miller & Rhoads, where it remains. Shortly after buying out the numerous partnerships, Belk left the former Leggett location. Other large spaces would be occupied by AMSEC, an engineering firm for the U.S. Navy, and training facilities for the nearby Newport News Shipyard by 2003, with the property eventually renamed NetCenter. The office buildings that currently occupy the former store spaces are closed to the public, with the only spaces remaining available to the public are the Sears location (due to Sears owning the property) and a Piccadilly Cafeteria, with Sears Holdings' October 2018 Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection announcement resulting in that Sears location closing; leaving Piccadilly Cafeteria - the lone remaining remnant of Newmarket North Mall - with a very uncertain future.
• Going back to Kentucky: Lexington Mall (in the city of that name) opened in 1974 and quickly became the area's leading shopping destination, despite being smaller than its main competitors, Fayette and Turfland Malls. It benefited greatly from its location—it sat next to some of Lexington's most exclusive neighborhoods, and it was noticeably more accessible to shoppers in outlying counties to the east than Fayette and Turfland were. The popular radio commercial jingle "Lexington Mall has it all" rang true until the 1990s, when...
  • First, Fayette Mall added a food court and a large new wing early in the decade, seriously cutting into Lexington Mall's traffic.
  • Turfland Mall underwent a lesser renovation in the mid-1990s, and drew several popular restaurants.
  • Starting in 1997, notorious horse farm owners and socialites Preston and Anita Madden turned most of their farm into the big-box shopping mecca of Hamburg Pavilion. Unlike the urban core of Lexington, or any of the city's existing malls, Hamburg had direct interstate highway access, making it much more accessible to shoppers from outlying counties who used to flock to Lexington Mall.
  • The year before the Maddens got into the game, The Home Depot planned to build a new store immediately to the east of Lexington Mall. The mall owner, Saul Centers LLP, wanted the store built as part of the mall in the parking lot of a former supermarket next to the mall. Home Depot instead built a free-standing store on the former supermarket site, which was in fact on a separate piece of property from the original mall. The dispute led to a meeting of Lexington's planning commission that became a shouting match. The commission basically told the parties to "grow up"... they didn't. Saul then filed suit—and became so obsessed with winning the case that it lost sight of the fact that virtually all of the mall's tenants got tired of the mess and left. By the time the legal action was over in 2004, the only significant retailers left in the complex were a Dillard's (which pulled out the next year) and the same Home Depot that triggered the legal mess (which remains open to this day).
  • The final chapter: Lexington megachurch Southland Christian Church, whose main worship center is in adjacent Jessamine County, bought the former mall in 2010, tearing out most of it to build a satellite worship center that opened in 2013. Only the Dillard's space remains from the original mall, and even that portion was gutted to turn it into support facilities for the worship center.
• Puente Hills Mall in Industry, California eventually fell hard into this.
  • The mall opened in 1974 alongside with Santa Anita Fashion Park, sharing the same anchors as the latter except with Sears instead of Buffum's.
  • Things went relatively well for the mall until a string of developments starting in the early 90s began taking its toll on the mall. First was a spree shooting and robbery that negatively-affected the mall's safety reputation. Second was a one-two-punch from redevelopments at Plaza West Covina to the north and Brea Mall to the south. The latter got an expansion with a Robinsons-May anchor and the former got an expansion with Nordstrom and J.W. Robinson's (later JCPenney). This would lead to Puente Hills Mall's middle and upper-class clienteles migrating to Plaza West Covina and Brea Mall respectively. Third was simply shifting demographics, with the Industry area becoming increasingly working-class and Asian-American.
  • By 1996, the mall's occupancy rate was 50%. JCPenney left in favor of the nearby Brea Mall location and Macy's chose not to convert the Broadway department store into a Macy's, leaving the anchor to be demolished and rebuilt into an AMC Movie Threater. The ex-JCPenney anchor was redeveloped into Circuit City, Linens-n-Things, CompUSA and Ross.
  • While the mall enjoyed a period of respite during the 2000s, the 2010s would usher in another round of irreversible decline. Toys-R-Us would open in the former Circuit City space in 2011 and closed in 2018, Forever 21 would close in 2020, Sears closed in 2018, and Macy's closed in 2022. Around this time, several attempts at revamping the mall have gone nowhere. By the end of 2023, very few, if any, stores are open.
• North Towne Square on the north side of Toledo, Ohio was also a troubled mall. Built right below the Michigan border in 1980, the mall originally included local department stores LaSalle's and Lion Store, along with Montgomery Ward. However, LaSalle's was rebranded by parent company Macy's in 1982, and then closed and sold to Elder-Beerman only two years after that. While the mall initially held its own, it quickly lost traffic when Frenchtown Square (now Mall of Monroe, and now very dead in its own right) opened across the border in Monroe, Michigan in 1988, followed by an expansion of nearby Franklin Park Mall in the early 90s. Elder-Beerman closed in 1997 during its first bankruptcy (they also had a store in Monroe at the time), and Dillard's bought out Lion Store only to close it a year later, leaving just Montgomery Ward until they went out of business in 2001. A gym took the former Montgomery Ward space, but the other two department stores remained vacant, with the mall itself closing in January 2005. An attempt to build a Walmart on the site in 2007 was shut down by city council, so the building sat and decayed. In 2010, the city mayor issued a condemnation notice due to leaking roofs and broken pipes on the vacated property, along with $86,000 in back taxes owed by the building's last owners. The property was finally torn down in 2013 except for the gym.
• Stones River Mall in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (southeast of Nashville) managed to recover from a rough start. Already delayed from an originally-planned opening of 1984, it remained a vacant lot for several years after that thanks to financial difficulty of the original developers. The mall's original anchor stores (Sears, Walmart, and Goody's) opened in 1989, but other than an Applebee's restaurant, the mall was kept from opening for nearly three years due to said developers going bankrupt. When another company took over and opened it in 1992, much of the mall space was not yet occupied, including a slot for a fourth department store (Anderson's) that went out of business before the mall opened, and a food court that ultimately never took off and got removed. In addition, Walmart moved to a supercenter next to the mall after only six years. However, things began to turn around when local department store Castner Knott (which soon got bought out by Dillard's) moved into the former Walmart building and J. C. Penney took the last anchor slot. Combined with Murfreesboro's strong economy and the decline of the next-nearest mall in Nashville (Hickory Hollow Mall in Antioch), tenancy quickly rose, to the point that both Dillard's and J. C. Penney built newer, larger stores to free up their older locations for further mall expansions. Even though a "lifestyle center" outdoor mall has opened just up the road in the intervening years, Stones River has managed to hang in there.
• Worcester Center in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts, went through this twice. A large urban renewal project in the early 1970s, an attempt to revitalize the then-dying downtown district, cleared out 34 acres of downtown for a massive, three-story shopping mall with Filene's and Jordan Marsh as the anchor stores. Although it opened in 1971 to great fanfare, it was constantly described as struggling; as early as 1973, there were doubts to its long term success. It had a reputation for crime, and its downtown location was inconvenient relative to malls that were already being built in the suburbs, while its size and positioning made for inconvenient traffic patterns downtown (particularly for pedestrians). Still, it limped along until the early 1990s, when Jordan Marsh went out of business entirely and Filene's closed due to declining sales. A developer took over and reopened the mall in 1996 as an outlet center, bringing in a myriad of new "big box" and outlet stores, including Bed Bath & Beyond, Media Play, and Sports Authority. While initially successful, it still suffered from the same logistical problems as its predecessor... and it quickly lost footing when an outlet mall opened in Wrentham in 1997. A rapid decline in tenancy ensued, with nearly all the anchor stores closing in 2004, and finally the mall itself between 2005 and 2006 for redevelopment. The building sat abandoned for years as new developers attempted to secure funding for a new development. Finally by the 2010s, demolition began on most of the property (except the former Filene's-turned-Media Play, which became a CVS/pharmacy and some city offices), with many office and retail buildings having displaced most of the former mall's site.
• Avenue Mall in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin is a lesson in not building malls in downtown districts. It was proposed in the mid-1980s to link two existing downtown department stores, Gimbels and H. C. Prange Company (Prange's). The mall opened in 1985, requiring the demolition of two city blocks. However, Gimbels went out of business only a year later and sold their store to Marshall Field's. The mall was extremely sparse on opening day, with only about 20 tenants open for business. Not helping matters was the opening of Fox Valley Mall out in the suburbs around the same time. Noticing the lack of tenancy, the owners of the Prange's chain announced that they would close the downtown store by 1989 in favor of the Fox Valley store unless Avenue Mall's occupancy reached 70% — and sure enough, downtown's store was closed in 1989 as promised. Marshall Field's closed in 1991 when the parent company opened a branch of Dayton's over at Fox Valley (which itself would assume the Marshall Field's name in 2001, and become a Macy's in 2006). The downtown mall was already facing foreclosure, but still managed to snag Herberger's in the former Marshall Field's space in 1993, only for then-parent company Saks to rebrand the store to Younkers in 1997. Since Younkers had also gotten into Fox River by taking over Prange's, they closed the downtown store in 2001, leaving the now almost entirely vacant Avenue Mall with no anchors. As a result, the building was renamed City Center, and both former department store spaces were sliced up for offices and ground-facing retail. The mall structure still exists, but it is largely barren except for the occasional office suite.
• Also in the Orlando market was Interstate Mall in Altamonte Springs. Opened in 1974, it immediately got outmoded by the larger Altamonte Mall across the street, and was plagued by poor access from nearby highways. An A&P supermarket which served as one of the anchor stores closed after only two years, and the mall was foreclosed on due to its unprofitability. It was bought by a lender in 1977, and passed on to his sons a year later when he died in a car crash. The new owners did some fixing up in the 1980s, replacing the A&P with Orlando's first TJ Maxx in 1984, while the Montgomery Ward was turned into their discount division, Jefferson's... only for that division to go under in 1985. After a Dallas developer backed out on redevelopment plans in 1986 (which would have included putting home improvement chain Builder's Square in the former Jefferson's), the Jefferson's was turned back into a Montgomery Ward. A Phar-Mor drugstore was added to its east, but it quickly went out of business. The mall was finally put out of its misery in 1995, with the enclosure removed for "big box" stores, and only a small hallway leading to the still operational movie theater in back. But it didn't stop there — the Montgomery Ward closed again in 1997, and became a Burlington Coat Factory with a Gold's Gym on the upper level. Many of the replacement stores such as CompUSA, Linens 'n Things, and David's Bridal all went out of business, TJ Maxx moved to a new store, and Gold's Gym abruptly closed in 2015, leaving the redeveloped center to struggle a second time.
• Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio is another one that has been widely documented. It got off to a slow start, as it had been planned as early as 1971, but difficulty in excavating and developing the land set it behind schedule to the point that the city of Akron nearly withdrew building permits. On opening day in 1975, only 21 stores were open for business, despite plans calling for more than 120. By 1977, the mall had filled out to full capacity, with four department stores (J. C. Penney, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and O'Neil's), and nearly all of its 140 stores filled. It also boasted a movie theater and food court on the second level. While Montgomery Ward closed in 1986 due to declining sales, it was quickly replaced with Higbee's, which in turn became Dillard's in 1992. O'Neil's was renamed May Company Ohio in 1989, and again to Kaufmann's in 1993.
  However, in 1991, the mall owners enacted a cost-cutting measure by hiring "rent-a-cops" instead of off-duty police officers as security. This backfired massively when a riot broke out at the movie theater after a falling metal sign was mistaken by mall patrons for a gunshot during a screening of New Jack City. This negative publicity, combined with the theater's smaller size, caused it to close in 1993. While mall owners managed to attract Target as a fifth anchor in 1995, both J. C. Penney and Dillard's downgraded their stores to clearance centers, and the mall had gained a reputation for being a lower-class "urban" mall, compared to the much nicer Summit Mall to the north in Fairlawn. Rolling Acres was sold off several times, and by 2001, it was owned by Heywood Whichard, a Raleigh, NC-based group known for buying struggling malls at rock-bottom prices just to let them deteriorate. While it was sold off again, the mall's reputation for crime and blight had only exacerbated, to the point that a homeless man was found living in a vacant storefront with over $30,000 in stolen goods from mall merchants. Between 2006 and 2008, Dillard's and Macy's (which bought out Kaufmann's) closed, while Target moved to a new location. Due to an inability to pay for power, the entire mall was shuttered at the end of 2008, with every tenant getting evicted except for Sears and the J. C. Penney outlet.
  But the problems didn't end there. The vacant mall was auctioned online in 2009, but attracted no buyers. A company bought the building in 2010. Sears closed in 2011, and J. C. Penney Outlet in 2013, leaving the structure fully abandoned except for a storage facility in the old Target. Throughout The New '10s, the abandoned mall was repeatedly broken into by vandals, scrappers, and urban explorers, including one man who was electrocuted to death when attempting to steal copper wiring. The then-owners stopped paying for security, and blocked attempts by the city to auction it off. It was auctioned off in 2016, but again found no buyers, so ownership was transferred to the city of Akron. The mall was finally torn down in 2017 except for the former Sears, which houses a recycling facility.
• Bellevue Mall, also in Nashville. It was first planned in the early 1970s, but shifts in developers, difficulties in rezoning the land, and failure to find suitable anchor stores doomed it almost from the start. Taubman Centers had joined development in 1981, but the mall did not open until 1990. Unusually for a Taubman mall, it had only two anchor stores: Dillard's and local chain Castner Knott. The hopes were for the mall to spur southwesterly development into the suburb of Bellevue, and that the upscale stores offered would give incentive. Instead, the exit at which Bellevue Mall was located remained sparsely developed, as suburban sprawl instead pushed due south into Franklin, where CoolSprings Galleria (which also had both Dillard's and Castner Knott among its anchor stores) opened a year later. Still, Bellevue managed to hold on for a while. Attempts were made to lure in more anchors, but the only other interested party was Sears which joined in 1999; in addition, after Castner Knott was purchased by Dillard's, their store became Proffitt's, Hecht's, and then Macy's within the course of five years. But perhaps the biggest blow was the much older Mall at Green Hills just to the northeast: originally an unassuming strip mall built in the 1950s, it was aggressively expanded into a much larger mall with much of the same posh offerings. Bellevue quickly resorted to temporary tenants such as libraries and churches to fill its increasing vacancies. Lack of surrounding development and redundancy to the other area malls quickly sent Bellevue Mall into a tailspin: Dillard's bailed in 2007, the mall itself closed in 2008, and Macy's a year after that, leaving only the Sears attached to a vacant property. It remained that way until 2015 when the property was finally torn down — all after a mere 18 years in business, a short life for a massive suburban megamall. A much smaller, more compact outdoor mall opened on the property in 2019.
• Raceland Mall, a small community mall in Louisville, Kentucky, went through this as well. Originally planned for a 1970 opening, it was held up for many years following an attempt to sell the then-unfinished mall to another developer, after which the original developer went into receivership with the mall 95% finished. Raceland Mall finally opened in 1975, by which point anchor store W. T. Grant had already been open for two years. However, Grant's went out of business that same year, and their store was sold to Britt's, only for them to go out of business in 1979. By this point, only 19 out of 33 spaces in the mall had been filled, with much of the blame being placed on the slow start and inability to secure an anchor store, along with poor store selection and highway access. Ownership changed multiple times, with one owner attempting to sue the previous one for a mortgage. The former Britt's became local department store Consolidated Sales in 1980, only for them to go out of business as well in 1985. Their replacement, and the mall's fourth anchor store in less than a decade, was a Pace warehouse club store; however, unlike its predecessors, Pace did not retain an entrance to the mall itself. By 1990, the mall was entirely closed except for Pace and a supermarket. Yet another batch of new owners renamed the mall to Creekside Pavilion and promised redevelopment plans, which fell through when the supermarket and Pace both closed. After being put up for sale for the tenth time, the entire mall structure was converted to an auto dealership in 1996, which continues to sell Fords, Lincolns, and Nissans to this day.
• Valley Green Mall in Newberry Township, Pennsylvania, halfway between York and Harrisburg, was a very quick example. A local developer built the mall in 1987 in hopes of attracting more stores, but they never came. Major points of contention were difficulty in access (the center is all but impossible to get to from southbound Interstate 83, and access northbound is easier but still impacted by poor visibility) and a lack of major stores (the anchor stores were Jamesway, a local competitor to Kmart, and a supermarket). So quick was the mall'a decline that it was "de-malled" — that is, turned from an enclosed property to an open-air one — only five years into its existence. It was also at this point that the center was renamed Newberry Commons. After that, Jamesway went out of business in 1995, so their store and much of what was left became corporate offices for Rite Aid.
• One Schaumburg Place in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg was troubled right from the start. Built in 1991, it was intended as a "discount" oriented complement to the massive Woodfield Mall across the parking lot. However, it found considerable difficulty in securing tenants, particularly when three of the major tenants (Highland Superstore, Phar-Mor, and Filene's Basement) filed for bankruptcy and closed less than two years into the mall's existence. While the Highland store was replaced with an Office Depot and a branch of local footwear store Chernin's, Montgomery Ward closed their store in 1997 due to poor sales, thus leaving the mall without an anchor store. As a result, the shopping center was converted to a more successful outdoor format that year, in which it survives to this day.
• New Orleans Centre was an attempt to bring a third mall into downtown New Orleans. However, instead of building along the Canal Street corridor where most of downtown's retail (including the other two malls) can be found, it was built much further west, among a cluster of office towers and across from the Louisiana Superdome. Opening in 1988, it featured Macy's and Lord & Taylor as the anchor stores; of these, Lord & Taylor had no other stores in Louisiana, while Macy's would have only one other until 2006. Its distance from downtown's retail core left its upscale offerings vastly out of place, while the oil bust did further damage to local demographics. Almost none of the third floor was ever tenanted, resulting in portions becoming a TV studio. The only consistently successful part of the mall was the food court, and even then it mostly served only office workers. Anecdotes from former workers have reported that some of the stores went entire days without a single sale, and that the only traffic came from office workers, customers of the adjacent Hyatt Regency, or the occasional spillover from New Orleans Saints games. Lord & Taylor closed its store in 2004, taking with it nearly all of the mall's on-street access. As with many other fixtures of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina dealt the final blow. The entire mall was closed in 2005, although Macy's lasted until 2007. The mall structure was torn down in 2009 except for the former Lord & Taylor and Macy's locations (both repurposed into other uses), and the rest of the site was repurposed into an open-air event center called Champions Square.
• Pavilion Shops in San Jose, California was troubled right out of the gate. It was intended to bring upscale shopping and a food court to downtown. However, the opening was delayed multiple times. First, the original developer Campeau Corporation dropped out due to a lack of commitment, leading Melvin Simon & Associates (now known as Simon Property Group) to take over. Leasings were held up as the company failed to secure a major department store anchor. Analysts also balked at the mall's concept, due to a lack of tourism, higher-income residents, or commuter traffic in the area. Although the mall was busy on opening day in 1989, business quickly plummeted; more than 50 stores would open and close by the early 1990s, a number made all the more shocking by the fact that the mall only had 30 spaces to begin with. Simon responded by decreasing rent. When a sports bar opened at the mall in 1991, the few remaining businesses worried that such an establishment would detract from the originally intended upscale image. In return, Simon included a clause in the bar owner's contract which said that he could not sue them under any circumstances; when the owner refused, he was given the choice to be evicted or pay the pre-reduction rent, and chose the former. (He was able to get his rent waived, but lost a fraud lawsuit against the mall.) Another developer who had planned to build an upscale restaurant adjacent to the mall also sued Simon for breach of lease; when a judge ruled in Simon's favor, the developer of the intended restaurant committed suicide. Simon then chose to reassess the mall with a focus on restaurants and entertainment, which led to many of the remaining tenants getting evicted and a further spiral of lawsuits before the mall was finally closed in 1996.
  Opening in the former building were a United Artists theater and arcade known as Starport. However, United Artists ran into financial issues and closed it in 2000. The city of San Jose lent $2.5 million to a local theater chain, Camera Cinemas, to reopen the theater on a 15-year lease. However, an ill-fated expansion to 12 screens and the Great Recession put a financial strain on Camera, causing it to fall behind on rent. After years of decline and owed rent, the theater finally closed again in 2016. In 2020, a real estate funding company called Urban Catalyst announced a massive redevelopment plan focused on San Jose's downtown. Conversion of the former mall-turned-theater to offices began in December 2020.
• San Mateo Fashion Island was a failed mall in San Mateo, California, halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. It was built in 1982 on a muddy field, and required special building techniques to counter this. Opening with anchor stores JCPenney, Montgomery Ward, Bullock's, and Liberty House, it faced difficulty almost immediately. Developer Hahn Company sold the mall off in 1986 for a myriad of reasons, including poor access from highway 92 which was exacerbated by construction. Shortly afterward, Liberty House closed due to poor sales outside their home base of Hawaii, and Bullock's due to ventilation and shopper comfort issues caused by the store's canvas roof. Bullock's location was sold to an upstart sporting goods company called All American Sports Club, and Liberty House to a counterculture store called Whole Earth Access; however, the former went out of business in 1989 and the latter did not open out to the mall. Meanwhile, Hillsdale Shopping Center across highway 101 successfully underwent a massive renovation and expansion that lured away many stores and shoppers. By 1991, both Whole Earth Access and JCPenney had closed too, leaving Montgomery Ward as the only anchor. Having dropped to 80% vacancy in 1993, the mall was put up for redevelopment; this led to the owner of an arcade inside the mall attempting to sue the then-owners for breach of contract. After Montgomery Ward finally closed in 1996, the mall was torn down for a conventional strip mall after only 14 years in business. The only remnant of the past is the ice rink.
• Eastgate Mall in Richmond, Virginia suffered badly for being one of the city's oldest malls. The mall was a simple one-story T-shaped mall with two major anchor stores: Sears and local retail giant Thalhimers. However, in the early 90's, the mall suffered a one-two blow that it never recovered from. The first was the departure of Sears, leaving for Virginia Center Commons in neighboring Henrico County, in 1991. The second came from Thalhimers' buyout by Macy's, shuttering all its doors in 1992. A Peebles would take Thalhimers' place soon after, remaining there the remainder of the mall's life, but nothing would replace Sears until the 2010s when the former anchor store was replaced by a storage facility called Ample Storage. The mall would remain there, effectively bleeding to death as its other stores would slowly go out of business, transforming the mall into a former shell of itself until it was ultimately all torn down and replaced with a smaller shopping center anchored by a Wal-Mart Supercenter in 2018.
• Harrison Plaza in the Philippines used to be the premier shopping mall in Manila, with air conditioning introduced relatively early in the late 1970s. However it was struck by a fire in 1982, forcing the Martel family to rebuild it. By the 1990s, it had somewhat recovered, but the rise of the more powerful shopping mall chains like the SM, Robinson's, the Megaworld chain, and the Ayala Malls dented Harrison Plaza's reputation, which did not help with the appearance of drug addicts, not to mention that the former site used to be a cemetery; by 2016, rival shopping mall SM, who had an anchor store in Harrison Plaza, offered to buy out the Martel family. It was razed in 2021, paving the way for a new SM mall.
• Uniwide Sales did not fare better: originally a supermarket chain, they built the Uniwide Coastal Mall in Manila in 1997. Then the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis hit, crippling the mall. Only a few establishments opened such a bowling club, a theater, a McDonald's, a grocery store, and a Jollibee. The mall in the 2010s later became a bus terminal in 2018; the Coastal Mall no longer exists due to demolition and the bus terminal took over the site.
• Norfolk, Virginia's two most prominent malls, Military Circle Mall and MacArthur Center, began falling on hard times (in the former mall's case, terminally) almost simultaneously due to a combination of changing economic conditions affecting many other malls and a series of violent crimes in the areas.
  • Military Circle Mall opened in 1970 with J.B. Hunter^note later acquired by Thalhimers; JCPenney; Leggett^note one of the partnerships as part of the Belk umbrella; Smith & Welton; an AMC movie theater and even a Sheraton hotel. Even with Smith & Welton closing in 1990 and Thalhimers becoming Hecht's in 1992 (and by 2006; Macy's), things remained relatively successful for the mall until about the late 1990s, when reports of rising crime and increased competition - particularly from the new MacArthur Center mall listed below - started hammering the mall; first with Belk^note which had recently retired the various partnership names such as Leggett to unify the company's brand leaving in 1998, though the Smith & Welton space that had been vacant nearly a decade was filled when Sears returned to the Mermaid City after its last store in the city closed in 1993; followed by the Belk slot being replaced by an 18-screen Cinemark theater. Thor Equities acquired the mall in 2002 and renamed it "The Gallery at Military Circle" while continuing its renovation, including adding a Ross Dress for Less where a former McCrory's had been. However, the mall began experiencing more trouble starting around the time of the Great Recession; with KB Toys, Suncoast and Waldenbooks all closing their locations in 2009^note with KB Toys and Waldenbooks both going out of business entirely. Sears, in the middle of its own rapid decline, shuttered its Military Circle location by 2012, followed by original anchor JCPenney being one of 33 stores closing by January 2014; with the city of Norfolk acquiring the vacated anchor for just $2.5 million to have a larger say in the mall's future while leasing the space out to Movement Mortgage and insurer Optima Health. The entire mall was placed under foreclosure in 2015 and auctioned unsuccessfully (though by the end of the year, the mall reverted to its original Military Circle Mall name), with Macy's leaving as one of 40 stores closing nationwide^note this was one of three stores in the Hampton Roads region to close; increasing speculation that the mall would be closed and torn down for a new arena that would possibly replace the aging Norfolk Scope, speculation fueled further by the 2021 closure of the Cinemark theater. Finally; in 2022 it was announced that the mall would close down, which it did on January 31, 2023, with the former mall's future as yet undetermined.
  • MacArthur Center, named for World War II general Douglas MacArthur^note who had familial ties to the area, as his mother was born in Norfolk and the general's parents were married there. Additionally; the MacArthur Memorial, where both the general and his wife Jean are buried, is located near the mall as part of MacArthur Square; first opened in March 1999 to much fanfare and anchors including Nordstrom and Dillard's (which became the chain's East Coast flagship store); with over 70 of the original tenants being new to the region including Nordstrom; Rainforest Cafe and Abercrombie & Fitch^note Macy's had signed a letter of interest when plans for the mall first became public, but backed out for unknown reasons and at 1.1 million square feet was the region's largest mall. Things went reasonably well at the mall until the mid-late 2010s; when the general "retail apocalypse" and rising crime - including a number of shootings - began taking its toll, with the canary in the coal mine being the closing of original anchor Nordstrom in 2019; followed shortly afterwards by a number of other stores including J. Crew, Banana Republic, Forever 21, Chicos and Zales. Following largely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic was the shuttering of stores such as Victoria's Secret and another original tenant in Abercrombie & Fitch; while Starwood Capital Group - owner of MacArthur Center since 2014 - defaulted on a $750 million loan, British real estate firm JLL (short for Jones Lang LaSalle) temporarily took over management until Spinoso Group took over management in 2021. That year saw the city of Norfolk announce their plans to tear down the mall by 2030; with other closures including Apple in 2021; the Texas de Brazil restaurant following an April 2022 shooting and the December 2022 departure of Barnes & Noble, likewise leaving the mall's future in jeopardy. The city of Norfolk acquired the mall in June 2023 save for Dillard's (the sole remaining original anchor and one-time East Coast flagship); which was originally announced as downgrading to a one-story clearance store, only for Dillard's to announce in July 2023 that it was closing that location altogether, effectively clearing the way for redevelopment.
• Regency Mall in Augusta, Georgia became an example when the mall found itself the victim of the usual things that tend to hurt a mall; such as high crime, intense competition, a lack of updating and a poor location before languishing after its closure much like Dixie Square Mall and Rolling Acres Mall above.
  • The mall was built by the DeBartolo Corporation^note for non-retail enthusiasts that recognize the last name, Edward DeBartolo Jr., son of the company founder, was the longtime owner of the NFL's San Francisco 49ers from 1977 until he was forced to turn over control of the team to his sister Denise York and her son Jed in 2000 after being embroiled in a corruption scandal involving former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, with Eddie DeBartolo pleading guilty to failing to report a felony after Edwards, long known as a Corrupt Politician, demanded $400,000 in exchange for a casino license, receiving a $1 million fine and 2 years probation in exchange for testifying against Edwards. DeBartolo would ultimately be pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020 and opened in July 1978 (one week before Augusta Mall) with just over half of its 139 stores ready in time for the grand opening including anchors Montgomery Ward, local department store chain J.B. White and a General Cinema theater (tellingly, the anchor locations for Cullum's and Belk-Howard^note unlike most of the Belk partnerships during this time; the store was branded as simply Belk were not completed at the time of the grand opening. Cullum's didn't open until late 1978, Belk not until 1979)^note incidentally, JCPenney had been considered as a potential anchor before electing to open in Augusta Mall.
  • Both malls did well initially; but Regency was beginning to suffer from its location (the intersection of U.S. 1 and Gordon Highway) not being near an interstate (in contrast, Augusta Mall was just off the Bobby Jones Expressway off Interstate 520 as well as being 2 miles from I-20). Additionally, both malls had security issues beginning during the mid-1980s but Regency was rocked by two particularly violent incidents in 1986 (where a 16-year-old girl was abducted, raped and shot four times; with her body being discovered in nearby Hephzibah) and 1989 (where an 18-year-old woman got into her car unaware that a man had snuck in; with the woman being shot and left paralyzed). Meanwhile; 1990 saw Augusta Mall undergo a $32 million renovation and expansion that included the local Sears moving to the mall (by contrast, Regency was essentially unchanged in terms of appearance; with the only major changes of note by this time being the Cullum's later becoming a Meyers-Arnold and by the late 1980s Uptons). Despite all this trouble; DeBartolo Family Associates still held out hope for a possible fifth anchor, but that never came to pass.
  • The first signs of trouble came when several other stores, including the Uptons anchor, closed in 1993 (one merchant being quoted as saying that she didn't see the mall "having any kind of future"), with small local businesses such as a comic book store moving in. By 1995, the ailing DeBartolo corporation transferred the mall to Equitable Real Estate (which held the mortgage) in exchange for the forgiveness of a $12.5 million debt. The following year saw both Belk (which by then had downgraded to an outlet center) and General Cinema close its doors while city leaders began looking at moving several government offices there^note one 1998 proposal included moving a courtroom to the former Belk. The mall itself was sold in 1997 to Regency Mall LLC; run by Raleigh developers Haywood Wichard and Paul Woo - notorious for buying and reselling distressed properties, for $4.15 million (a mere fraction of the $33.5 million it was valued at in 1991); while by 1998 J.B. White (recently acquired by Dillard's) moved from Regency to Augusta Mall, leaving Montgomery Ward as the mall's lone remaining anchor. Additionally; by 1999 rumors surfaced of a possible sale to AMC Development, conversion to an entertainment center with amusement park rides, an ice rink and hotel among the planned attractions and potential retailers such as FAO Schwarz and Nike being added; only for the planned sale to fall through and a subsequent attempt to auction the property off also failing.
  • By 2000; the mall was down to five tenants: original anchor Montgomery Ward, another original tenant in International Formal Wear, Foot Locker, a teen clinic and a sub-station for the Marshals Department for Richmond County (Augusta area). By mid-2001, Foot Locker, the teen clinic and Wards (which went under when the entire chain folded) had closed, followed by the last retail occupant, International Formal Wear, in early 2002. Wichard (who bought out Woo's interest in 1999) then sold the property save for the vacant Wards to Cardinal Entities for $3.5 million (the Wards building went to Charleston-based Commercial Property Holdings; which sold the Wards building to Cardinal in 2007) and despite attempts to woo the local government to move office buildings to the vacant property, the city leaders (in a reversal of their late 1990s interest) balked. The marshal's substation remained in the property until 2004.
  • In the years since, Regency - much like Dixie Square Mall and Rolling Acres Mall - found itself the target of deteriorating conditions and vandalism as a series of proposals fell through^note among them, an attempt to convert the property into a park and retail space similar to the failed 1999 proposal; an arena proposal in 2004 that ended when voters defeated a proposed local-option sales tax, a 2007 plan by a local church to buy the vacant Wards and convert it into a new location (as part of a larger plan to occupy the rest of the mall) that included a sanctuary that could seat up to 3,000 and a 2017 proposal to make the vacant mall site the location of a newly relocated James Brown Arena. None of these came to fruition. By 2013 - following a series of fires, an investigation by CBS affiliate WRDW-TV 12 where a reporter and cameraman went into Regency to demonstrate how easy it was to break in and local officials demanding the property be brought up to current fire code or demolished, the vacant mall had all combustible, mechanical and electrical equipment and wiring removed in an attempt to discourage vandals and urban explorers (in 2010; all entry-ways and exits had already been blocked off), leaving Regency an empty shell. By 2020; the former Montgomery Ward building was demolished, but as of June 2023 that building was the only part of the former mall's property to have been torn down.
• Although Pontiac Mall, later Summit Place Mall, in the Detroit suburb of Waterford Township started out holding its own, it ended up becoming an example after winding up on the receiving end of a chain of events that started in the late 1990s.
  • The mall, the first enclosed shopping complex in Michigan, was built by what would later become Ramco-Gershenson and opened in May 1962, initially featuring 42 inline tenants joined by pre-existing Montgomery Ward department and Kroger grocery stores alongside a "budget" branch of Detroit-based Hudson's^note which did not sell furniture or small appliances. The mall would expand several times in the ensuing decades, as Hudson's would expand their store into a full-line location and Sears would erect a standalone store in the mall's northern parking lot in 1972. By 1983, Pontiac Mall had briefly entered a decline due to several of its tenants going out of business, and Ramco-Gershenson's solution was to enact a full-scale renovation of the mall, which was renamed Summit Place Mall afterward. This was followed by a 1988 expansion that saw new JCPenney, Service Merchandise, and MainStreet^note which was acquired by Kohl's shortly after its opening stores, along with a connection to the existing Sears and a new food court.
  • The late 1990s and early 2000s, however, saw a triple-whammy that would doom the mall - Great Lakes Crossing Outlets opened in nearby Auburn Hills in 1998 and drove away many of Summit Place's inline tenants, not helped by Summit Place being located nowhere near a freeway (it was located at Telegraph Road (US 24) and Elizabeth Lake Road, while Great Lakes Crossing Outlets was located just off Interstate 75) - and Summit Place would also lose Service Merchandise and Montgomery Ward after their respective bankruptcies in 1999 and 2001. It was also during this time that Hudson's would be renamed Marshall Field's in 2001 and again to Macy's in 2006. This would lead to General Growth Properties selling Summit Place to Namco Financial in 2002.
  • Shortly after taking the mall over, Namco announced ambitious plans for Summit Place, which included another rename (to Festivals of Waterford), a family entertainment center, a kid's play area, and a waterpark in the former Montgomery Ward. Although the play area would open in December 2002, the waterpark was cancelled after Waterford decided that its potential income would not repay the debt. A law that would allow half of Summit Place to be redeveloped into housing was enacted by the state legislature in 2005, though that redevelopment ended up falling through. As the township explored the creation of an authority to look into the property's redevelopment potential in 2007, the mall continued losing inline tenants, including the nearly-new kid's play area and the food court's remaining tenants. Kohl's's closure of their Summit Place store in March 2009 was the kiss of death for the mall, which quickly lost all of its remaining inline tenants and closed its doors for good that September, aside from the three remaining anchors. Two of those, JCPenney and Macy's, ended up closing as well in March 2010.
  • Sears, the last remaining anchor, held on for a few more years before closing their store in December 2014, by which point Summit Place had heavily deteriorated and turned into a magnet for vandalism and crime, much like Dixie Square Mall and Rolling Acres Mall above. The vacant mall's condition would degrade further to the point that Waterford declared it among the township's most dangerous buildings, resulting in calls for it to either be repaired or demolished. After these calls went ignored, Summit Place was ultimately demolished in May 2019 and replaced with a warehouse complex named the Oakland County Business Center.

Space Programs

• Alexei Leonov is famous as the first human to ever perform a spacewalk, which occurred during the Voskhod 2 mission in March 1965. As Cracked has noted, it's probably a miracle that Leonov made it back to Earth alive as the mission pretty much devolved into a disaster once the spacewalk was finished.
  • Leonov was temporarily unable to enter the Voskhod module when his spacesuit inflated from being in the vacuum of space, forcing Leonov to let out some of his oxygen while suffering from heatstroke and the bends. By the time he made it back into the module, he was literally up to his knees in sweat inside his spacesuit.
  • The Voskhod module itself was a logistical nightmare. It held three occupants for this mission, even though it was based on an earlier spacecraft design which called for only one. This deprived the cosmonauts of any means of escape in emergency situations, and forced them to crane their heads at 90 degree angles just to read their instruments.
  • As could be expected from such a feat in engineering, the module's automatic landing system failed on re-entry. And thanks to the myriad design flaws, Leonov's crewmate Pavel Belyayev had to lay down across the module's three seats to reach the navigation panel while being held in place.
  • While he tried to land the thing manually, Belyayev asked Leonov to check their altitude. That move cost them time and landing accuracy, forcing them to land 800 miles off-course in a heavily forested part of the Ural Mountains where no rescue helicopters could land. The crew spent two days cutting firewood and fending off wolves before they were rescued.
  • To say the Voskhod program was a mess is an understatement. The aim of the program was simply to one-up the United States instead of work towards the goal of a moon landing like NASA did with Project Gemini. To that end, both of the Voskhod spacecraft were simply surplus Vostok spacecraft haphazardly modified first to carry a crew of three, then to carry a crew of two and an inflatable airlock.
• Also mentioned in that same Cracked article is the early Soyuz program, the USSR's answer to Apollo. The space race was reaching its climax by 1967, and the Soviets cut a lot of corners to ensure that they put their man on the Moon first. Unfortunately, unlike Voskhod 2, this did not end with the cosmonaut coming home alive.
  • Like the Voskhod spacecraft, the Soyuz 1 capsule was designed as a Rube Goldbergian death trap. For example, traveling from the orbiter to the landing craft required a spacewalk, while Apollo had an internal docking tunnel that was not only safer, but also afforded astronauts more legroom. When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was called in to inspect the capsule, he found 203 structural deficiencies and recommended that the program be postponed. He was rebuffed by the Soviet higher-ups, as was everyone else who reported any errors; they wanted to beat Apollo in time for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, safety be damned.
  • To add a huge Tear Jerker element to this, Gagarin discovered that his close friend Vladimir Komarov was expected to man the flight, with Gagarin ordered to be his potential replacement. Neither man wanted to back out and force the other to go on what they agreed was a suicide mission, despite Gagarin's attempts to remove Komarov from the flight in hopes his own status as a national hero would cause them to call off the mission, but in the end (despite Gagarin showing up at the launch pad pleading to take Komarov's place) Komarov was sent up in Soyuz 1.
  • Almost immediately, things went From Bad to Worse. Once Soyuz 1 reached orbit, its solar panel failed and Komarov's systems went with it. Then the orientation detectors froze, further crippling the craft. Then the automatic stabilization system died with the manual system only partly working. To make matters worse, the launch of a second spacecraft that was to dock with Soyuz 1 was postponed indefinitely due to inclement weather at the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After thirteen orbits around Earth, the mission was aborted and Komarov was ordered back home.
  • Then things took a turn for the terrifying when the Soyuz 1's parachute failed to deploy on re-entry (only the drogue chute deployed successfully - the primary one failed, and the manual reserve got entangled with the drogue chute), causing the capsule to crash to the ground at almost terminal velocity and kill Komarov in the process. As the capsule burnt, Komarov could be heard cursing the people who had sent him on the doomed mission. This is all that was left of him afterwards.
• After the Komarov incident, there was a fatal incident on Soyuz 11, the first flight to dock with Salyut 1 (itself the first space station) when all three cosmonauts aboard suffocated to death when their spacecraft leaked oxygen. Fortunately, the incident was a major wake-up call for the Soviet space program, and they began taking safety much more seriously; since then, there hasn't been a single fatality in the Soyuz program (though there were a few scary close calls in 1983 and 2018). As of 2021, the Soyuz spacecraft is still being used, having undergone numerous upgrades and modernizations over the years, and is scheduled to be replaced by the new Orel spacecraft in 2025.
• Then there was the Soviet analogue of the Saturn V rocket, the N1. An overcomplicated jumble of thirty engines, and the Soviets decided to save on the ground tests. The result? Four failed launches, including one sub-nuclear level explosion.
• The Galileo and Cassini missions to Jupiter and Saturn respectively for different causes:
  • Galileo, a probe designed to be launched from the Space Shuttle, had its launch date delayed several years due to the Challenger disaster. Due to safety issues, it also had to use a less powerful rocket to be launched from the shuttle, meaning it took more time to reach Jupiter, and as its lubricant eroded away during the years-long journey that the main antenna did not fully deploy, meaning less data could be transmitted back.
  • Cassini suffered budgetary cuts that forced its redesign, the contempt of NASA's administrator at the time who called it derisively "Battlestar Galactica" due to its size and high cost, and was close to be cancelled several times. The only thing that saved it was the fact that the Huygens lander, designed to land on Titan (Saturn's largest moon), was European-built; it was worried had the mission been cancelled the resentment felt by Europe after having expended so much money on said lander could extend to other areas beyond space exploration. Despite all those troubles, both missions were great successes at the end, especially the latter.
• Speaking of Challenger, its doomed flight was caused by this trope, mostly thanks to NASA not heeding its own safety instructions.
  • NASA's publicity stunt of recruiting Christa McAuliffe, a public school teacher who would have been the first private citizen to travel in space, created much incentive for NASA to ensure that upcoming mission proceed with as few issues as possible, which would later be determined to have caused the space agency to downplay or ignore major warnings about the faulty O-rings in Challenger 's solid rocket boosters.
  • The shuttle launch was supposed to occur at 2:42 PM Eastern Standard Time on January 22, 1986. However, a series of delays caused them to push it back until January 28th. These included delays from a previous mission, bad weather at a Transoceanic Abort Landing site at Dakar, numerous bad weather moments and problems with its exterior access hatch.
  • On January 27th, engineers for Morton-Thiokol, the company who made the O-rings, realized that the launch date would be unsuitable as the O-rings were not rated for a launch temperature so low (they were rated at 40 degrees F, while launch day would only have it at 30) and desperately called NASA for a conference call to beg the group to delay the launch until it got warmer. NASA refused. Morton-Thiokol tried again, but only with the management of the Kennedy and Marshall Space Centers. They were again refused. Amazingly, Morton-Thiokol management then gave the thumbs up for the launch to proceed, with one shocked engineer admitting to his wife that Challenger would be destroyed.
  • The day of the launch, Rockwell International, the main contractors for NASA's shuttles, was aghast at the amount of ice on Challenger and feared that build up could damage the shuttle upon ascent. As well, the temperature that day was colder than most launches, at about 28 degrees F. Rockwell tried to warn NASA to scuttle the mission, but they ended up only delaying until around 11:38 AM.
  • Everything went swell until, over a minute after launch, everything fell apart, hot gases escaped from a hole created from the damaged O-rings as well as sudden wind shear, causing a series of cascading failures that lead to the shuttle's sad disintegration on live television.
  • Various investigations were launched as to what happened to cause Challenger to fail. Ultimately, blame was to placed at NASA and Morton-Thiokol's feet for their blatant disregard to the warnings laid out by many. On a lesser note, these investigations also said Challenger disintegrated; it did not explode, though many media outlets continue taking a layman's perspective instead of doing actual research.

Other

• Cardmageddon, a Magic: The Gathering invitational tournament held in Las Vegas. Upon announcement, it was claimed to be the first in a series of tournaments managed by a company named CardAgain. An eye-opening prize pool of "at least $25,000" was also boasted. Needless to say, it fell flat.
  • The most serious blow to the tournament — and the root of most of the problems that beset it — was the dismal attendance. Most assumed that the player turnout would be large, given the aforementioned prize pool. However, only 67 players showed up. In turn, this guaranteed that the prize pool was going to be nowhere as advertised when players paid $42 each. Because they didn't have enough people, the management cancelled the Modern division. According to one Twitter post◊, one unfortunate player had driven all the way from California to participate, only to find out what had happened.
  • The tournament had stiff competition with other Magic competitive gaming events running over the same weekend, which included Grand Prix - a series of very popular worldwide competitions — and SGC Invitational in Columbus, Ohio — again, another well-established alternative with a sterling reputation for extremely organized events.
  • Another flub came with the Cardmageddon's marketing, which wrongly portrayed it as an invitational-only event — yet another contribution to the middling amount of players that actually arrived.
  • Reportedly, CardAgain had spent over $40,000 on advertising alone. This included contacting about 1500 card shops to each hold mini tournaments, along with sending a free packet containing a free voucher to the event to the winner. Numerous shops refused the offer, another contingency of them had failed to actually run a tournament (instead offering the packet as a prize for an already-existing tournament), or outright taking full advantage of the opportunity. This was all overshadowed by immense budgets for running advertisements on sites including Facebook, Google, Reddit and Twitter.
• The 1998 Star Wars Customizable Card Game World Championship was a disaster for most everyone involved. The details of how this was a disaster can be found in a blog post by one of the game's designers. Among other things:
  • Decipher had been designing the Special Edition set, and decided it would be a good idea to release the set right at the World Championship. Participants would be sent boxes and encouraged to build decks. Due to a lack of playtesting and concerns from the playtesting team being ignored, the Operatives mechanic quickly was discovered to be not only the most optimal way to play, but the only option if one wanted to seriously compete.
  • When the utter brokenness of Operatives became apparent, players complained and some of the designers asked Decipher's upper management to not allow the Special Edition set to be legal. Upper management refused, feeling it would not be fair to players who'd come to the event as if it would be legal.
  • Angry players confronted several of the design team members, with one of them being threatened with physical violence, another being confronted while he was eating dinner with his wife, and other incidents.
  • Player anger got to such a high level that when one designer walked into a deathly silent room and jokingly asked if a fistfight had just happened, another member of the team responded "Somebody threw a chair."
  • Even worse was when one player blatantly cheated through the whole event but went unpunished because Decipher decided that giving penalties to said player would do more harm than good and forbade the judges to hand out any penalties, thus giving free reign to cheat. Said player managed to make it to the Finals, but in what many said was the only good thing to happen during the event, he lost and didn't win the World Championship.
  • For many players, this was in retrospect the beginning of the end for SWCCG. The Operatives mechanic proved to be so broken that Decipher, who were loathe to ban or nerf cards, nerfed the entire Operatives mechanic into the ground, but the damage was done and the whole event left a bitter taste in the mouths of all involved. Three years later, LucasArts declined to renew Decipher's license, and the game's official existence was over, though it still continues to this day with an unofficial Players Committee.
• The Runaway Guys' first Thrown Controllers panel at PAX East 2012 was this in spades. A gameshow-esque panel filled with prizes and gameplay, the panel itself started 20 minutes late due to technical difficulties involving their laptop and projector. When they were able to work, the program could not be fullscreened and ran very slowly. While the gameshow itself ran smoothly, it wasn't until the end when things really started to hit the fan. While trying to end the panel due to loss of time, Jon's laptop ended up crashing right when he was about to bring the final event up, causing him to have to reboot it in front of 700 people. And the entire buildup led to a mighty Anti-Climax. Needless to say, Jon and the rest of the guys didn't like this panel, with Jon feeling very disappointed. Later Thrown Controller panels were reworked into a style that ran way more smoothly and faced far less technical problems.
• While the The Notorious B.I.G. biopic Notorious didn’t have any problems, the same couldn’t be said about its press junket, as recalled by Martin Thomas:
  • 20th Century Fox flew a whole bunch of film critics and journalists to New York, where the temperature was below freezing. First was a bus tour involving Biggie Smalls’ mother, Voletta Wallace, guiding people to specific spots. Problem was, the tour was behind schedule due to crazy slow Manhattan traffic. It didn’t help that the temperature on the bus was high, resulting in the reporters all bundled up for the cold sweating and overheating. During all this, a kid threw a big rock at the bus. What also didn’t help was Voletta’s very soft voice, which was often drowned out by the traffic and reporters’ chatting with each other.
  • The next day was the press screening and cast interviews, where the real problems started to arise. Already behind schedule, the cast interviews were conducted in a three story recording studio that was far too small for everyone the film reps invited. The elevator holding numerous journalists ended up getting stuck for almost an hour, leaving them in a small, tight space with no ventilation, meaning the event had to be pushed back even further until the elevator was fixed. At this point, employees were panicking, while journalists immediately declared the experience to be the worst, most disorganized press junket they've ever attended.
  • The interviews themselves were handled via roundtable discussion, but due to schedule conflicts, each interview was very short (around 12 minutes, and decreasing), with six questions asked per session (in a room full of 12 interviewers). To make this worse, there was one guy who kept asking repeat questions, which wasted both everyone's time, and the interviewers' possible questions.
  • What made the junket awkward was Voletta's reaction to seeing the movie for the first time, where she got to witness her son on the big screen selling crack to pregnant women, cheating on and abusing his girlfriends, and abandoning his kids. All of which she had no idea about.
• After the success of "We Are the World", Ken Kragen, the president of the USA for Africa organization, decided to turn his attention towards the issue of hunger and homelessness in his home country. This time, however, a mere Charity Motivation Song wasn't enough. To go along with it, he came up with a far more audacious publicity stunt: Hands Across America, a chain of millions of people holding hands from New York City to Santa Monica, California on May 25, 1986, hoping to raise at least $50 million for the cause. Whereas "We Are the World" was a smashing success, Hands Across America was a failure.
  • The first problem came with the obligatory charity single to promote the event. While the event as a whole boasted the participation of Bill Cosby, Lily Tomlin, Kenny Rogers, and baseball star Pete Rose, Kragen couldn't find any superstar artists for the tie-in song, save for Toto doing the instrumentals while anonymous studio singers handled the rest of the music. The real problem, however, emerged when it came time to premiere the song. It was meant to premiere at the Super Bowl XX halftime show, only to immediately face protest from Michael Jackson over concerns that it would upstage "We Are the World", causing it to be quickly yanked and replaced with a commercial featuring Cosby and Tomlin. Needless to say, the song flopped when it was eventually released.
  • The question of the route the human chain would take also became a source of controversy. In Massachusetts, Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative Ed Markey protested over the fact that the New England states were not included in the route, and similar concerns were voiced in the South, the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. In Hawaii, Tom Selleck and Senator Daniel Inouye staged a "Hands Across Hawaii" event to remind people on the mainland that Hawaiians were Americans, too.
  • The participation of President Ronald Reagan in Hands Across America came in for criticism, as many activists blamed his cuts to poverty assistance for the problems that the event was designed to raise money and attention for. It didn't help matters when, just days before the event, Reagan made comments indicating that the only reason people were going hungry in America was because they didn't know where or how to get assistance, comments that were widely seen as dismissive of those problems.
  • The event went off mostly without a hitch, with about five million people joining the human chain and another million creating smaller chains elsewhere in the US. However, the American Southwest created major logistical problems, as that region of the country was sparsely populated and filled with unforgiving geography. Out there, gaps in the chain were unavoidable, and had to be filled with ribbons and banners; some cattle ranchers found a creative solution by lining up their steers to take part.
  • Afterwards, it became apparent that, as a fundraiser, Hands Across America had almost completely failed. Once the large amounts of money spent on the promotion were accounted for, only $15 million was raised for charity, coming in far short of the $50 million that Kragen was hoping for. However, it did succeed in raising awareness for the cause of homelessness, such that it has been credited with leading to the passage of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, which provided a billion dollars a year for the funding of programs to help the homeless. Its profile would also be raised years later thanks to the 2019 horror film Us, in which it played a prominent role.
• In The '90s, Planet Hollywood's illusion of real-deal cinema glamour elevated it above a typical Kitschy Themed Restaurant (also known as the “eatertainment” fad) and made it the hottest ticket in town. Then, as detailed in this article by Kate Storey for Esquire, who called it "[a] creation only the nineties could give us," it fell apart in spectacular fashion as it turned out that the chain's founders also brought Hollywood's tendency for off-the-rails productions with them, culminating in the chain going bankrupt twice.
  • The idea was born in 1987 when Brian Kestner, an executive at Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions, got the idea to create a version of the Hard Rock Cafe dedicated to film as opposed to music. Kestner teamed up with his boss Barish and Robert Earl, the CEO of Hard Rock International, and they envisioned a restaurant that would not only double as a Hollywood museum, but would have actual, A-list Hollywood stars associated with it. ​They managed to get the involvement of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone (who said point-blank that he was motivated by greed) and purchased all manner of old movie props to decorate the place with, while Anton Furst, the set designer who won an Oscar for his work on Batman (1989), would design their first restaurant on 57th Street in Manhattan.
  • The restaurant's opening on October 22, 1991 was preceded by a public-relations blitz courtesy of Bobby Zarem and treated like a red-carpet premiere for a Summer Blockbuster, with 57th Street closed off and a list of celebrities too long to name all in attendance, and the reviews were solid, praising the food and the restaurant's fun atmosphere. Before long, stars were lining up to get involved with Planet Hollywood as it expanded across the United States and eventually the world, and the openings of new restaurants got ever more extravagant.
  • Warning signs were starting to emerge, however, even at this early date. Peter Morton, cofounder of the Hard Rock Cafe, sued Earl for stealing the company's trade secrets for use in Planet Hollywood, the two settling out of court. Furthermore, studio heads were starting to complain, feeling that their stars were becoming Famous for Being Famous and that restaurant openings were drawing more people than screenings of the films they starred in. The chain never quite managed to balance the allure of exclusivity with the promise of getting to meet the stars, and the restaurants quickly became known as tourist traps after they opened, save for when they screened films or hosted special events. Zarem left the company in 1993, saying that the classiness it originally had was gone by then, while gossip columnist R. Couri Hay said that it was never classy to begin with. Most importantly, however, the focus on the celebrity allure meant that the quality of the food, which few people involved seemed to care about, was going into the gutter, and the restaurant earned a reputation among foodies for serving garbage. For many tourists, however, the illusion kept them pouring in. The company went public in 1996, its IPO making for the busiest in NASDAQ's history.
  • This turned out to be Planet Hollywood's downfall. It created pressure on the company to constantly grow, which caused it to spread itself thin branching out into merchandising, as by that point most major cities had a Planet Hollywood restaurant, so openings were hitting diminishing returns. What's more, knockoff celebrity-themed restaurants in everything from sports to modeling to Country Music were flourishing, cutting into Planet Hollywood's appeal. By the end of 1996, Planet Hollywood's profits had fallen from $12.7 million to just $4 million, going deep into the red soon after, and the restaurant's cool factor was collapsing with it. Barish left the company in 1999 amid reports of a falling out with Earl, a matter that both of them refuse to talk about, and the chain filed for bankruptcy later that year, closing nine of its 32 American restaurants and many of its international locations. Schwarzenegger sold his stake in the company in 2000, and in 2001 Planet Hollywood filed for bankruptcy again. Since then, the chain has survived, but as a shell of its former self.
• Mars 2112, one of the many themed restaurants that followed in the wake of Planet Hollywood, opened in New York City's Times Square in 1998 and was initially an instant hit as the kind of family-friendly tourist destination that New York in the Rudy Giuliani years was eager to bring to the once-blighted entertainment district, combining a restaurant with a sci-fi immersive theater experience in which guests are transported to, well, Mars in the year 2112. After the 9/11 attacks, however, the wheels began to come off, and the restaurant spent a decade stumbling from crisis to crisis.
  • 9/11 had a devastating impact on tourism in the US, nowhere moreso than New York City, enough to singlehandedly destroy Mars 2112's fortunes and cause it to file for bankruptcy in 2002. When it reopened, the owners attempted to find a new footing by using it as a nightclub after hours, including partnerships with local radio stations to host parties. Unfortunately, the owners of Paramount Plaza, the Times Square building in whose sunken plaza Mars 2112 was located, furiously objected, telling the restaurant's owners in no uncertain terms that they believed that the rowdy parties being held there were attracting a bad element. As a result, they successfully sued to gain final say on any and all events held there, effectively shutting down the nightclub and restricting it to birthday parties and corporate functions.
  • The restaurant's struggling fortunes also meant that it fell behind on its rents to Paramount Plaza, and that it couldn't maintain the theming, scenery, costumes, and service quality, all of which grew increasingly run-down over the years. In 2007, Mars 2112, facing over a million dollars in debt, filed for bankruptcy again. However, since the restaurant's intricate theming was so expensive and unable to be easily removed, Paramount Plaza allowed it to remain open, including letting them reopen the after-hours nightclub in the hopes that the place might be able to turn a profit. Sure enough, the nightclub increasingly became the main thing keeping Mars 2112 afloat.
  • In 2010, the motion simulator ride that new arrivals at Mars 2112 went through broke down, and had to be hastily replaced with a stationary theater.
  • The killing blow for Mars 2112 came in 2011, when it made headlines for all the wrong reasons when the nightclub turned away Shaquille O'Neal for not meeting the dress code and he promptly told the press about his experience. With that, the nightclub's popularity went into freefall, and with it went the last pillar of stability keeping the place afloat. Two months later, the restaurant sold off its arcade machines and started dismantling some of the scenery as it prepared for liquidation, finally closing its doors for good in January 2012 — fittingly enough, exactly one hundred years before 2112. Since then, Paramount Plaza has attempted to turn the former Mars 2112 location into a retail space, but to this day, it remains unoccupied.
• The 2023 World Scout Jamboree in Saemangeum, South Korea should have been a wonderful celebration of all things Scouts-related across the world. However, the program was beset with so many problems that it shut down days before it should have. 90 million US Dollars were earmarked for the event but seemingly none of it went to making sure the scouts were having fun, let alone safe.
  • Problems arose almost immediately upon learning the site chosen for the event, a large area of land reclaimed from the sea, had poor drainage issues via pools of standing water, allowing for mosquitos to breed.
  • The start of the event was plagued with almost Fyre Fest-level problems: there were no campsites, tents or sleeping accommodations and very little food. One parent, being given updates via text messages from her son, learned they had no food that first night — instead, they were given shovels to dig out irrigation ditches to prevent flooding.
  • Sanitation issues also arose. They barely had enough bathrooms for the attendees. These all backed up and toilet paper ran out within days. There were only 70 cleaning crew for 40,000 attendees and so few showers that adults and teens had to share the showers. And, in a major scandal, a man was caught hanging around the female shower facilities.
  • The event occurred during a wicked heatwave pushing temperatures of upwards of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Attendees started suffering from heat exhaustion before the first day even ended and were still forced to participate in an elaborate opening ceremony attended by the president and first lady. In the end, hundreds were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses.
  • There were no proper cooling stations. Attendees had to make do with some exposed faucets that had perforated pool noodles attached as makeshift sprinklers. However, due to the heat, these would spray out steaming-hot water in the afternoon.
  • Amongst all these issues, there wasn't anything for the scouts to do. The heat was so extreme, having them do anything strenuous would have led to even more exhaustion and injuries. The organizers tried to keep people calm and engaged by promising a huge K-Pop concert — even spreading rumors that BTS would headline — despite the fact that two members were away fulfilling their mandatory military service.
  • News reports quickly revealed that senior organizers had arranged to stay in luxury vacation rentals and spent all day in air-conditioned trailers. The prime minister personally came down to the site to chew them out. Journalists also dug up e-mails that revealed that organizers knew about potential weather issues and problems with the chosen site years in advance but barreled ahead without any concern.
  • The news started replaying stories about the 1991 World Scout Jamboree, also hosted by Korea, that showed that that event also suffered from weather-related issues but that 1991's organizers rallied to make sure the scouts were cared for and that all planned activities could be enjoyed. This led to further public anger, as 2023's organizers had bet everything on the aforementioned K-Pop concert and failed to do anything about the Jamboree itself.
  • Ultimately, the threat of a Tropical Storm forced the South Korean government to evacuate the campsite, a decision made too late as the US, UK, Germany and Singapore evacuated their teams to other places^note The UK contingent found hotels while the US contingent was welcomed onto US military installations much earlier after seeing the situation.
  • Amdist a wave of national shame, stores, restaurants, and hotels began offering steep discounts to scouts to try and make the rest of their time in Korea a bit better. Meanwhile, the South Korean government decided to host little cultural activities here and there. While these activities were mostly well received, everyone noted that they weren't the scouting activities they'd come to take part in.
  • Because the original site was evacuated, the K-Pop concert was hastily moved to Seoul World Cup Stadium. Despite it drizzling from beginning to end, the scouts seemed to have a good time. However, it turned out that the last-minute arrangements meant that inadequate care was taken when setting up the stage and seating and that the stadium's million-dollar hybrid sod was damaged, forcing FC Seoul to hastily tear up and replace the field at huge cost.
  • Fallout continued even after the scouts went home. Because the Jamboree itself ended early, many contractors found that their services were no longer needed and that they wouldn't receive the money they were promised.
• The 2023 incarnation of Burning Man was derailed when sudden torrential rains inundated the festival site at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, stranding thousands of attendees after organizers closed roads to the event. Many attendees, including DJ Diplo and Chris Rock, were forced to walk for hours through mud before hitching rides home, while back at the festival site food, water and ice had to be rationed. As of writing, one death has been reported.
• Willy's Chocolate Experience, an unlicensed live experience based off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, opened in Glasgow on February 24, 2024 and it was a staggering disaster from beginning to end. Several points of note include:
  • The event's official website was loaded with A.I.-Generated Artwork that contained numerous spelling errors and fell straight into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
  • The location of the event was essentially a barren warehouse that was sparsely decorated with random Wonka-style props and backdrops which were also made of AI-art.
  • The actors were given a 15-page AI-generated script two days before the event was to take place, and even then, on opening day they were further instructed to just "improvise" due to lack of props and an incomprehensible storyline.
  • Photos and videos of the event went viral all around the internet, the most notable being a depressed Oompa Loompa girl with a chemistry kit and The Unknown, a black-cladded figure with a mirror mask who's supposed to be an evil chocolate maker original to the experience.
  • Guests were only allowed a single jellybean and a quarter cup of lemonade due to dwindling concession supplies.
  • Angry parents, who had been charged 35 pounds for entry, ended up calling the police demanding a refund.

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