Abandoned Cave City Tourist Attractions

A fantastic collection of photos of Cave City's numerous defunct tourist traps has turned up in, of all places, an interior decorating blog from Nashville.

Kristie Barnett's Making Arrangements blog recently took a break from its usual style, design and feng shui topics to show some vacation photos taken while passing through Cave City. It's sad how many of the great places there have closed their doors, and it's up to us to do something about it. Like Aldo the Apache and his men in the film Inglourious Basterds, we need to organize a determined squad of entrepreneurs to go down there on a mission to help restore Cave City's beautifully tacky tourist trade. Who's with me?

Dinosaurs Alive!

Though I still prefer the old-school simplicity of Cave City's Dinosaur World, I'm looking forward to "Dinosaurs Alive!", the Louisville Zoo's forthcoming exhibit of high-tech animatronic prehistoric beasties.

(But will Kentucky's sizable Creationism contingent get their Archaeopteryx feathers ruffled by it? Read my article about it on Louisville Mojo!)

Dinosaur World

This Cave City attraction consists of a large wooded area in which someone has placed dinosaur statues of various sizes.

And that’s it. They don’t talk, they don’t move, they don’t light up or explode, lasers don’t project futuristic light shows on their abdomens, and you can’t ride them.

I have to admire the old-fashioned simplicity of such an attraction, and in this modern age where attention spans are dulled by video games and the Internet, I wish there were more places like Dinosaur World. For some of us, just gawking at a fiberglass allosaur is vacation enough.

Five and a Half MPH?

Wait, what?

Jellystone, Kentucky?

I don't get why there's a Hanna-Barbera Jellystone Park resort at Mammoth Cave, since the fictional Jellystone of Yogi Bear cartoons was presumably in Wyoming like its satire source, Yellowstone National Park. But that's okay. Like Jack Burton, I was not put on this Earth to "get it".

Wigwam Village

Not to be confused with the Wig Wam Restaurant, Wigwam Village is one of Kentucky's most famed and enduring examples of 20th century mimetic architecture. Each motel room unit is a separate stone teepee, as well as the main office building. Amazingly, even though this tourist trap of a bygone era was originally built in 1937, it still stands today and hasn't been torn down by blasé land developers.

The main teepee is made up of 38 tons of concrete, 13 tons of steel, and stands 52 feet high. Used to have a restaurant back in the day, but sadly that's been long gone for decades. They do still have quite a thriving and wacky gift shop though.

Of the seven original Wigwam Villages, only three remain today. The other two are out West, in Arizona and California.

Does anyone out there own any memorabilia from the Wigwam Village, specifically the Kentucky one? Pictured below is a postcard from the now-vanished Florida one:


Wigwam Village is located at 601 North Dixie Highway, Cave City, KY. Call (270) 773-3381 to make reservations.