9 Florida Hangout Spots From the ’70s Nobody Should Have Let Disappear

A frontier town outside Ocala once staged shootouts at high noon several times a day, cancan dancers included, for families who never got near Dodge City.

That town has been gone for more than 40 years.

So is almost everything else Florida built for its biggest hangout boom.

These are the Florida hangout spots from the 1970s nobody should have let disappear.

1. Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink

One of Florida’s most talked-about vanished hangouts sits off a dirt road in rural Hillsborough County outside Tampa, behind a hand-painted sign nobody can find anymore.

A University of South Florida photography student named Bill Yates found the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in the fall of 1972, a wooden building from the Depression era ringed by strawberry and tomato fields.

He kept coming back.

Nearly every weekend for seven months, kids of migrant farmworkers and Ringling Bros. circus families who wintered nearby in Sarasota skated to the Allman Brothers and Rod Stewart, and Yates shot hundreds of rolls of film before he graduated and left for good.

Those negatives sat boxed up for decades.

A set of them recently made the rounds on Reddit’s Florida forum, pulling in more than 2,000 upvotes from Floridians who had never heard of the place.

The rink is long gone.

Strawberry fields have grown back over the gravel lot where it once stood.

2. Pirates World

Dania Beach had a full pirate-themed amusement park by 1967, built around a fleet of ships and a lagoon full of rides.

Pirates World also doubled as a concert venue, and the lineup reads like a rock history lesson: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Tina Turner, and David Bowie all played there.

It got rowdy.

At a rowdy 1971 Grand Funk Railroad show, security clashed with the crowd and arrested 11 people.

Then Walt Disney World opened a couple hours north, and attendance at Pirates World fell fast.

The park closed for good in 1973.

Condos cover the rezoned land today.

3. Miracle Strip Amusement Park

Panama City Beach built its whole identity around one wooden roller coaster, and never fully recovered from losing it.

Miracle Strip Amusement Park opened in 1963 around the Starliner, Florida’s first roller coaster ever built.

Through the 1970s, the park kept adding rides and expanding the midway.

Workers even sent the Starliner’s cars diving straight into a giant dragon’s mouth partway through the ride.

Not subtle.

Miracle Strip stayed open until 2004, longer than Pirates World or the Aquatarium managed, but it still counts as a piece of the 1970s that Panama City Beach lost for good.

The Starliner itself was dismantled and moved to Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven.

4. Aquatarium

St. Pete Beach had a dolphin show under a golden dome years before SeaWorld ever existed.

The Aquatarium opened in 1964 with a 160-foot geodesic dome over a circular tank holding more than a million gallons of seawater, where dolphins, sea lions, and pilot whales performed daily.

It turned a profit at first.

Then SeaWorld Orlando opened in 1973, a gas shortage scared off road-trippers, and the Aquatarium’s income dried up within a few years.

Then the money stopped.

A rebrand to Shark World in 1976 didn’t save it, and the dome closed for good in August 1977.

A beach club sits where the dolphins used to jump, and nothing about the shoreline hints at what used to be underneath that dome.

5. Six Gun Territory

Ocala had its own frontier town before Disney ever built one, and it drew families for two decades straight.

Six Gun Territory opened in 1963 across 200 acres, with more than 40 buildings: A saloon, a jail, a schoolhouse, and a full Mexican border town with its own cantina.

Staged shootouts broke out at the OK Corral several times a day.

Cancan dancers packed the Palace Saloon and Theatre most nights.

The park held on through the 1970s, then closed in 1984 once Westerns fell out of fashion and Walt Disney World kept pulling families toward Orlando instead.

Nothing survived the bulldozers, not the saloon, not the jail, not the cantina.

Only the name Six Gun Plaza, on the shopping center that replaced it, hints at what used to be there.

6. Circus World

Polk County got the actual circus as a winter home, tent and all.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey opened Circus World in 1974 in Davenport, right at the intersection of U.S. 27 and Interstate 4, about 30 miles from Walt Disney World.

Visitors watched lion tamers, polar bears, and a flaming high diver inside a 27,000-square-foot building shaped like a big top.

Ringling kept expanding the grounds through the early 1980s, wooden roller coaster included.

None of it lasted.

Circus World closed in 1986, reopened briefly as Boardwalk and Baseball, then closed again in 1990.

The interstate exit is still there.

The circus isn't.

7. Dale Mabry Drive-In

Tampa's drive-in movie scene peaked hard along Dale Mabry Highway, and this screen was one of the biggest around.

The 26-acre lot held 736 cars, making it one of the most modern drive-ins in the state when it opened.

Families packed it through the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Not for long.

Crosstown expressway construction, not falling attendance, forced the closure.

The Dale Mabry Drive-In shut down on July 14, 1974, to make way for the road.

A retail strip covers the ground today.

8. Royal Castle

Miami had its own answer to the classic diner counter, and it spread across the whole state.

Royal Castle opened in 1938, and by the late 1960s, it ran more than 170 locations across Florida, famous for onion-topped sliders, breakfast plates, and mugs of birch beer.

Teenagers filled the counters after school and after football games.

Bigger chains moved into Florida during the 1970s, and Royal Castle couldn't keep pace.

The company filed for bankruptcy by 1975.

It didn't recover.

A handful of independent stores kept using the name for decades, but the chain that once anchored Florida's fast-food scene never came back statewide.

9. Joyland Arcade

Daytona Beach's boardwalk had one address that outlasted almost everything else Florida built that decade, right on the sand.

Joyland opened inside a building that went up around 1949, and by the early 1970s, teenagers were feeding coins into skee-ball lanes and pinball machines while a mini-golf course ran across the roof above them.

Ticket winners traded prizes at the counter for decades.

The building outlasted hurricanes, recessions, and the entire rise of home video games that emptied out the rinks and drive-ins Florida built the same decade.

Developers finally came for the lot.

Nobody stopped them.

Daytona Beach closed Joyland Amusement Center under eminent domain in late 2022, and the building came down soon after.