This will be the year Southern Californians can view a new version of the future from Disney, walk among sharks at a world-class aquarium, ride a high-wire bicycle without fear of falling and dance again to big-band music at classy nightclubs, including one that was a hangout for spies during World War II.
It will be the year a Russian submarine docks in Long Beach as a tourist attraction, the Getty Center offers an array of performing arts events and the California Museum of Science and Industry reinvents itself with a new exhibit and a new name.
On the heels of the billion-dollar Getty, entertainment venues that will be unveiled in 1998 will include dozens of others built at a collective cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Among these are a host of combination entertainment and shopping centers, known as urban and suburban entertainment centers, that will make 1998 one of the biggest years yet for new shoppertainment attractions.
This is one of the biggest years in recent memory in terms of new attractions opening in Southern California, says Carol Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau.
According to Martinez, the Convention and Visitors Bureau each year looks for new attractions to help it lure first-time visitors and others. She said one of the toughest jobs in recent years has been wooing back former visitors.
"Now we can say to them honestly that, if they haven't been here lately, they haven't seen everything we have to offer," Martinez said. While big attractions have opened in recent years, including the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios in 1996, Martinez could recall no recent year that offered such a variety of impressive new attractions.
Among them will be Disney's new vision of the future, which will be unveiled in the spring when Disneyland opens an all-new Tomorrowland. The revamping, designed to keep Tomorrowland a step ahead of the present, includes a new rocket car ride, an astro-orbiter where visitors can pilot themselves through simulated space and a "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" show.
Delayed but still on the way is the $23-million Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana. Construction began in October, and the opening of the 55,000-square-foot facility, slated to have more than 100 science-related exhibits, including a flight simulator, a climbing wall and a build-it-yourself robot, is now projected for fall.
