An indoor snow centre built in the USA around 2008 is set to finally open to the public early next year.
The indoor snow facility is part of a vast shopping mall and entertainments complex currently known as The American Dream located in New Jersey.
Work on this started about 15 years ago under one huge corporation but the banking crisis and other problems led to a series of delays and the project, which may have cost around $6 billion so far, has gone through several different names (it was called Xanadu for quite a while), colour-schemes and corporate owners . Ironically, the roof of the indoor snow slope was reported to be damaged by weight of snow from a snow storm some years ago while it was lying empty with no snow inside.
Several different opening dates have been given in the past but with a huge re-financing of the previous re-financing in place and the construction moving forward apace in recent years according to recent reports, this one – March 2019 – appears to be likely to happen.
The snow slope, currently named Big Snow America, will be mid-sized on the scale of the 70+ indoor snow centres currently operating worldwide. It will be 16 storeys high and about 240 metres in length.
Along with the indoor snow slope, around 500 shops and numerous restaurants and hotels other attractions at American Dream Meadowlands will include a Nickelodeon indoor water park, Dreamworks theme park, ice rink and climbing wall and a large observation big wheel with climate-controlled gondola cabins similar to the London Eye providing views of nearby New York city skyline. In one of the project’s earlier incarnations this was originally supposed to be sponsored by Pepsi and have a huge Pepsi logo on it but it’s not clear if it still will be.
The indoor snow centre is currently being inaccurately marketed as “the first in the western hemisphere” as several indoor snow centres in the UK and Spain can be considered in the western hemisphere and indoor snow centres have also opened in Brazil (Snowland, pictured below) and (tubing only) Tennessee, although Big Snow America was built, if not opened, before the latter two.
In fact one of the indoor snow centres in the western hemisphere built and opened before Big Snow America was built by the Mills Corporation in Madrid, Spain, and originally operated by Intrawest. The Mills Corporation are the same company that started building what is now called American Dream Meadowlands in the early ‘noughties’.
Big Snow America’s opening may also mark a turning point for indoor snow centres in North America as many projects have been proposed there over the past 30 years but this is the first to actually, finally open for skiing and boarding. Meanwhile more than 100 have been built in more than 30 countries on five continents worldwide, including Africa and South America.
Triple Five, the company which operates American dream Meadowlands as well as the two existing most popular shopping malls in North America, has already put in for planning permission to build a second similar facility with another indoor snow slope at American Dream Miami.
