Abandoned Appalachia
If you grew up in Perry County in the 1980s or 1990s, it is hard to imagine Highway 15 without Fugate’s Entertainment Center. For a generation of mountain kids, the castle-front cinema, the boat-shaped water park, the roller rink, and the Bowl-A-Rama were where you spent birthday parties, youth-group trips, first dates, and long summer afternoons.
By 2016 that world was already gone. The last flickering piece of the complex, Fugate’s Cinema 5, closed in January of that year. Four years later, arson fires finished what time and neglect had started, burning the iconic “riverboat” water-park building and then the empty theater itself. Contemporary fire coverage from WYMT and WTVQ described a site that had already been abandoned “for years,” now collapsing into ash under repeated suspicious blazes.
Today little remains except concrete, twisted metal, and the memories of those who once lined up for wave-pool sessions and matinee shows. This article pieces together the story of Fugate’s Entertainment Center from local news coverage, county planning documents, tourism listings, specialized cinema and rink histories, and community recollections. It is a story about how one family’s entertainment complex became a regional landmark, then a symbol of the challenges facing post-coal Appalachia.
Building an Entertainment Center in Coal Country
Fugate’s story begins in the early 1980s, when coal money and highway access briefly gave Hazard the feel of a booming crossroads town. According to Rink-History, a site that compiles roller-rink data from directories and family correspondence, Kidd Fugate and his brothers developed a large entertainment complex on what would become Entertainment Drive, just off Kentucky Route 15. They operated as Fugate’s Entertainment Inc, bundling multiple attractions under one family brand.
CinemaTreasures, a national database of historic theaters, records Fugate’s Cinema opening on August 29, 1984 as a twin-screen house. Its first double bill pairs tell you exactly when it arrived: Ghostbusters and Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope. Over the next decade the cinema expanded to three screens in 1990, then to five, eventually adopting the name “Fugate’s Cinema 5” and giving Hazard a multi-screen theater on par with larger regional towns.
From the start, the cinema was only one part of a broader vision. County and tourism planning documents from the 1990s and 2000s list Fugate’s Entertainment Center alongside the Perry County Park and the Challenger Learning Center as key recreational draws. A Perry County adventure-tourism analysis, prepared by WMTH Corporation, explicitly groups the complex with other attractions the county hoped to use in a strategy to diversify beyond coal.
Layout: Water Park, Rink, Bowling, and Cinema on Entertainment Drive
Physically, Fugate’s unfolded on both sides of Highway 15. CinemaTreasures and Rink-History, combined with business directories and modern aerial footage, let us reconstruct the basic layout. The cinema sat near the base of Entertainment Drive with a distinctive castle-style façade and marquee facing the highway. Across the road and up the hillside, the water park and roller rink occupied a different tier.
Rink-History describes a showboat-style water-park building with slides coiling down the hillside, a pool complex, and the rink nearby as part of the same Fugate’s Entertainment Inc operation. Bowling directories and business listings place Fugate’s Bowl-A-Rama at 218 Entertainment Drive, confirming a dedicated bowling center tied to the same brand.
Kentucky State Police traffic-checkpoint notices and Yellow Pages style directories help pin the site even more precisely. One KSP checkpoint list locates a safety stop “at the intersection of Entertainment Drive and Hull School Road in the parking lot of Fugate’s Bowling Alley,” giving GPS coordinates that match modern maps of the complex. Yelp and Go-Kentucky listings place “Fugate’s Skating Rink Inc” at 80 Pilgrims Path, with other roller-rink compilations clarifying that the actual structure sat along Entertainment Drive and that Pilgrims Path was primarily a mailing address.
Taken together, these sources show a tight cluster of attractions tied together by signs and shared parking, turning a small valley along Highway 15 into a miniature resort corridor for eastern Kentucky families.
Summers at Fugate’s: A Regional Destination
For a time Fugate’s functioned as a kind of all-in-one amusement district for the upper Kentucky River counties. Even neighboring counties felt its pull. A Floyd County Times display advertisement from November 2001 promoted “FUGATE’S WATER PARK” to readers well outside Perry County, suggesting that by the early 2000s the park was being marketed regionally, not just locally.
Tourism summaries and online reviews from the early 2000s echo that broader reach. A TripAdvisor entry titled “A Local’s View – Review of Hazard, KY” explains Fugate’s Cinema as part of “Fugate’s Entertainment business,” which also included a bowling alley, skating rink, and summer water park. The reviewer treats the complex as shorthand for things to do in Hazard, proof that for travelers and locals alike Fugate’s was the default entertainment option.
Yelp and Go-Kentucky business listings from the same era emphasize the family-friendly nature of each component. The Bowl-A-Rama is described as a classic bowling center with arcade games and snack options. The skating rink appears in state tourism directories under “Sports Complex” and “Ice Skating Rinks.” Fugate’s Waterpark itself is listed at 151 Entertainment Drive, with user photos that show crowded pools and the boat-fronted building perched above the concrete basins.
Inside the gates, urban-exploration videos recorded just before the final fires give us a glimpse of what those summer days looked like. Drone and GoPro footage captures a wave pool, curving slides, a children’s area, and a wooden deck that wrapped around the upper levels of the complex. The structures appear heavily weathered and graffiti-scarred, but their lines still echo a period when central Appalachia tried to build its own version of a theme-park landscape, perched above a coal-town highway.
Shifting Currents: Decline of the Water Park and Rink
Pinpointing exactly when the water park shut down is more difficult than dating its heyday. There is no widely cited closure notice in the surviving press. Instead, we rely on community recollections and the pattern of later sources.
In a widely shared Reddit thread titled “Abandoned Waterpark in Kentucky,” commenters identify the site as Fugate’s Entertainment Center. One poster, who says they grew up in the area, recalls that “one day in the late 90s they just decided to not reopen for the next summer,” while the cinema kept showing movies for another fifteen years. Social media posts on Facebook and Instagram describe the water park as “the pride of Hazard” in the past tense, long before the fires, suggesting that by the 2000s it had already entered local memory as something lost.
The skating rink, by contrast, seems to have lasted into the early 2000s as a stand-alone business, at least on paper. Corporate and tourism directories list “Fugate’s Skating Rink Inc” at 80 Pilgrims Path with a 2001 date of establishment and a small staff. Yet by December 2013 the structure itself was gone. A Lexington Herald-Leader report under the headline “Fire destroys skating rink in Hazard” covered a major blaze at the Fugate’s rink site along KY-15, noting that fire crews fought through the night and that the building was a total loss.
By the middle of the 2010s, then, the water park had long been closed, the rink had burned, and only the bowling alley and cinema still operated under the Fugate name.
The Last Screen: Fugate’s Cinema 5 Closes
The final active business at the complex, Fugate’s Cinema, survived into the digital-projection era but could not outlast it. On January 15, 2016, WYMT reported that “Fugate’s Cinema in Hazard, open since the mid-1980s, has closed its doors.” The story notes that the theater was “the last remaining business from Fugate’s Entertainment Center, which used to be home to a water park, skating rink and bowling alley.” The closure announcement itself came in a short Facebook post from the cinema’s page: “Sorry to inform our loyal customers but we are now closed. Thanks for all the wonderful years.”
Commenters in the Reddit thread and other online discussions suggest that the cost of upgrading to fully digital projection equipment was a major factor in the decision, a struggle shared by many rural theaters in the 2010s. They also note increased competition from home streaming and the difficulty of maintaining older buildings in a struggling coal county. These explanations are anecdotal but fit broader national patterns.
Within a few months, local news outlets and Kentucky State Police were already referring to the property as “the old Fugate’s Entertainment Center” when describing nearby traffic incidents. When a fatal crash occurred on Kentucky 15 in July 2016, WYMT locators placed it “near the old Fugate’s Entertainment Center,” signaling that even without active businesses the complex remained one of the dominant landmarks on that stretch of highway.
Fire and Arson: 2013 and 2020
The 2013 rink fire marked the beginning of a destructive pattern. By the late 2010s, trespassing and vandalism at the abandoned water park and cinema buildings had become common targets of neighborhood complaints and police calls. This tension exploded in September 2020.
On the night of September 21, 2020, a “massive fire” erupted at the former Fugate’s water park. WYMT described the blaze as burning the “boat shaped building that’s been abandoned for years” and noted that Fugate’s Entertainment Center had been a popular spot from the 1980s into the early 2000s. The fire was so intense that Kentucky Highway 15 was completely shut down near the site as crews from multiple volunteer departments responded.
Just across the mountain in Lexington, WTVQ carried a similar story under the headline “Fourth time in 3 days old water park set on fire in Perry County.” The station, quoting the Perry County Advocate, reported that the Old Riverboat at Fugate’s Water Park had been set on fire four times in three days and that both directions of Highway 15 were closed during the response. Firefighters told reporters that the fires were suspicious and repeatedly described the structure as the “Old Riverboat,” confirming local slang for the showboat-style building.
WYMT’s follow-up coverage included interviews with Angelic and Charles Herald, who had purchased the property in early 2016 after the cinema closed, hoping to revive at least part of the complex. They described constant break-ins, squatters, and theft, and said insurance companies had refused to cover the structure because the neighborhood was considered a “red zone” for arson. After the riverboat building was finally destroyed, Angelic voiced the question many locals were asking: why would someone burn down a property that meant so much to community memory.
Two months later, on November 24, 2020, fire returned to the other side of Entertainment Drive. WYMT reported that the former Fugate’s Cinema caught fire early that morning, again drawing emergency crews and again closing off part of the area. The story explicitly called it “the latest in a series of fires in the former Fugate’s Entertainment Center” and reminded readers that a September blaze at the water park had destroyed the boat-shaped building.
Within seven years, arson and accident had erased the rink, water park, and cinema buildings that once defined the complex’s skyline.
A Landmark in Memory
Even in ruin, Fugate’s remained a reference point. Local crash stories in 2016 and 2017 described wrecks as happening “near the old Fugate’s Entertainment Center” on Kentucky 15. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet road-work advisories for District 10 used the complex as a landmark when describing lane closures and construction zones along Highway 15.
On social media, the site became a canvas for both nostalgia and worry. Facebook comments under photos of the abandoned water park talk about “the pride of Hazard” and how heartbreaking it is to see the place reduced to scrap. Others focus on safety, warning that the collapsing structures, open basins, and graffiti-covered stairways are dangerous to curious teenagers and urban explorers.
Aerial stock footage and urbex YouTube channels brought those worries to a wider audience. Drone shots from 2022 and 2023 show the wave pool empty and cracked, the slides sagging on rusted supports, and the burned-out shell of the boat-fronted building. Ground-level videos capture layers of graffiti, from older tags to fresh paint over charred surfaces, allowing viewers to roughly date visits by watching how the artwork accumulates over time.
In online comment sections, Hazard natives swap memories: running up the wooden stairs to the slides, learning to skate under disco lights, bowling on rainy Friday nights before catching a movie. One Redditor, reacting to a photograph of the burned riverboat, summed up the sentiment bluntly: “Everyone, no matter who it was, knew that the building was part of Fugates Entertainment Center.”
Fugate’s in the County’s Post-Coal Planning
While social media users were mourning the site informally, county planners were grappling with its loss more directly. The Perry County Economic Development Implementation Manual (often called the “Economic Matrix” manual), completed in the mid-2010s, lists Fugate’s Entertainment Center under a discussion of weaknesses in local amenities for young people. The report notes that the county has “one theater” and then adds that “Fugate’s Entertainment Center, which had a multi-screen theater, bowling alley, water park, and skating rink, has burned and is now out of business.” It goes on to observe that only two public swimming pools remain in the county.
In other words, by the time the manual was written, officials saw the loss of Fugate’s not only as an aesthetic blow but as a measurable reduction in recreational infrastructure at a moment when the county was trying to broaden its economy. Adventure-tourism plans for eastern Kentucky prepared by WMTH Corporation still list Fugate’s as part of the wider attraction mix for Hazard and Perry County, placing it alongside outdoor resources like Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park, the Perry County Park, and the Challenger Learning Center.
These planning documents were part of a larger strategy to shift from reliance on coal mining toward a diversified service and tourism economy. Fugate’s appears in them almost as a hinge: a symbol of what the county once had in terms of youth-oriented entertainment, and a reminder that such assets could vanish quickly without investment and maintenance.
Remembering Fugate’s: Entertainment and Extraction
Fugate’s Entertainment Center did not exist in a vacuum. Its rise and fall track closely with the fortunes of the coalfields around Hazard. The complex blossomed in the 1980s, when mining paychecks and severance taxes gave local families disposable income and county leaders a sense of possibility. Its water slides and bowling lanes stood as visible signs that the mountains could enjoy some of the same commercial leisure culture found in Lexington or Knoxville.
By the 2010s, that economic base had eroded. The Economic Matrix manual bluntly connects Perry County’s high unemployment rate to the downturn in coal, and, in the same section, points to vacant, rundown buildings and lack of amenities as both symptoms and causes of a negative outside image. Fugate’s, singled out as a burned-out complex that once housed multiple attractions, becomes a case study in how quickly infrastructure can slide from pride to liability.
Yet the memories attached to the place do not fit easily into a neat narrative of decline. Former patrons, now parents and grandparents, talk about teaching their kids to skate where they once held hands on first dates. Firefighters interviewed after the 2020 blazes admit that they, too, remember the water park in its prime. The owners who tried to buy and rebuild the cinema after 2016 did so because their first movie date happened there. Fugate’s was a business, but it was also a shared reference point in the stories people tell about growing up in Perry County.
Legacy
Standing among the ruins today, it is easy to focus on rust and broken concrete. But the history of Fugate’s Entertainment Center is ultimately a history of Appalachian improvisation and ambition. A family from the hills built a complex that, for a few decades, gave local kids wave pools, castle-fronted matinees, birthday-party lanes, and disco-lit roller nights without leaving their home county. Coal money and four-lane highways made that possible. Market shifts, maintenance costs, and a wave of arson helped bring it to an end.
What remains are questions that echo across many communities in central Appalachia. When a place like Fugate’s disappears, who is responsible for cleaning up the site and making it safe. What replaces it in a county that already struggles to offer “things to do” for young people. How can local governments, small business owners, and residents work together to build new forms of recreation that do not depend on extractive booms.
For now, Fugate’s lives on as a landmark in memory and on old family photos. As future plans for the Highway 15 corridor unfold, the remains of the complex will continue to remind passersby that, for a time, there was a riverboat on the hillside in Hazard, and that in the glow of its neon and floodlights you could catch a movie, bowl a game, and feel, just for a night, that the mountains were the center of the world.
Sources & Further Reading
WYMT. “Fugate’s Cinema closes doors.” January 15, 2016.
WYMT. “Former Fugate’s Entertainment Center no longer standing, fire investigation underway.” September 21–22, 2020. https://www.wymt.com+1
WYMT. “Fire contained at former Perry County movie theater.” November 24, 2020. https://www.wymt.com
WTVQ. “Fourth time in 3 days old water park set on fire in Perry County.” September 22, 2020. WTVQ
Lexington Herald-Leader / Kentucky.com. “Fire destroys skating rink in Hazard.” December 16, 2013. Kentucky
WYMT. “One person dead following Perry County crash.” July 23, 2016. https://www.wymt.com
Perry County Fiscal Court. Perry County Economic Development Implementation Manual. c. 2015–2016. Perry County Kentucky
Kentucky State Police, Post 13. Public safety-checkpoint locations (Entertainment Drive / Hull School Road, Fugate’s Bowling Alley).
KY Transportation Cabinet, District 10. Highway 15 construction and lane-closure advisories using Fugate’s as a landmark.
CinemaTreasures. “Fugate’s Cinema, Hazard, KY.” Cinema Treasures+1
Rink-History. “Fugate’s Roller Rink, Hazard, KY” and Kentucky statewide roller-rink lists. RINK HISTORY+1
Skatelog. “Closed Kentucky Roller Rinks.” Skatelog
Yelp / Go-Kentucky / Yellow Pages entries for Fugate’s Bowl-A-Rama, Fugate’s Skating Rink, and Fugate’s Waterpark. Bowling Centers USA+5Yelp+5Yelp+5
WMTH Corporation and related sites. Eastern Kentucky Comprehensive Adventure Tourism Plan and “Adventure Tourism in Perry County” listings referencing Fugate’s Entertainment Center. www.slideshare.net+2Trails R Us+2
Shutterstock and independent drone footage of the abandoned Fugate’s water park (2022 onward). YouTube
YouTube. “The History and Remains of Fugates Entertainment Center and Water Park,” “Exploring Fugates Abandoned Waterpark (Hazard KY),” and related urbex videos. YouTube+1
Reddit. “Abandoned Waterpark in Kentucky” thread in r/AbandonedPorn, with local recollections of the park’s closing and the cinema’s later years. Reddit
Various Facebook and Instagram photo posts featuring the abandoned complex and describing Fugate’s as once “the pride of Hazard.” Facebook