Six Flags Great America

Six Flags Great America is an amusement park located in Gurnee, Illinois in the Chicago metropolitan area. The park was created by the Marriott Corporation, who operated it as Marriott's Great America from its original opening in 1976 until it was acquired by Six Flags in 1984. The park features nine themed areas and sixteen roller coasters, as well as a 20-acre water park called Hurricane Harbor. Over 3 million guests visited the park in 2017, ranking it among the top 20 amusement parks in North America for attendance.
In the early 1970s, the Marriott Corporation, owner of several restaurant chains and Marriott hotels, sought to branch further out into the tourism and vacation industry. The largest of the projects it took on was a chain of state-of-the-art theme parks, each of which would be named "Marriott's Great America" and themed around American history, opening in time for the nation's bicentennial. From the beginning, three parks were planned, as Marriott identified three underserved metropolitan areas that could support a major amusement park: Baltimore–Washington, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago-Milwaukee.

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