Category Archives: Indiana

Watch the Kenwood Drive-In screen come down

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The good news is that the screen from the Kenwood Drive-In (Louisville KY) is in good shape and will be recycled at the Georgetown Drive-In, just across the river in Georgetown IN. The bad news is that it had to come down, because the Kenwood, dormant since 2009, is now thoroughly closed.

The Courier-Journal of Louisville recorded the screen’s final day with an article and the video embedded above. According to the Courier-Journal, the screen’s rusted bolts slowed workers’ efforts to remove it. “After hours cutting at the base of the screen with a torch, the final bolt was cut and without much warning, the screen crashed to the ground.”

WAVE, Louisville’s news leader, also chimed in with a bit of video and a short story. Both sources say the screen was cut into pieces for shipment to the Georgetown, where it will stay in storage as a reserve screen. I hate to see a drive-in die, but it’s always good when its pieces live on somewhere else.

Project Drive-In roundup 2, The Sequel

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In my last post, I began the task of listing every local media report of every local drive-in that’s participating in Honda’s Project Drive-In. Foolishly, I thought that I might gather up all of them in one sitting. When I hit 20 theaters, each with a similar tale of tenuous finance and this lottery-ticket hope for survival, my eyes had glazed over, and I barely had the strength to finish off the post and click Publish.

Two days later, I’m ready again to see how many more drive-in reports I can list. Again, they’re alphabetized by state. And again, if you click through and find a particularly cool detail we should all know about, please leave a comment.

More of your candidates:

Whew again! That’s 20 more drive-ins with local coverage of their Project Drive-In eligibility. I don’t know whether there are 20 more that I haven’t mentioned, but if I spot enough new ones, there may be a third episode of this franchise.

Who wants to rehab Indiana’s Ski-Hi?

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Over at TriCities.com, the folks there ran a story that first appeared in the Muncie (IN) Star Press. I’m not sure how that works, but the only difference between the two is that the Star Press version includes some photos and a nice bit of video, which I’ve embedded here. It’s worth the visit for the photos, but the Star Press is one of those newspapers that wants to restrict viewers to a few pages a month unless they subscribe. But I digress.

Anyway, the story is about Michael Chalfant, who bought the remains of the Ski-Hi Drive-In, which sits just north of Muncie at the corner of Indiana highways 3 and 28. The Ski-Hi had closed around 2005, and it just sat until Chalfant bought it a couple of years ago. The Ski-Hi had a lot of fans, and there are any number of people who’d love to see it restored and operating again. And that’s pretty much the end of the story.

A big problem is that the Ski-Hi has been gutted. Not only was it hit by weather and decay, but vandals and scavengers cleared out the apartment at the base of the tower and the concession stand. “Everything’s pretty well gone,” Chalfant said. “Thieves have taken the scrap and the wiring. The snack bar is beyond repair. The counters are still in there but it’s pretty much been rummaged through.”

The situation now is that Chalfant mows the grounds and has “no immediate plans” to tear down the Ski-Hi. But he also says he has no particular plan to restore it. Some folks are starting to talk about forming a non-profit to embark on the huge project of restoring a drive-in when all that’s left is the land, the shell of a concession building, and a screen tower that’s slowly falling apart. Good luck on putting something together, and meanwhile, thanks to the Star Press for preserving this video snapshot of what a drive-in can look like after years of neglect.