Wannado City

Wannado City was an indoor role-playing amusement center at the Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was a property of Grupo CIE. Proclaiming itself as a place "where kids can do what they wanna do", it was a child-sized representation of a metropolis, where children aged 2–14 could participate in different careers and other lifelike activities. Luis Javier Laresgoiti Fernandez created the concept in 1996, when he opened a similar park in Mexico City named "La Ciudad de los Niños", now known as KidZania. Luis sold his shares and left Kidzania to open Wannado City at Sawgrass Mills Mall in Florida. The initial success of Wannado City led to plans of expansion, with the partnership of the Mills Corporation, including expanding to Japan, a second US location in the then-in development Meadowlands Xanadu in New Jersey (owned by Mills at the time, now known as the shopping mall American Dream Meadowlands), Gurnee Mills, and in a development project in downtown Chicago, Illinois. Financial problems would begin around a year after opening, when Hurricane Wilma made landfall in Florida, affecting South Florida's tourism market and causing local schools to cancel field trips, delivering a blow to revenue. Coincidentally, the Mills Corporation, Wannado City's main expansion partner, began to be investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commi

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