Seeing as you can't add comments to the original post anymore, I wanted to expand on a post I saw many years ago on a now-defunct site called Dumpy Strip Malls—the Wordpress version of the site still remains but many of the posts were lost. Not lost totally, however, some of them are on Archive.org like the one on Grand Rios Water Park in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The blog covers the sorry state of the hotel as it was in 2012, and within a few years it was indeed torn down for a CarMax.
From what I can find the 224 room hotel opened back in the mid-1970s (first phase open in November 1974) as Sheraton Inn Northwest and featured a number of amenities, with a 24-hour coffee shop, meeting and banquet rooms, and a large indoor swimming pool and other features (no doubt cloned from Holiday Inn's "Holidome"). The original room count at least when it first opened was 140 rooms.
The hotel changed hands a few times, becoming Best Western Northwest Inn in 1990, then "Northwest Inn" in 1999 before becoming a Ramada in 2001. In 2003 a local businessman bought the hotel to transform into a waterpark-based hotel, which seemed to work for a slumping tourist economy and would have the largest indoor waterpark in Minnesota. While it was announced that the hotel would be Four Points by Sheraton (the new name of Sheraton Inn adopted in the 1990s, bringing back the hotel full circle). When the hotel reopened, however, there were differences, the first being it had no seemingly hotel chain affiliation (now known as Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel, though Ramada remained on the road sign) and while it had three restaurants, Beach House Bar & Grill, Soggy Dollar Cafe, and Coconut Charley's, Coconut Charley's served "All American items" rather than the Caribbean restaurant originally promised.
Now you know the rest of the story—it doesn't do well, gets poor reviews, and it's gone within a decade...
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