By contrast, the small-town idealism of my new residence in Osceola County was easy to grasp. Even if you were not the kind to swallow the sugary brew of sentiment attached to the traditional small American town, a quick jaunt around Florida’s highways, condo canyons, and honky-tonk strips would be enough to prep you for the girls on the swing or the hard sell of Celebration Realty. The whole state was in pretty bad shape. At some point in mid-century, after Florida stopped building communities around people and started building them around automobiles, its population growth pattern locked into a woozy spiral. “Keep the World Coming to Florida” has ever been the state’s calling card. Recent estimates of growth project an increase of between 6 and 13 million new residents by 2020, when Celebration’s own buildout is complete. Each year, assuming the lower, more conservative estimate of 6 million new residents, the state will need 120,000 new dwelling units, 40 million more gallons of fresh water, 800 miles of new roads, and, as a result, will lose 164,250 acres of forest and 149,650 acres of farmland.2 It will be catastrophic to accommodate this growth on open space in the current fashion: cranking out new exurban subdivisions of three-bedroom, two-bath ranch homes on half-acre lots at five-mile distances from the mall clusters of Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Burger King. The toll on water, energy and land will simply be unsustainable. The damage wrought by thirty years of this kind of market-driven development, propelled by short-term profit and asleep-at-the-wheel planning, is painfully evident on all sides. The second and third rings of suburban development around city cores now host semi-abandoned strip malls and miles of decaying housing stock. Some of these places are becoming virtually obsolete within a single generation. The cost of maintaining the infrastructure of the low-density suburban housing formula has begun to outstrip the budgets of middle-class residents and tax-starved local governments. Those who can afford it seek refuge in prestigious, gated communities on the outer, pastoral necklace and enjoy forms of private government that capture their tax assessments for internal use. In the meantime, Florida’s rich wetland and lake ecosystems have deteriorated to the point where the hatching rate of its alligators—prehistoric creatures with a time-proven capacity to survive—has begun to plummet.
Celebration joined the small but growing rank of towns and neighborhoods that were creating alternatives in the name of sustainable development. Seaside, ground zero of the New Urbanist movement, and Windsor, its most tony offspring; city neighborhoods like Boca Raton’s Mizner Park, Tampa’s Hyde Park, and Orlando’s South-East Corridor; retrofitted centers like Haile Village, near Gainesville, and West Palm Beach; new developments like the Tampa-area cluster of Longleaf, Silver Oaks, Rivendell, Westchase, and Connerton; and large municipalities, like Jacksonville and Orlando—all have forged and adopted planning principles that stress mixed land use, compact residential and commercial density, pedestrian or mass-transit orientation, and, where it still exists, greenfield preservation. Growth management legislation, passed in 1985, has catapulted Florida from being almost derelict on the regulation of developers to one of the more stringent of the Sunbelt states. The regulations still lack the teeth to make regional planning effective, but they have forced developers to acknowledge, and enter into dialogue with, environmentalists. In time, every city and county in the state might come to weigh anti-sprawl planning ordinances. If the sales figures shift enough, key players in the housing industry and investment banking might be persuaded to amend their formulaic habits of “blow and go” subdivision production. The pursuit of a Dream Home, lately endangered as housing costs have outstripped median incomes, might be redeemed as a result of savings on transportation and unit density. And, who knows?, the restoration of civic spirit in tightly knit new traditional neighborhoods might help to breathe new life into a moribund democracy at large. These, at least, were some of the hopes borne along by New Urbanism’s winds of change.
However unique in its market offerings, then, Celebration was not exactly a one-shot wonder. Disney’s decision to develop was a shrewd bet on a horse with everything going for it: timing, turf, and a critical mass of influential advocates. For seekers of property value, it also seemed like a sure thing, since it was backed by a company with one of the most profitable land development performances in history. Devised by the original developer of Never-Never Land, Celebration simply could not avoid its baptism as an instant utopia, nor could it ever live this identity down. In mock-heroic moments, I would picture myself in the footsteps of the classical narrators of utopian travelogues. Writers like Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and Ursula Le Guin had sent themselves or fictional travelers to new places, whether real or imagined, to report on the existence of better worlds, wondrous alternatives to the corrupt and decadent societies they had left behind. But I had promised myself to be true to residents’ experience of daily life in Celebration, and I soon found that they had brought along as much nonutopian residue from their former lives as I had.
FIRST DAY
On my first day in Celebration, I am still battling a light New York flu that often pulses through the city’s population around Labor Day, as if to remind us that no season holds a copyright on mortality. My movers have not arrived. They call to report that they have broken down twice already, once in Virginia and then in North Carolina. Like many of the employees in the moving business in New York City, they are young Israeli men, fresh from their army training and, I assume, accustomed to hardship and uncompromising orders. They are quick to point out that native-born Americans would not deign to do their job. Unsure about this assertion, I spare them my phlegm on the phone and brace myself for a rough-and-ready weekend. I am about to share a common experience of new Celebration residents—an uncertain wait to move properly into my home.
Kennedy Donofrio, Celebration’s rental property manager, is eager to help out. It is a relief to see a real personality emerge from the phone voice through which I have gotten to know her. The Disney hospitality voice is a formidable thing; the unstoppable friendliness of its tenor, pitch, and intonation is designed to disarm the skepticism of everyone it encounters. Finely calibrated at Disney University, where all new employees (or “cast members”) are trained, this voice is the official greeter of consumer capitalist America, as distinctively authoritative a form of English speech as the pukka curtness of a British colonial administrator might have been for an earlier time. Things are not always what they seem in Celebration, however, and it turns out that Kennedy and her assistant Dawn Thomas, whose Trinidadian lilt has been flattened but not vanquished, are not Disney employees at all. Their management company, ZOM, is one of the many subcontractors in town, delicately buffering relations between residents and the world-famous underwriter of this new community.
Kennedy had found me a downtown apartment at the foot of Market Street, with a balcony view of the central lake. If nearby Kissimmee had not snagged the name over a century ago (Osceola County forbids the repetition of street names), I would be living on Main Street, as Walt once did in his Disneyland apartment, ostensibly to take delight in the first reactions of visitors to the idealized town square setting. Everyone who visits or takes a stroll in downtown Celebration will pass beneath my perch along the petite, palm-lined promenade. In no time, I would become familiar with the traffic in and out of the stores across the street: Max’s Café, the bakery Bread Alone, M Fashion’s fragrant boutique, the more casual Soft as a Grape, Dunn’s antique furniture, and Goodings’ grocery store. I would soon get used to street conversation drifting up from the sidewalk bench outside Village Mercantile, mecca for youth gear, and would even learn to endure the Muzak piped into the street from speakers buried in the bases of the palm trees. As I make a debut appearance on my balcony, the first of many pictures is snapped by tourists below, as eager to document a native resident of this town as they would be to snap an Amazon rain-forest dweller, a kilted Highlander, or a Bedouin on a camel.
Downtown is made up of diverse
two- or three-story apartment buildings, with restaurants and stores at street level. Because the town is supposed to have grown up organically over time, master planners Robert Stern and Jaquelin Robertson wanted some to look as if they were apartment buildings all along, and others to look like grand houses that were later converted to use as apartments. This habit of posterior dating has a pedigree in Florida. The most renowned example is northern industrialist James Deering’s winter villa, Vizcaya, in Biscayne—an elegant Renaissance estate built in 1916 in a highly weathered style to suggest occupation and languid restoration by several generations of a titled Italian family. In Celebration, however, everything, even if it is “slightly aged” in this manner, looks freshly minted. The preference for porches and gingerbread detail made of polymerized materials instead of wood (highly rottable in this climate) means that the real aging process will have a struggle on its hands. My duplex apartment, in a sturdy, coral-colored, stucco building with a clock tower, is atop a dinky shopping arcade that provides shade from the punishing midday sun. Right now, the late summer air is a river of scalding breath, ferrying pairs of fat lovebugs that stick to my skin and burst apart like overripe Champagne grapes if I slap them. Patch-eyed birds glide in on the breeze from the lake, and use Market Street for a landing strip. But there are scant pickings for them on the ground. From my earlier, flying visits to Celebration, advertised at that time as an “honest to goodness town,” I already know these street surfaces are vacuum-cleaned every morning by early-bird company employees. At this time of year, late-afternoon gully washers drench the whole place. Even so, the power washers on the dawn patrol are never too far way.
I do the Celebration thing and introduce myself to a neighbor, Raffaello Sessoms, who is surveying the parking lot from the common walkway at the back of our apartment block. Every bit the casual and courteous Carolinian, he welcomes me cordially and fills the air with lively praise of downtown apartment life. When asked, I tell him up front, as I’ll do with everyone in town, that I am here to write a book about the community. Biting down on the quid of tobacco in his mouth, his blithe mood shifts, his voice lowers, and he coyly advises me that I’ll soon learn “the pixie dust wears off quickly here.” This is too much like the beginning of a southern gothic screenplay for me, so I nod knowingly and change the subject. After all, I want to inhale some of that pixie dust before it wears off. Six months down from Charleston, Raffaello works evenings at the Macaroni Grill out on the Kissimmee strip and minds his irresistible kids, Caitlin and Max, during the day, while his wife Lisa teaches at a middle school. “That’s the secret of keeping a marriage afloat,” he jokes. I grit my teeth as I smile, wondering how I will keep my own Manhattan-stranded romance afloat in the year ahead.
Unruffled and vigilant, Raffaello has the proficient air of a town-watcher, and I can see one of the reasons why. Directly below us, children are playing in the gardens, bordered by a busy parking lot that services not only the residences but also the backs of stores and restaurants. I suspect that the pedestrian traffic across this interior lot could tell me a good deal about the doings of this town, much more so than on Market Street, the main thoroughfare on the other side of our apartments. The town hall and the post office occupy one corner, the bank sits in another, the cinema and half the town’s restaurants and stores back on to the square, and directly opposite from us is the Seminole Building, housing the offices of the Celebration Company (TCC), the Disney subsidiary that is developing the town. Everyone’s paths cross here at some point or another. My neighbor seems to know many of the people in motion below, and in time so will I. Eyes on the street in Celebration are for more than safety. Residents like Raffaello are surveying and assessing how well this new town actually works. Are there unforeseen traffic problems? Do the restaurant kitchens have enough back space to function? Where do people cluster and what do they talk about? In other words, residents are already doing what urbanologists do—what I have been sent to do. Flush with the grand romance of being Celebration pioneers, they are monitoring the town’s every step, from behind the scenes, on the backlot, even as the world’s media survey the life of its front porches, parks, and avenues.
The Sessoms family and apartments on Market Street. (Photo: Jonathan Hayt)
Despite the extensive spraying, everyone, Raffaello tells me, is panicking about the encephalitis-bearing mosquitoes that have recently moved into the area and have started to take human lives. Town Hall has issued advisories about venturing out after sunset. The much-vaunted porch life of the residents is on hold, and community activity is subdued. Sectors of Disney World have been shut down. In the absence of a hurricane season, courtesy of El Niño, lesser natural threats are taking on a fresh prominence. A fourteen-foot gator, an alleged mankiller on several occasions, has just been captured in an adjoining county—the biggest specimen in recorded state history, although the claim is being hotly disputed. Since I was last here in the spring, several alligators had taken up residence in Celebration Lake and been benignly evicted. I later learn that waivers in homeowners’ contracts exempt the developer from liability for residents’ harmful encounters with alligators. An article about alligator habits is even included in the contracts. Why this special attention? Apparently, the swampland on which Celebration is being built was used as a dumping ground for gators cleared out of the Lake Buena Vista area when the foundations of Disney World were being excavated. Celebrationites were sharing their new habitat with this scaly army of Disney refugees. Of course, the gators are not anxious for human contact, but on occasion, five-footers show up in residents’ swimming pools.
Notable birds, like sandhill cranes, have begun to adopt Celebration’s lavish parks as a port of call, keeping company with other fauna in and around the wetland areas: the cottonmouth moccasin snakes and eastern diamondbacks, great blue herons, snowy and great egrets, gopher frogs, stinkpot musk turtles, cooters, bald eagles, parakeets, wild turkeys, and, most wondrous to me at least, the anhingas, drying off their clumsy wings by the lake before taking flight, like latter-day pterodactyls. For a northern urbanite, there is more than a touch of the Lost World about Central Florida, a region that played host to a Noah’s ark of animals fleeing the southward advance of the Pleistocene ice sheets eons before it welcomed the hordes of human “snowbirds” fleeing modern northern winters.
Later in the season, Nala, a clawless 450-pound lion, will escape from nearby Jungle Land, precipitating a massive three-day hunt along route 192 outside of Celebration. Lt. Dennis Parker of the state game commission will tell residents that if they are attacked, they should “present an arm or something that isn’t vital.” Nala, rescued in a terrified condition from an adjacent thicket, turns out to be the least of the powerful natural threats, most of them meteorological, that will visit destruction and hardship on Central Florida in the months to come. Flood, fire, and winds from hell will lend an end-days backdrop to my year in Osceola County.
Just across from my balcony, three solid wooden rocking chairs are set out on the lakeside promenade. Unoccupied, they still look like three elderly citizens holding a leisurely conversation. The rockers are placed there for public use and they command the best downtown vantage point. From there, the view up Market Street is unimpeded, and you can see the entire sweep of Front Street and Bloom Street as they hug the northern portion of the lake. Their facades all glowing brightly in the sun, the downtown buildings draw on regional styles and borrow liberally from much-admired southern townscapes. There are balconies from New Orleans on Market Street, and Charleston sideyard porches on Front Street. According to the Architectural Walking Tour pamphlet, which you can pick up from the sales Preview Center, the garden apartment buildings on Campus Street, to the west, with their green clapboard upper stories, steep gabled roofs, and shallow eaves are “inspired by the traditional houses of St. Augustine.” On Bloom Street, the model is the Low Country houses found in the coastal areas of the Carolinas. Many of the background buildings on Market and Front d
raw on Anglo-Caribbean “cross-bred” styles that mix colonial and classical architecture.
By the lakefront on Front Street stands a large plantation house, with the posture of Deep South comfort. Its solid, round columns rise above a ground floor that houses Café D’Antonio. The upper-floor apartments in the building opposite, hosting Max’s Café, are shaded by outsize Bermuda shutters. Columbia, a branch of a famous family restaurant from the old Cuban cigar-making community of Ybor City, near Tampa, is nearing completion farther along Front. According to the pamphlet, it displays “the transfer of architectural ideas from Spain to Florida via Cuba” in the sweeping pediment marking its entryway and in its latticed lakefront porch. Next door, Cesar Pelli’s deco cinema, with its two slender towers aimed skyward like impatient launch rockets, is a flamboyant tribute to the showy era of picture palaces. Few small towns these days boast a working downtown theater, and even fewer advertise their presence from a great distance as this one does. Also rare on the nation’s Main Streets are the chunky, old-fashioned commercial signs, like this cinema’s wheel-shaped marquees, or the boxy icons of Chambers’ the jewelers and Max’s, projecting out from their buildings and into the streets. Under pressure from preservationists, the signage on Main Streets’ commercial buildings nationwide has been denuded or compressed in order to focus attention on the facades.3 Here in Celebration, the variety of the signage, and what Jaquelin Robertson calls the “urban jewelry” of the town, is sumptuous enough, but still bears the mark of a single author, in this case the New York design firm of Pentagram.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 2