This was not the only occasion for a dogged Dickson visit to Town Hall. Postal couriers had balked at delivering mail in the front of his Campus Street house, where parked cars obscured access to the mailbox, and at the back, where the long narrow alley posed some traffic problems. One rainy day in January, Ron attached a long plastic pipe to his mailbox, looped it over the cars into the street, and attached a makeshift delivery box. He distributed some flyers advertising the virtues of the contraption. His mail was delivered, but Town Hall was alerted. By the time an amused local sheriff arrived, the pipe had been swung back into his garden, thus evading a summons for traffic obstruction. Dickson, however, was summoned to Town Hall to explain his prank. A few days later, he got results. An agreement was reached with the post office in Kissimmee to deliver in the rear alleyway.
Townhouses on Campus Street. (Photo: the author)
Citizen action like this could often take on a surreal air. Later in the year, a lawyer resident pursued a more public form of protest against her builder David Weekley. She plastered stickers, depicting lemons and with slogans about how Weekley had ruined her life, all over her car and her house on West Park Drive. The car was parked downtown on weekends for all to see. While many sympathized with the plight of the Lemon Lady, as she came to be known, her public self-indulgence was widely perceived as a thoughtless menace to her neighbors’ property values. Nonetheless, other disgruntled Weekley buyers would adopt the stickers, over time.
At Town and Country, foremen and field superintendents were coming and going on a revolving-door basis, and things seemed to be getting worse. By the end of 1997, despairing complaints about the situation prompted community manager Brent Herrington, the clement czar of Town Hall, to commission an independent engineer’s survey on the townhouses—gruesome epicenter of the despair—on Campus Street, Savannah Square, and Mulberry Street. The report, completed in March, was a sweeping indictment of the substandard workmanship and deficiencies in construction of the townhouse buildings. Copies of the report were leaked, and they circulated informally among residents along with the warning, “Don’t read it before bedtime.” Apocalyptic forecasts about the shoddy construction flourished. The region’s subcontractors, it was rumored, were refusing to work at Celebration because of the pay, working conditions, and lack of quality control. Local realtors were also telling clients not to buy here because of the poor construction. With the prospect of Town and Country pulling out altogether, townhouse residents, fed up with their treatment so far, were worried sick about the short-term future of their investment. Several had stopped paying their maintenance fees, in protest. After a year plus of living with chronic leaks, sloping floors, fixture malfunctions, and drainage ordeals, and with most attempts at repair generating new problems, they now learned from the engineer’s report that the substandard work “could jeopardize the structural integrity of each building.”
With this quality of smoke on the horizon, Herrington, himself a Town and Country homeowner, called a residents’ meeting in June to speak with the builder’s new division manager, Tim Kelly. A blunt Chicago negotiator, neither unctuous nor easily belligerent, he looked as if he would rather be nursing a martini than facing a room full of Celebration’s angriest. “I can’t be on the same emotional plane as you people,” he acknowledged with terse candor, but promised a new start. By meeting’s end, he had vowed to replace all the roofs, unit by unit, and correct all the deficiencies in flashing, bracing, framing, sheathing, and shingle and stucco work. An arsenal of video cameras, cassette recorders, and legal representatives were on hand to document the promises, and the high emotions of the aggrieved were on display. “We paid a lot of money, we got a lot of crap,” declared one irate homeowner. There was a flood of talk about quality control, insurer’s responsibilities, and responsiveness to punchlists, but nothing about the town’s dirty secret—the low wages paid to construction workers by the builder and subcontractors. So I asked Kelly, from the floor, about these conditions. He smiled wanly, and acknowledged there were some local circumstances beyond his company’s control. He was referring to the notorious Orlando “labor shortage,” which had recently prompted Disney and other area companies to recruit south of the border, rather than raise their rock-bottom wages. The father of one resident, with experience in contracting, illustrated this response by describing a scenario typical of the building industry in Florida: “Droves of people come up here from anywhere, and they get off the back of a truck, and are asked, ‘What do you want to be? Painters or carpenters?’ ”
Robin Stone, an inspector from the county’s building department whom I interviewed much later, concurred: “They were pretty much hiring anyone. On most sites there is a majority of guys who know what they’re doing, and maybe one helper.” On the early Celebration sites, what was more common was “one skilled professional trying to keep track of three unskilled workers.” Stone had written violation after violation, as many as eight on some houses, and warned early on that the poor supervision on the developer’s part would result in mayhem down the line. “It was too much, too fast,” she recalled, and the result was “every kind of repair you could imagine, from foundational to cosmetic.” A seasoned inspector, she said she had seen “many strange things” in Celebration. Above all, she expressed sympathy for the residents. “They weren’t allowed to see the drawings beforehand,” and “the sales agents told them they could have what they wanted” in blithe disregard for what the building codes legally allowed.
By July, TCC had decided to cease serving as a sales broker for the builders, and was allowing prospective homebuyers to meet with the builders’ own sales agents in the Preview Center. The official reason was that the builders’ agents were more “hungry,” but the change in policy was widely seen as a move to stave off future legal action, resulting from the gulf between residents’ expectations of the Disney name and what the builders delivered. It fueled suspicions that the company was backing off from the town to protect against any tarnishing of its name. Six years before, in Dade County, a related turn of events had occurred. Country Walk, a planned community built by Arvida, a Disney subsidiary at the time, was flattened by Hurricane Andrew, sustaining much greater damage than neighboring housing developments. The aftermath of the hurricane damage, in Carl Hiassen’s account in Team Rodent, exposed a trail of sloppy construction: “Engineers discovered rows and rows of nails that were purely decorative, having cleanly missed the trusses they were supposed to secure.”18 Lawsuits followed, in which homeowners tried to claim that Disney’s magical name had been invoked by sales agents to secure their purchase. Disney succeeded, through extensive legal pressure, in keeping its name out of the courts.
With or without a hurricane, for a while it looked as if Celebration might be headed down the same path. Dickson and Jones had formed an entity called the Celebration Homeowners’ Association, “not affiliated in any way with the Celebration Company,” or with the official association. Partly a pressure group, and partly an information resource, the association was a clear alternative to Town Hall’s official channels for dealing with the builders. With its motto, “Working Together to Fulfill the Dream of Celebration,” it would serve as a ready-made legal convenience if things got much uglier than they already were. It would take the combined effort, finally, of Disney pressure, the county inspectors’ issuance of code violations, and threats of resident insurrections to force Town and Country to make good on some of the repairs. In the fall of 1998, workers set about tearing off the rooftops, filling the quiet air below with a shower of shingle. Within weeks, some of the new roofs would be sprouting leaks. Grateful for any attention to the repair of their homes, several residents nevertheless seized the moment to sell and move out. They included Ron Dickson himself, who returned to the Charlotte area to live “on the biggest lake in North Carolina.” As a result of his departure, the alternative Homeowners’ Association lost much of its steam and fell apart. But Ron had not withdrawn from the fray. “Once I
take up a cause, I don’t give up easily,” he declared when I caught up with him seven months after he moved north. He was still busy penning letters to the new town managers and consulting with lawyers about the builders and the school. “A lot of people are afraid to speak out down there,” he explained, “so they ask me to do it.” No longer a resident, he was getting even less satisfaction in his petitioning.
With or without Dickson, the ever-elusive class action lawsuit against Disney was not likely to materialize, but the memory of at least one brush with the law was firmly deposited in the town’s stash of legends. In a certain townhouse on a bad day, one resident’s difference of opinion with a Town and Country employee had escalated into a physical brawl. The employee moved to charge the resident with attempted second-degree murder. After many twists and turns, the suit was eventually dropped. Violence had come to town, notably, in a struggle over property.
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THE NEW GEEWHIZZERY
“How does the future appear?” —Karl Marx
“Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.” —Seneca
The Disney name has long been a catchphrase for false-front architecture and optical illusions, and so the last thing the company needed was to be accused of “Mickey Mouse construction.” Yet the expected headlines never appeared in print. On the face of it, this was surprising. Journalists were popping in and out of town all the time, and the strength of feeling among residents about their housing hardships could not easily be stifled. Sooner or later, some scandal-seeking reporter would surely have come across this story. I had been in residence myself for only a few weeks when I learned, without inquiring, all about the butcher builders. A resident hailed me—a stranger to him—as I passed by his home. He was bemoaning the waterlogged state of his lawn, and clearly wanted to share his drainage predicament, even with someone he did not know. Inviting me inside, he pointed to the lopsided floor, a door hanging askew, water stains all over the ceiling and walls, and other visible legacies of the poor workmanship.
Public openness proved more rare than I had been led to assume from this encounter. From week to week, I expected to see the story break in the media. But clearly there was a much stronger countervailing force at work. Residents’ common interest in protecting the town’s property values prevailed. This was one story that no one in town wanted to see in the newspapers, and so, despite the ever-present threat on the part of wronged residents to go to the press, none broke ranks to do so.
Of course, the Mickey Mouse construction in town had nothing directly to do with Disney’s own know-how in assembling buildings, let alone two-dimensional stage sets. But the homeowners who had been shortchanged felt that their plight said something about how the company interpreted its responsibilities in creating a model public environment. Saddled with a dubious reputation for building only phoney places, there was nothing company managers would like more than to earn credit for fashioning a real bricks-and-mortar habitat that would help awaken public life from its suburban slumber. What stood in the way? In addition to the housing glitch, it turned out that there were some obvious anachronisms involved in creating the kind of town that hasn’t been built for many decades.
For one thing, ideas about what constitutes the public interest change over time. The technical master plan for the town had not always accounted for the way in which public needs have been redefined in the course of a century. For example, I learned early on that the building of the Phase One infrastructure made little provision for disabled access, and was in violation of federal requirements. Under pressure from residents who used wheelchairs, TCC had to spend a small fortune remodeling bridges, sidewalks, parks, and waterfront access paths in order to meet ADA standards that were not a legal requirement in the earliest part of the century when towns like this were built. I came across few residents who knew about this, and indeed, if they had, they may have wondered whether their homeowners’ assessments were footing the bill for the company’s costly oversight. Even with the rectifications, residents in wheelchairs would have a tough time with the three, four, or five steps that lead onto the porches of Celebration’s homes. Unlike most houses in Florida, they are built on raised slabs well above the grade of the land, ostensibly to give residents a sense of security. To make these houses wheelchair accessible would require up to twenty-four feet of ramping, and would surely disrupt the aesthetic unity of the facades so well protected by the Pattern Book.
Cottage homes in Celebration Village. (Photo: the author)
Similarly, the task of re-creating traditional housing designs in an industry that had forgotten how to build them was fraught with obvious pitfalls, especially in a town being thrown up so quickly. The outward period styling of these homes suggested painstaking craft and long durability, while much of the infrastructure was inexpensive, inferior, and likely to be obsolete after a few decades. Die-hard traditionalists maintain that if a Victorian home is not built with the methods, materials, and careful craft of that age, it will deteriorate rapidly. The more pragmatic neotraditionalists insist that the latest technical improvements, if properly installed, will do the job. Many Celebrationites told me they could not be sure of how long their houses would last. Mostly everyone knew there was a disparity between the “body” and the “dress” of the housing.
In Disney World, I learned, they use especially hardy “theme park-quality paint” to weather the daily contact with millions of visitors. Building a public realm involves much more than pleasing the mass of people with aesthetics. How the builder of a public environment budgets and guarantees its infrastructure is no less significant than the designs or the architectural styles that are chosen to express civic ideals. Look at the great public building feats of this century. The public works of the New Deal—the TVA, the rebuilt infrastructure of many cities, the Greenbelt towns, the great rural parkways and dams—became objects of immense popular pride, especially for those who had worked on these projects. FDR’s Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, and Resettlement Administration not only put people back to work but also produced buildings, roads, and environments that were clearly intended to symbolize the achievements of public will and public commitment. These were projects with common benefits, aimed at the social well-being of vast sectors of the population. Naturally, once the federal pipeline was open, public money flowed in the direction of votes and vested interests. Postwar suburbanization was massively funded by the public purse, whether to build roads and infrastructure, guarantee rock-bottom mortgage rates, or absorb homeowner tax deductions. Public money, in this period, directly financed a privatized, suburban landscape, almost exclusively for white families, while it was building cheap Corbusian knockoffs in city projects for predominantly minority residents. Both were products of public policy, and they were inextricably linked. Neither has survived terribly well. Whether unaffordable or unlivable, large portions of both landscapes are falling to pieces.
While few of its residents would regard Celebration as a direct result of public policy, the building of the town had been fully shaped and approved by public government agencies, though not without a struggle. Bob Stern assured me that he and the other planners had to “beat back the system” all the way. The outcome was a town with much more public space than is usually permitted by these same regulatory agencies, accustomed to zoning around the automobile. In fact, one of the reasons I had taken up residence there was that I believed there might be some lessons to be learned from Celebration about the direction of public life at the end of the century. The last two decades of suburban tax revolts, government’s forced retreat from public spending, and the epidemic of privatization have meant that we can no longer take for granted our society’s will to build and maintain the basic framework of public life. Here, in the Osceola scrub, a giant beneficiary of the private marketplace entered the business of sponsoring the public realm and of infusing suburbia—the bastion of social and economic
privacy—with a revived public spirit. But what kind of business is this, and what is its future? Isn’t the public everyone’s business? And how accountable can a private company be to the public interest if its ultimate priority is to protect its name and self-interest? Will it always back off when the heat is on? Celebration would not provide full answers to these questions, but living there convinced me it is a good place to ask them. Every time a new set of tensions developed within the town, I watched as the company’s commitment “to act in the sunshine” (as Florida’s public officials are directed to do by the state’s Sunshine Laws) was put to the test.
THE PUBLIC IS NOT FREE?
The company’s declared interest in restoring public space dates from Walt’s distaste for what Southern California had become by the mid-1950s, and his intent to market Disneyland as a remedy. In 1965, Robert Stern, then editor of the Yale journal Perspecta, published an essay by Charles Moore, the renowned postmodernist architect, whose last design, before his death, turned out to be the sales Preview Center in Celebration. Entitled “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” the essay was the first significant mark of recognition for Disneyland from within the elite quarters of the architectural profession. Searching for public monumental architecture in Southern California, where public space had become an endangered species, Moore could only find what he was looking for in Disneyland. In that auto-free environment, people could commonly mingle in ways that were impossible in their daily suburban environments. He concluded that the future creation of public space may well lie with entities like Disney, if only they were prepared to “submerge their own Mickey Mouse visions in a broader prospect of greater public interest.” Indeed, he declared, with a brash nonchalance available only to a professionally secure avant-gardist seeking to shock his peers,
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