The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  Disneyland must be regarded as the most important single piece of construction in the West in the past several decades.… Single-handedly, it is engaged in replacing and extending many of those elements of the public realm that have vanished in the featureless, private, floating world of Southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is undiscoverable. Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is not free. You buy your tickets at the gate. But then Versailles cost someone a great deal of money. Now, as then, you have to pay for the public life.1

  Moore got no points for his flip analogy with Versailles, which was such an obscene example of personal opulence at public expense that it helped to foment a popular revolution. But his comments about Disneyland, however provocative in intent, proved to have a long and sprightly life among architects and planners for whom the theme park’s urbanism was held in a perilous balance; much admired by fans for its bustling ambience and spotless efficiency, much reviled by critics for its near-totalitarian forms of crowd control.

  For one thing, the success of Disneyland was a chilling premonition of the day when shopping malls, controlled by private developers, would come to function as just about the only version of public space available to a sizable chunk of the North American middle class. These biblically proportioned zones, which swelled in scale from 50,000 square feet in the early 1950s to over ten times as large in the 1990s, became mandatory destinations for all and sundry, from the makeshift youth subcultures of mall rats to the elderly legions who use their retail corridors and stairways as exercise opportunities. In George Romero’s prescient film Dawn of the Dead, the mall was a gathering point for zombies whose return from the dead led them, by force of glutted habit, to congregate in the only place where they remembered each other collectively to be alive. Increasingly, malls have threatened to displace parks, schools, libraries, post offices, town halls, and community centers as civic meeting places and points of assembly. Architecturally, they include evocations of the traditional marketplace, plaza, or village green, and many have walkways that simulate the public bustle of urban streets. Soon, whole suburbs began to name themselves after malls, and vast private developments sprang up in the form of city malls, often run by corporate boards with no trace of civic accountability.

  The creators of Celebration were well aware of Moore’s prophecy about Disney’s future role as a promoter of public space. Proud of the subsequent attention devoted to the theme parks by architects and planners, Michael Eisner told me he has always thought of the theme parks as “public places in private communities.” Celebration could comfortably fit under this description. Since there is no visible evidence, for the unwitting visitor, of the Disney connection, this town could indeed claim to be the literal outcome of Disney “submerging its Mickey Mouse visions in the broader prospect of greater public interest.” Locating Disney iconography in downtown Celebration is like looking for graven images in a mosque. When Joseph Judge, a bicycle retailer, set up shop in the fall of 1997, he raised a Mickey Mouse banner above his storefront for two heroic weeks before he was obliged to remove it, as indeed he had predicted to me. If you look hard enough you can find discreet Disney jewelry and vintage Disneyana collectibles in one or two stores, but keeping Mickey out of sight is consistent with canons of good taste dictated in the downtown area. The mass cultural icons on which the company’s vast wealth rests are considered much too tacky to be displayed in the town it is building.

  Celebration’s civic place-making is intended to be a classy rebuttal of the cookie-cutter subdivision, the strip, and the mega-mall. At a time when urban contact is so often simulated in bogus portrayals of public space like Universal Studios’ City Walk in Los Angeles (and now in Orlando), real places like Celebration that are built to champion public interaction are surely a step in a better direction. The planners of the town borrowed some of the high moral ground of the New Urbanist movement that wants to get things right in the belief that most other places are wrong. But what had struck Moore about Disneyland in 1965 was not just the sense that it worked as a public place, where the surrounding urban sprawl of Southern California seemed dysfunctional, or hostile to human intercourse. What thrilled him was the public indulgence of pleasure, the sense of “participation without embarrassment” in a place where the interstate chitchat of the visitors (“You’re from Ohio?”) flourished alongside the intergalactic geewhizzery of the attractions (“You’re going to Mars?”). If you could get beyond the false fronts and the gimcrack stage sets, you might even run into a chunk of the future. At least Moore thought so: “There, on the Matterhorn, from the aerial tramway over the bobsled run on the inside of the plastic mountain, is a vision of a place marked out for the public life, of a kind of rocking monumentality, more dynamic, bigger and—who knows?—even more useful to people and to the public than any the world has yet seen.”2

  Was Moore half joking, in that arch, ironic way that would subsequently become the house style of the postmodern movement? Not exactly. For a brief, but significant, moment, the Pop attitude of the day allowed its devotees to imagine that, if you came to it with no prejudices or snobbish reserve, pop culture harbored impulses of progress that had stagnated elsewhere, especially in the Establishment’s preoccupation with good form and paternalistic planning. In the mid-1960s, anything was still possible. In America, no one had put the brakes on yet, and the future, like the monorail, still looked futuristic.

  But the sector of the future that gave rise to Celebration had little to do with the heady vision of scale and speed summed up in Moore’s “rocking monumentality.” Instead, it could be found, in embryo, on Main Street, and in the picturesque parochialism of Disneyland’s versions of American history. Within a few years, the vigor of the urban ghetto uprisings and the opposition to the Vietnam War, followed by the flourishing of gay and women’s liberation and the ecology movement, had shattered the innocent daydreams of the Mouseketeers and plunged the country into an orgy of national self-analysis for the next three decades. Historians’ accounts of American settlement underwent a total overhaul, as the chronicles of genocide, slavery, ethnic exclusion, and imperialism sliced open and remodeled the official narratives about the past. The great ethnic revival—enriched by the pride of discovery for peoples, like African Americans, who had been denied their histories—was matched by a reappraisal of folk and vernacular arts. This protracted season of historical revisionism was long overdue, but it meant that the national culture would be focused more exclusively on the shape of the past than on the profile of the future. In a nation in imperial decline, like Britain, there were obvious reasons for this retrospective mood. But for a country like the United States, so long identified with progress and fast-forward motion—a country that had always been viewed as the home of the future—the backward-looking turn was as genuine and unlikely a heresy as this century has produced.

  First of all, however, the look and feel of futurism had to wither on the vine, and it turns out that the Disney company played its own role in that story.

  THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE FUTURE

  Within a year of Moore’s comments, Walt Disney had described his own short-lived blueprint for the future in a 1966 TV clip for “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” that announced plans for the company’s newly acquired property in Central Florida. Walt’s television manner in these years helped to define the term “avuncular.” Running his pointer over a map that, in its current incarnation, still occupies prominent wall space in every Disney conference room in Florida, he casually outlined the plans for the 28,000-acre spread—twice the size of Manhattan—as if he were describing a carefree family vacation. The blueprint included a theme park, a Vacation Land (with the resort hotels the company had lacked in Anaheim), and an innovative transportation system, each of which was realized in the final design for Walt Disney World. The features of the plans that went unrealized were an Airport of the Future, an Industrial Park designed to showcase American industry at work, and the ur
-EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), a model city for 20,000 Disney employees with a radial hub design.

  In the downtown area of ur-EPCOT, business and commerce would thrive in a climate-controlled center encased in a giant bubble, where “the pedestrian is king.” This area would house offices, a thirty-story hotel and convention center, stores “re-creating the character and adventure of places around the world,” theaters, restaurants, and other nightlife attractions. It was to be surrounded by concentric zones allocated to High-Density Apartment Housing, Green Belt and Recreation (playgrounds, churches, and schools), and the outlying neighborhood and residential areas. Surface transportation would be primarily electrical, in the form of the Wedway people-mover, which never fully came to a stop, even at embarkation points (the modernist, industrial idea of the city somehow had to include twenty-four-hour-a day motion, if only to rival fully, and perhaps to surpass, nature). The auto routes lay underneath the city, again living up to Walt’s solemn vow that “no stop lights will ever slow these automobiles.” The professed goal of Walt’s EPCOT was to build a model solution to some of the great urban problems of the day: blight, poverty, unemployment, traffic congestion.

  Predicting that EPCOT would “influence the future of city living for generations to come,” he spoke in the film of meeting the urban challenge

  by starting with the public need, and the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of community.… EPCOT will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, and a place where people actually live a life they can’t find anywhere else in the world. Everything in EPCOT will be dedicated to the happiness of those who live, work, and play here, and those who come from all round the world to visit our living showcase.… It’s our hope that EPCOT will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community … a planned environment demonstrating to the world what American communities can accomplish through proper control of planning and design.

  The urban utopia of ur-EPCOT was the ultimate modernist linear city and company town rolled into one. Being a Disney town, it was also for show. The showcase design had antecedents in the White City of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition (where Walt’s father, Elias, had been a construction worker) and the City of Tomorrow from New York’s 1939 World’s Fair, both of which had a hefty influence, respectively, upon the City Beautiful movement and the urban renewal of the postwar period. In the 1964 World’s Fair, the General Electric pavilion featured “Progress City,” a city of the future that was subsequently added to the end of the “Carousel of Progress” exhibit in Disneyland. It became the model for ur-EPCOT, code-named Project X.

  As for the workers’ town, Project X had a long list of predecessors among benevolent Victorian capitalists—Cadbury’s Bourneville and Lever’s Port Sunlight in England, Krupp’s Maragaretenhohe in Germany, and the Pullman town in Illinois—and many not-so-benevolent corporations. The United States produced hundreds of company towns (the first was established as early as 1645 by the Braintree Iron Works).3 By 1917, as many as one thousand American firms provided some form of worker housing, whether in the form of model rural precincts, with cottage rows and boardinghouses, or as bounded municipal enclaves, where even the social behavior of workers’ families was extensively regulated.4 By 1938, with company towns in sharp decline, they still accounted for a total population of 2 million persons.5

  Though not the final try at a superplanned modernist city, Walt’s ur-EPCOT was the last gasp of the paternalist company town, which had provided planners (like John Nolen, much lionized by New Urbanists) with an unparalleled opportunity to design whole towns. But the most audacious detail of Project X lay in the idea that a large corporation would actually try to resolve the urban crises of the late twentieth century by creating its own, alternative version of urbanism—a city that didn’t exist elsewhere—for its own workers. Hitherto, this idea had flourished only in the dystopias of science fiction. Only the “unacceptably optimistic” Walt Disney Company would take up such a challenge in the midst of urban renewal, with the ghetto uprisings in Watts, Newark, and Detroit just around the corner, and with political movements for community self-determination and grassroots participatory democracy sweeping through the inner cities and campuses of the nation. It was just as well that Walt died before the plans got under way. There is little doubt that the civil rights and political instincts of 20,000 residents (envisaged as temporary renters, who would therefore not be able to vote on the affairs of Disney World) would have been impossible to manage, even by the masters of corporate management. Hired as a consultant on Project X in 1964, Ray Watson, future chair of the Disney board, advised against a plan to closely regulate the residents’ dress and behavior. A development veteran of the new California city of Irvine (and pioneer of the use of market research in consumer taste to plan and sell housing), Watson reasoned that if visitors were paying to see them in their utopian habitat, residents would need to be heavily subsidized to live like fish in a bowl.6

  Ur-EPCOT had too much nineteenth-century residue in its gut to give birth to a workable twenty-first-century urbanism, at least one inhabited by real people and not audio-animatronic puppets or lobotomized workers. In the course of the internecine Disney family struggles that followed Walt’s death in 1967, Project X shriveled up, and when the nonresidential EPCOT finally opened in 1982, it was a perfectly schizophrenic affair—one half an extension of the World’s Fair pavilions run by major U.S. corporations, the other half an international food court on a grandiose scale. Pictorial vestiges of Walt’s plan lived on in a few of the pavilion rides, where the futuristic dioramas of floating cities, space colonies, and desert farms were already outdated in 1982, and were virtually museum pieces a decade later. To this day, these obsolescent futures are populated by many of the same audio-animatronic families that were satirized to death by the Jetsons. Nonetheless, it took the company until the planning of Euro Disney in the late 1980s to acknowledge that the space-age version of the future in the Magic Kingdom had aged beyond redemption. Euro Disney got around the problem by replacing Tomorrowland with a Discoveryland that features fantasy versions of the future according to French progenitors of science fiction like Jules Verne. After several attempts over the decades to overhaul the originals, Disneyland and Walt Disney World followed suit with versions of Yesterday’s Tomorrowland. Geewhiz futurism was presented now as a retro period look, on a par with Frontierland.

  The creators of Celebration tend to play down the legacy of Walt’s ur-EPCOT. When I quizzed Michael Eisner about it, he almost shrugged off the original proposal: “It was like having an idea for a movie over dinner, and then dropping dead after dinner, and people saying that this was your fully conceived vision.” Many residents, by contrast, still spoke religiously of “Walt’s dream,” and, on several occasions, I saw one resident use the phrase to remind backslidden TCC employees of the idealism behind the town. By the time the master plans for the neotraditionalist Celebration were drawn up in the early 1990s, what did they retain of Walt Disney’s “idea for a movie”? Actually quite a lot: a community of 20,000 residents, built from scratch, “on virgin land”; an international showcase for technology, education, and medicine; and a macro-construction challenge that only a company with deep pockets, booming profit margins, and a financial need to expand and diversify would take on. There are even some unrealized ur-EPCOT features like the “Workplace,” a manufacturing complex that would display work methods to visitors, that still appear in the undeveloped sector (west of I-4) of the plans for Celebration.

  To be sure, this was no longer a company town, although many residents took jobs, conveniently, with Disney after moving to Celebration. In my estimate, as many as one fifth of the families in Phase One ended up in some direct (and many more in a less dir
ect) relation to the company, even if the price points were well beyond the means of the vast majority of the company’s 55,000 area employees. Above all, Celebration had retained Walt’s promise to correct some of the wrongs of modern urbanism. But only some of the wrongs, and only for those who could afford the entrance fee. Then, as now, “urban problems” are a code word in American public speech for the expendable labor pool of the inner cities. When I asked him about the likely impact of the town on urban planning, Eisner volunteered: “I will say one thing. This does not address the problem of the underclass, like you have in New York or Detroit. It is not a panacea, it is not the model for the next city, nor was it meant to be.”

  THE VIRTUAL FRONT PORCH

  In the twenty-five years between Walt’s futuristic blueprint and the master planning of Celebration, the Disney stage set for urban utopia underwent a complete change of scenery. Instead of a climate-controlled bubble, we had preserved wetlands; instead of cloud-capped towers, we had relics of Americana. From the outset, Celebration would be seen by outsiders as a raw nostalgia trip down Memory Lane, or, at best, as a stark expression of the Back to the Future ethos that took the Main Streets of the past as its inspiration for the way forward. But this was only the surface, as Celebrationites were always quick to point out. Behind the twee facades, the billboards and sales brochures promised a state-of-the-art, “wired” community with its own intranet, serving the school and the health center and accessible to all residents through high-speed data access from every home. Here, in a largely invisible form, was the rapturous technological future that Walt’s company had always been careful to honor.