In the course of the meeting, residents posed questions to a panel of representatives from the company, the school, and the Osceola County Commission. One retiree wondered if there were plans to build a cemetery. After all, no small American town is complete without its graveyard. Tom Sunnarborg, TCC’s director of commercial real estate development, explained that this was a complicated business decision, owing to the high cost of the land, and that nothing had been resolved on the matter: “Should the right opportunity come along, the company will consider it.” His response generated a new round of sick humor around town. It is a common perception that officially no one is “allowed” to die on Disney property, even though visitors expire there with regularity and as many as thirty-one animals notoriously died of various causes in the months before the recent opening of the Animal Kingdom. A rich mythology surrounding the preservation of Walt’s own body had arisen from the promotion of the Magic Kingdom as a Never-Never Land of eternal life. Celebration itself had been actively promoted as a model of community health where people would live longer and more robustly than almost anywhere else. Ground would soon be broken for an assisted living center, but so far the sound barrier of mortality had not been broken. On the face of it, land value did not appear to be the obstacle. Cemeteries are one of the most profitable uses of land. Indeed, Charlie Rogers, the bank manager, told me he had once heard it estimated that plots would sell like hotcakes to the thousands of Disneyphiles around the world who were literally dying to be buried on Disney property.
In time, the town will probably get its cemetery, as a result of some private commercial initiative, but it was considered noteworthy that the company had made no provision for it in the early phases of construction. Nor had an adequate space been allotted for a community center. The spaces that did exist for community events—Lakeside Pavilion and the Golf Course tavern—were diminutive and all too soon swamped by the crowded community schedule. The only place available for a sizable public assembly was an open-air pavilion in the North Village, remote from the town center and contingent on fair weather conditions. Again, not a few townsfolk saw this planning omission in a vaguely conspiratorial light, as a surefire way of discouraging large public meetings, and there were jokes about this, too.
If there was any real basis for this perception, the same could not be said of the planners’ approach to community building itself. Celebration’s creators had made a special effort to build in community initiatives, lest the residents’ team spirit proved weak. Beyond the personal sacrifices required of all members of a planned community, and the pioneer zeal that propels residents of any new town, the company had laid down a professional infrastructure to ensure that community ties would be staunch from the outset.
In talking to members of the original development team—Peter Rummell, Todd Mansfield, Charles Adams, Chris Corr, Joe Barnes, and Don Killoren (all now gone their own ways)—it’s clear that they each had an unbridled passion for the idea of Celebration. Recruited from the community development profession to create something quite different from a boilerplate Florida golf-course or prestige community, this was a group, according to Rummell, “for which Celebration was a favorite child.” Rummell was careful to downplay the physical planning and talk up the community plan: “The town plan is the hardware, the grid, the alleys, the streets, the setbacks, the architecture. That’s all hardware. My concern has always been that as people come and try to get lessons from Celebration, they get all obsessed with the architecture. The architecture is about eight on the list as far as I’m concerned with what was experimental about this place. What was much more important to me was the software—the things that we tried to make it into a place, make it into a real town.”
One of the more uncommon features of the software package is the Celebration Foundation, a nonprofit institution that fosters and facilitates community initiatives among the residents. Funded with startup grants from Sun Trust Bank, TCC, and the Kohler Company, it would soon file for designation as a public charity, eligible for tax-deductible contributions. Heading up the Foundation was Kathy Johnson, an ebullient Minnesotan with twenty years of experience in fund-raising, government, and nonprofit program development for youth, the disabled, the working poor, and the aging in Duluth. Her mandate was to jumpstart the pioneer phase of residential life: “Most foundations have been created after a problem emerges and people are trying to solve a problem. The notion here was to start out with an organization that can help to build positive responses, and to try to address problems as they come up—but to build it into the civic infrastructure. Most foundations are strictly a pool of resources that you regrant out, or are operating foundations where you only run programs, or grant-making foundations, which only award grants. We’re a mixture of all of those.”
As a result, the Foundation has been active on many fronts. Among its functions, it runs a Volunteer Center, recruiting and placing resident volunteers; provides seed money for community groups, clubs, and branches of national organizations; runs orientation programs for new residents; organizes community picnics and yard sales; and does its share of outreach work in Osceola County, including volunteer service to institutions like Help Now, the county’s domestic violence shelter. These endeavors “to stir the pot,” as Johnson puts it, showed clear results. Initially, volunteerism ran high, and the town’s clubs and community groups got off the ground rapidly. The Garden Club, The Celebrators (for retirees and semi-retirees), the Rotary, Chamber of Commerce Council, Children’s Playgroup, Scouting, and Indian Guides were all well established and thriving in the first two years. A barbershop chorus and the theatrical group, Celebration Players, both had two seasons under their belts. Other initiatives, like the stamp club, had a tougher time attracting interest. Aside from its municipal character, Town Hall also hosts the Parks and Recreations Office, which sponsors a raft of sports clinics, activity classes, and children’s groups. Between the Foundation and Town Hall, the town’s daily “event calendar,” listed on community TV channel 12 and the community cybernetwork, is chockabloc and requires careful coordination among the many groups to avoid chronic conflicts.
For some purposes, the community clubs can take on civic service functions, and even act as lobby groups. One unexpected example of this featured the popular Garden Club in an activist role. In April, its members got wind of a rumor that the weekly downtown Farmer’s Market—a trinkety, boutique affair—would be phased out for reasons of poor economic return. However ersatz, the market served as a communal meeting point and was an especial favorite of the Gardenites. Twenty club members banded together and entered Town Hall to protest the market’s impending closure. It was Celebration’s first “march on City Hall.” So, too, the Celebrators, (fifty-five years and over, and comprising a representative 12 percent of the town’s population) are much more active than as a strictly social group. The monthly meetings to which they invite speakers—many of them from Disney—are rare occasions for residents to have their questions directly answered in a public forum. The Celebrators actively lobbied the county to start a satellite site of the public library in the school, and their members are consistently among the most outspoken attendees of any public meeting. Of course, retirees are habitually the bane of developers. Highly vocal, with lots of time on their hands and living on fixed incomes, they are much more likely to affirm their rights and question decision making. Attending their meetings, I felt I was in the presence of the conscience of the community.
Saturday morning in downtown Celebration. The Farmers’ Market. (Photo: the author)
By the time I arrived in town, the Foundation was no longer offering an elaborate orientation program known as “Celebration Traditions.” The initial program had run for several weeks and covered the biogeographical history of Central Florida, from the time it was part of the African portion of Gondwanaland, through the period of the Caloosa Indians, and the Seminoles (who moved from Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century), the postbellum Homestead
Act of 1866 (which gave freedmen and “loyal whites” eighty-acre tracts), to the flourishing of cattle ranching in the area and the advent of Disney. Researchers on the development team had taped a series of local interviews that resulted in a patchwork oral history of Osceola oldtimers—trappers, cow hunters (Florida’s term for cowboys), ranchers, and loggers. Before it was Celebration, this spot was known as John Dan Bend. The researchers had traced the name to an alligator hunter, John Dan, who frequented the gator hole in a bend in Reedy Creek. The tract was named for him after he accidentally shot his arm off in a confrontation with his prey. A century and a half before, this whole area had been a strategic sector of the swamplands from which Chief Osceola led his guerrilla warriors on hit-and-run raids against the U.S. Army in the course of the long Seminole Wars.
The orientation program was conducted by volunteers coached to initiate new resident groups by using, for no evident reason, the American Indian institution of the Talking Stick. The Volunteer Trainer’s Guide explained how the program was designed to resolve the dilemma of creating an instant community that had no real past: “Most places around the country that exhibit a strong community spirit have a long history. Here we’re starting from scratch with no past or traditions.… How could we give newcomers a common history that in some way begins the process of weaving our individual lives into that tapestry we call community? The answer to this question turned out to be right under our nose.” For what it’s worth, history offered some striking parallels. Centuries before, on this land, the Seminoles had welcomed runaway slaves—Indians and blacks—from southern states into their communities as maroons. The result of this loose sanctuary policy was the free mixing of Indians and blacks in the region. In Eatonville, the nation’s first incorporated black township, just to the north of Orlando, Zora Neale Hurston would later quip, “I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”5 With or without a Talking Stick, it is unlikely that the methods of initiation for these earlier Florida newcomers hastened their socialization into the community as much as did the threat of recapture. Then, as now in Celebration, community building drew strength from adversity as much as from the seasoned customs and best-laid plans that greet the parvenu.
Those who attended it remembered the full Traditions program as a little hokey, and joked about the “indoctrination” sessions. One volunteer described the orientation and welcome gatherings as “an unnecessary form of brainwashing” because the pioneers bonded well enough anyway. Too closely associated with the company’s employee training programs at Disney University, called Disney Traditions, the program was renamed and eventually segued into an eight-part seminar called the Discovery Series, focusing on topics like “The Legend of the Florida Cracker and Early Ranchers” and “Celebration’s Environmental Legacy.” By that time, of course, the town already had some authentic (and much reported) history of its own.
From the moment newcomers attend their first orientation meeting, Kathy Johnson acknowledges, “there’s a constant message that we expect people to get involved, we want them to get involved, we encourage them to get involved.” No one questioned the goal behind “being involved,” but for the most part, residents agreed that “community” had to be earned, and not purchased, for it to be real. Everyone, of course, had his or her own idea of what “real community” was, rooted in an idealized childhood or drawn from the yellowed pages of American mythology.
Phyllis and Paul Kleinman, for example, had grown up in the tight-knit Bronx in the 1940s, where “no one was well-off, everyone was in the same boat,” and where stickball, stoopball, and other street games like Johnny-on-the-Pony and King Queen required little more than a sawed-off mop handle to play. “Now that was a real community,” they ardently declared. The Kleinmans, who own a military surplus store in Orlando, still subscribed to Back in the Bronx, a nostalgia magazine devoted to the proposition “You Can Go Home Again!” which features wedges of warm reminiscing about the old neighborhoods, candy stores, picture palaces, plots of grass, and the El. Celebration, by contrast, was a place where “they are developing community artificially, and it will never have the same warmth.” Of course, the Bronx of legend, like any “real community,” was lost in time. Paul was not the only senior male for whom Celebration had triggered the child within him, offering a safe but thrilling form of regression. Several others, more Disneyphilic, spoke wistfully of reactivating the emotional link with their childhood—the “Mickey within us”—through their newly intimate association with the company name.
As with the Kleinmans’ Bronx, fifteen years from now Celebration veterans will be lamenting the loss of the “real community” that existed in the early years. As the pockets of the site’s residential land were developed, some slated for as far away as four miles from the downtown area, the bounded solidarity of the population would inevitably erode. The Foundation would have a tough job providing the glue for this archipelago of island communities, not to mention the sundry expectations of what a real community feels like. Among the initial pioneers, it built a broad and spirited volunteer base, but aside from this core, the pool increasingly drew upon retirees and empty nesters. Some residents, like Debbie Lehman, shrewdly observed that Celebration’s much-vaunted “Type A” population did not necessarily translate into a selfless volunteer pool. “There are too many Type A people in this town. They thought this would be a ground-floor experience, and they could be in control of something—‘I’ll move there and be boss of something.’ It’s a little scary because there aren’t enough positions, everyone is vying for them, and it’s very competitive. Type A folks can’t just be members, they have to be leaders, and since there’s no real boss, you can’t fire any of them. So we have a town full of bosses, and not enough followers or team people.” Sporting a tie-dye T-shirt reminiscent of her 1960s youth in Madison, Wisconsin, Lehman, a doll maker who lives on Golfpark Drive, sees the problem crystallizing in the debate over the school. Soured by the memory of how her own artistic proclivities had been suppressed in a traditional school, she explains: “We have so much trouble from parents who want ‘competition’ at the school. They point out that they are very successful in their own business, but if we don’t learn how to be cooperative then this town will fail. Being Americans, we have much less of a sense of cooperation or teamwork than other countries. As a society, especially at this moment, we are very self-centered.”
After all the talk about its Type A population, I was surprised to discover that Celebration actually had a large share of nonjoiners. Over half the residents I interviewed were not particularly active in community or volunteer initiatives. More startling yet, I came across people who were confirmed “loners,” even hermits. That the loners did not feel threatened by the compulsive pressure of Celebration’s peer sociability was a tribute to civility, though it ran against the grain of the town’s official self-image as Participation Central. One such loner told me that even if he were not a recluse, he wouldn’t volunteer because a wealthy town like Celebration didn’t need additional help. Another was even more cynical. “Everyone here wants to be your friend. I’m basically anti-social and pathetic, and don’t care, as long as they don’t infringe on my rights.” Others had a vigorous sense of entitlement and approached community life as clients or consumers, expecting prompt attention to their needs. Having paid “an expensive entrance fee” to live in town, they tended to view the management professionals in Town Hall and the Foundation as service workers, often treating the Foundation, as Johnson admitted, “like an adult day care service.”
FIGHTING FOR COMMUNITY
Of all the amenities Celebration would offer—summarized in the five cornerstones of Place, Health, Education, Community, and Technology—the promise of a “sense of community” is the least easy to plan, guarantee, or put a price on. Hiring professionals to deliver the promise and ensure its upkeep is the natural offshoot of a corporate society where layers of experts are add
ed yearly to monitor and manage activities that people used to do for themselves. The corporate concept of a community manager would have been as bizarre as a bug-eyed Martian to the idealized small towns of yore, whose close-knit civic virtue and neighborliness Celebration was designed to restore. Nowadays, there are managers for everything, even things that are supposed to have been lost, like our fabled sense of community.
“Community” is one of the most emotionally ubiquitous and versatile touchstones of American life. As a result, it is one of the more overused words in our daily lexicon, relentlessly mined for all sorts of social, religious, and commercial purposes, and in most instances no more meaningful than a sugary advertising cliché. Of all the things that can be acquired in a market civilization, it is supposed to be one of the most elusive. Like religious devotion or public service, it is not something we can easily put a price on. According to the given wisdom, community takes decades or centuries to build and then is rapidly eroded by the impact of modernity—usually in the form of a new technology like the automobile, or the TV set, or the Wal-Mart. Yet, in a modern society, people can create a sense of community very quickly if they are united around a common cause or can identify common concerns and affinities. A ninety-minute disaster movie can persuade us that close, altruistic ties emerge among complete strangers in peril at sea or in a burning tower block.
To be sure, community consciousness is accelerated in the face of threats: war, disease, impoverishment, discrimination. More and more, community in our time is associated with groups identified as endangered. People discover they belong to a community when it is suddenly at risk or jeopardized. Community, in this sense, is discovered at the very moment it is seen to be fragile and on the verge of disappearing, and then its true strength is put to the test in the struggle to survive. Ethnic or single-issue groups that are marginalized through discrimination also unite around a composite identity. “The African American community,” “the gay community,” “the Arab American community,” are all shorthand summaries of very diverse populations united as much by external disrespect as by common pride. The very composition of American civil society is the legacy of communities seeking protection from threats: Indian communities surviving prolonged decimation, immigrant communities fleeing religious and economic persecution, ex–slavery communities resisting disenfranchisement, and political refugees of all stripes.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 26