For myself, I had worried more about being lonesome, especially since a sense of professional ethics held me back from being too cozy with residents. Scholars and journalists can all too easily exploit their informants. Neither a journalist nor a social scientist by training, I had not angled for juicy headlines—there were enough out there already—nor had I aimed at an objective or statistical survey of the town—Celebrationites had been surveyed enough already. This book, like the hybrid nature of this community, is supposed to be a cocktail of personal and public observations, laced with those ingredients of analysis that seemed most true to my experience of the town’s residents and employees. So, too, I had elected not to be a mute, recording witness. After only a few months of interviewing, I knew more about the town than virtually anyone else, and respectfully volunteered information and opinion to anyone who seemed to want it. A large part of the social life of Celebration involves swapping information and tales about the town itself, and it is customary to barter stories for stories. Participation in this circuit of information absolved me from feeling and behaving like a parasite. My work at the school and various volunteer activities also helped. I left town, believing, at least, that I had contributed in small ways to the life of the community. I had made several good friends in the course of my stay. Back in Manhattan, acquaintances congratulated me on my “escape from Celebration,” drawing lightly from that haughty repertoire of cosmo attitude in which the term “suburban” is automatically derogatory. In my year in Celebration I had barely encountered any reverse snobbism toward urbanites.
From time to time, the memory of a tasteless film had flirted with my doings in Osceola County. Unlike The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show, this film had no obvious relevance to the real Celebration, but it did involve a place called Celebration, the only other record of the town name that I had come across. The film is Russ Meyer’s camp classic, Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, and it features the violent mayhem visited by a trio of tough, Amazonian disco girls on the studs and farmhands they meet while joyriding their sportsters in the Californian interior. In one scene, hunting for new kicks, they pull up for gas in a decaying farm hamlet called Celebration. The pump attendant ogles their physiques and shambles his way through his cameo role as a country yokel. With a vicious rev of their Porsche engines, they are gone, and he is left sucking dust. The name of the town is a passing reference to everything the go-go girls hold in homicidal contempt. A carefree masterpiece of exploitation film, Faster, Pussycat is a twisted tribute to the Californian teen fever of the 1960s—beyond good and evil, beyond gender and reason, and crazed with the high-octane gusto of a civilization burning fuel faster than the speed of its collective mind. Meyer’s film is the stark antithesis, in many respects, of The Stepford Wives’ gender parable of suburbia.
The real town of Celebration was intended to correct some of the extreme, destructive impulses featured in these two films. Among other things, its design was aimed at quelling the gas-guzzling frenzy of the American way of life, at cracking open the stifling conformity (especially for teenagers) of its suburban sanctuaries, and at liberating women, in particular, from having to follow the path of least resistance in their careers and daily lives. The result, it was hoped, might help neutralize the amoral self-indulgence that each set of impulses has unleashed within its citizenry and on its roads. In the centurylong tradition of housing reform, improving the neighborhood was expected to produce more civic-minded conduct.
But Celebration also hosted other checks against extremes of uncivil behavior. Aesthetic controls over house and garden, political control over who would vote in the community’s affairs, and social control over how many people (two, according to the rule book) slept in each bedroom. These controls were accepted by residents in return for surety of their property. In response to outsiders who saw such checks as un-American, the founding fathers could always be invoked. One Celebrationite, a retired schoolteacher from Philadelphia, cradle of liberty no less, reminded me that the ties between liberty and property were fundamental to the constitutional history of the United States. Liberty, he argued, had its root in property and was thinner without it.
There was some historical basis to this comment, but it seemed only partly accurate. Thomas Jefferson and his peers had indeed been guided by the opinions of English philosopher John Locke about the interlocking virtues of “life, liberty, and property.” Indian claims notwithstanding, the most distinctive mark of early colonial life, where land appeared to be plentiful, was the right of white settlers to acquire property, denied to the majority in feudal Europe. The New World, from Locke’s point of view, was a place where the natural right to property, and thus the opportunity to subsist as free men, could be realized. But Locke’s idea of property had more to do with self-possession and control over one’s personal liberty than with material or landed possessions. Natural property, for him, was more about free will than about the free market. When the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was drawn up, Jefferson altered Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Historian William Scott speculates that Jefferson was aware of the growing disparity between contemporary ideas about private property and Locke’s increasingly antique conception of natural property. Rather than risk a reference to property being read too literally, Jefferson substituted a more symbolic term.9 In turn, the new republic came to reflect this disparity. In this nation, all men, in principle, were “created free and equal,” but only white male freeholders were so, in practice, and would hold a vote in government accordingly.
In our day, only a tiny minority of citizens are still freeholders, living off the fruits of their own labor, in the sense that Jefferson and others envisaged for their agrarian republic of small farmers. Corporations own the vast bulk of productive property, and the principal meaning of “private property” now refers to homes, automobiles, stocks, and consumer appliances. Where the chief means of upward mobility once lay in the small freeholding of productive land, now material security rests primarily on the consumer property of the home, with its appreciated resale value. As for Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness, modern consumer companies like Disney, whose property is billed as “the happiest place on earth,” have staked their claim to that quest on our behalf.
Celebration’s version of “life, liberty, and property,” with its voter restrictions, its property deeds and standards, and its devotion to communitarian ideals, is in some ways a consumer society’s rendition of the concerns of the founding fathers. Walt’s famous signature (which, it is alleged, he himself could not reproduce)10 is our century’s most visible, trademarked substitute for the legacy of these original signers. To weigh the principles of these eighteenth-century legislators against the current-day policies of an overextended film company, is, of course, to invite comparison between the sublime and the ridiculous. But the distant past is always overvenerated, and we tend to underestimate events that unfold on our own doorstep. The concept of a town like Celebration is no less an expression of the dominant mentality of our age than the Constitution was a reflection of the interests of the powerful landowners, lawyers, merchants, and businessmen of its day. But—to stick with this flawed analogy to the bitter end—there is one large difference. The Constitution, made by the people, would be subject to amendment by the people, by due democratic process. In Celebration, as in hundreds of communities like it, people live by consent to the developers’ own rules, yet it is widely understood that everything is subject to change, at the desire of the developer. All advertising, promotional material, and company literature carries a disclaimer like the following:
These materials are intended to provide general information about certain proposed plans of TCC. These materials, and all photos, renderings, plans, improvements and amendments depicted or described herein are subject to change or cancellation (in whole or in part) at any time without notice. Accordingly, neither these materials, nor any communications m
ade or given in connection with these materials may be deemed to constitute any representation or warranty or may otherwise be relied upon by any person or entity. (c) The Walt Disney Company
On my last day in Celebration, I had been tearing around town, tying up loose ends and doing exit interviews. I ducked into Town Hall on some breathless quest. Dawn Thomas and Sarai Cowin, the grand divas of the building, accosted me as I bustled down the corridor, sweating bullets, my hair bent all out of shape. I must have been a sight. “Where have you been?” pumped one of them. “Disney legal?” quipped the other, with perfect timing. This was Celebration insider humor at its finest. Luckily, I never had any truck with the company’s legal department, whose reputation in the business world rivals that of Attila the Hun in the annals of human rights, although I had been there once, in the entrails of Team Disney, to interview a company attorney who was a Celebration resident. A clerical employee casually informed me that the building’s interior reminded everyone of a maximum security prison, but I knew she was just adding spice to the fearsome mystique.
In truth, however, all of us (I was now an honorary Celebrationite) had felt the shivery finger of “Disney legal” slide between our thoughts and our words, calibrating the temperature of our speech. Protector of the almighty brand name, its probing audit had once moved upon the face of the waters of the Osceola swamp, and the holy writ of its Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions now ran with the dry land raised above. Tapping into the town’s sick humor, a resident had once joked to me that “at least we don’t have a Celebration tattoo stamped on our arms yet.” In the age of the trademark logo, we had something much better. We had our own brand. Everyone, in time, might have his or her own brand. It had been promised.
As I motored out of town for the last time, I remembered some other things that same resident had told me. On one occasion, when a downtown parking lot was being resurfaced, TCC employees readied to tow his car to another location. Something about this intrusion unhinged him, and he complained loudly to the tow crew. The sheriff was called, and when TCC officials arrived on the scene, he lost it: “I’ve had enough of this,” he bellowed, threatening to sue Disney, “I’ve got pixie dust coming out of my ass.” A week later, when I ran into him again, he was agitated about the fact that a resident on the block occasionally parked her car on the back lawn, and had escaped a Town Hall reprimand for doing so. There was a perfect contradiction in his response to these two situations, and clearly this was a man in whom extremes met. But his fierce resistance to authority, on the one hand, and his equally fierce passion, on the other, for the policing of his neighbor’s conduct did not seem altogether out of character in Celebration. It was what we had come to expect. After all, this was a place that many of its residents had experienced as the best and worst of towns, or so it had seemed to me.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1 Vincent Scully, “Disney: Theme and Reality,” foreword to Beth Dunlop, Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), p. 8.
2 Estimates provided by the Sustainable Communities Project of Florida’s Department of Community Affairs.
3 Appreciation of the signage was recorded by Celebration resident Marty Treu, who was writing a book about the Main Streets of small-town America.
CHAPTER 2
1 Osceola County Comprehensive Plan, Evaluation and Appraisal Report, Executive Summary (December 1997).
2 Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
3 According to the recollection of an architect from the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, who worked on some of the first plans.
4 Russ Rymer, “Back to the Future: Disney Reinvents the Company Town,” Harper’s, (October 1996), p. 70.
5 Susan Hayward, “Changing Social Values and the Home,” unpublished copy of a consumer report by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman (August 1988). I am indebted to Peter Katz for providing a copy of this paper.
6 “Urban or Suburban?,” Harvard Design Magazine, 1 (Winter/Spring 1997), p. 47.
7 Compared to conventional suburban development, Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs) carry extra costs—for neighborhood greens, town squares and plazas, wide sidewalks, rear lanes, facade detailing, and other attempts to build in public “character.” The higher density per acre offsets these costs, since the smaller lots make roads and utilities less expensive for each unit. In addition, accessory units, or granny apartments on top of garages, provide a potential source of rental income for owners to offset mortgage payments. A study by the Ottawa-based Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that TNDs should cost a developer about 24 percent less per dwelling than in a conventional design. “Density Makes New Urbanism Cheaper,” New Urban News, July–August, 1998, p. 10. A Vancouver study by a University of British Columbia team, headed by Patrick Condon, estimates that the TNDs could be 30 percent less, while the tax base could yield 3.5 times more.
8 Mary Doyle-Kimball, “Sizing Up Disney’s Celebration,” Builder Magazine, September 1996, p. 121.
9 Mary Shanklin, “The Hottest of Spots,” Orlando Sentinel, January 3, 1999, J-1.
10 Despite all my efforts, I could not get access to company profiles of the income and demographics of the residents. The only general statistics on income I could access were the results of AT&T’s phone survey of the first 300 pioneers. According to that survey of a sample of 145 families, 54 percent had household incomes of under $75,000, 31 percent were between $75,000 and $150,000, and 10 percent were higher than $150,000. Almost 98 percent of the families had some college education, and 38 percent had graduate, medical or law school degrees.
11 The annual charges on a $400,000 house in Phase One would include about $5,106 in county and school taxes, $2,000 for the Community Development District maintenance assessment, and $360 for the Community Association, totaling about $7,500 per year. For a $155,000 townhouse, a buyer would expect to pay $1,714 in county and school taxes, $750 for the maintenance, and $360 for the Community Association dues, totaling about $2,824 per year.
12 Susan Lundine, “At Celebration, Big Tax Bills Set Off Fireworks,” Orlando Business Journal, March 20–26, 1998, pp. 1, 48.
13 Ramond Chiaramonte, in response to Orlando architect John Henry’s numerous broadsides against Celebration, “Architect on High Horse with Anti-Celebration ‘Diatribe,’ ” Orlando Business Journal, October 18–24, 1996; and “Celebration Parent Defends School Innovation,” Tampa Tribune, June 14, 1997.
14 TCC actively promoted trans2 electric vehicles, which resembled souped-up golfmobiles and were known around town as egg-cars. Almost twenty NEVs (neighborhood electric vehicles) had been purchased by residents and were in daily use. Ownership of these vehicles signified a particularly strong commitment to community life and to the ideals of Celebration.
15 Andres Duany, in “Urban or Suburban,” p. 55.
16 Quoted in Mary Doyle-Kimball, “Sizing Up Disney’s Celebration,” p. 121.
17 Lenny Savino, “Celebration Workers Face Deportation,” Orlando Sentinel, February 14, 1998, D-1, 6.
18 Carl Hiassen, Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World (New York: Ballantine, 1998), pp. 53–57.
CHAPTER 3
1 Charles Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” originally appeared in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, 9/10 (1965), and was collected in Charles Moore and Gerald Allen, eds., Dimensions: Space, Shape and Scale in Architecture (New York: Architectural Record Books, 1976), p. 116.
2 Moore, p. 130.
3 Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995). The more well-known include the Kuppert Farms town of Kingsport in Tennessee, Apollo Iron and Steel’s Vandergrift, the Hershey town in Pennsylvania, Tyrone, built in New Mexico by the Phelps-Dodge Copper Company, U.S. Steel’s Gary in Indiana, NCR’s Ohio settlement of Dayton, Colorado Fuel and Iron’s Ludlow, the Kohler town in Wisconsin,
Niagara Power’s Echota, the Chicopee town in Georgia, and the Draper Corporation’s Hopedale in Massachusetts.
4 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 180.
5 John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 436. Cited from a 1938 survey of planned communities by the National Resources Committee.
6 John Taylor, Storming the Magic Kingdom: Wall Street, the Raiders, and the Battle for Disney (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 33–34.
7 Quoted in Alan Bryman, Disney and his Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1955), pp. 118–120.
CHAPTER 4
1 Four samples of this kind of criticism, as applied to Celebration itself, will suffice. Longtime architecture critic for the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable’s book The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New York: New Press, 1997) is probably the most exhaustive example of the genre. Of Celebration’s Pattern Book, she writes: “All of the promised ‘looks’ are there, but in selectively annotated and historically correct versions. Clever ‘authentic’ adaptation makes the ridiculous acceptable; this is a managed eclecticism of a seductive unreality that both blows and corrupts the mind” (p. 65). Renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs sees Celebration “as a theme park of a town. It’ll have an artificiality, certainly, that genuine places that grew up over a course of time and weren’t the brainchild of one committee don’t have. You can’t fake it,” quoted in Craig Wilson, “Disney Gets Real, USA Today, October 18, 1995, A2. Rutgers professor Benjamin Barber observes: “When a government runs news stations, creates communities, defines friends and neighbors, controls architecture and rewrites history, it’s called totalitarianism. When the Disney corporation does it, it’s called Celebration. Except with Disney the motives are commercial, the reality is simulated, and the consequences are blandness, shallowness and the death of substance and taste alike, Disney’s world is not totalitarian, it is only a simulation, a kind of totalitarian-land.” “Sell-ebration: Living Inside the Book of Disney,” Forum, Summer 1997, p. 14. Michael Sorkin, noted critic and architect, writes: “Like Disneyland—a ‘city’ based purely on the value of entertainment—New Urbanism asks us to believe that a shell of a city really is a city, that appearances are enough. But cities are for real; democratic culture cannot flourish in a theme park.” “Acting Urban: Can New Urbanism Learn from Modernism’s Mistakes?” Metropolis 18, 1 (August/September 1998), pp. 37–39.
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