People love Walt Disney World.
So much so that it’s estimated over 50 million people visit the resort every year.
Some people love it so much that they wish they could live there.
In the 1990's Disney granted that wish when they created the town of Celebration Florida.
Now it’s impossible to talk about Celebration Florida without first talking about EPCOT.
No, not that Epcot.
This EPCOT.
You see when Walt Disney first dreamed up the plans for Disney World, he wasn’t focused
on the east coast theme park that would eventually become The Magic Kingdom.
He was focused on EPCOT.
The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was originally planned to be an actual city
of the future that would house 20,000 rotating residents.
He hoped it would serve as a cutting edge example for other cities around the world
to emulate.
More importantly, it was meant to embrace these futuristic technologies while still
using a careful design to foster a sense of community.
Walt’s goal was to take the best of what the past offered, the best of what the future
offered, and merge them together.
After all, this was the late 1960’s, when cities across the country were starting to
gain especially sketchy reputations.
Unfortunately Walt’s dream of EPCOT died with him, and while the Epcot we would get
in 1982 would contain some of the themes and concepts of his futuristic city, it would
ultimately still just be a theme park.
However it would only be a few years before the idea would resurface in another form.
In 1984 Michael Eisner and Frank Wells would join the Disney company as it’s new CEO
and COO, and one of their first courses of action when it came to Walt Disney World was
to sit down, look at the entire property, and come up with a long-term plan to put it to use.
That plan included setting aside space for up to three new theme parks, up to 60,000
new hotel rooms, and a permanent 9,000 acre nature and wildlife preserve.
But even with all of that space set aside, there was still unused land that they owned
south of US 192.
So the question became: “What should we do with that land?”
Selling it was an option, but the main drawback there was that Disney would ultimately have
no control over what the new owners would do with it.
Tacky hotels.
Competing amusements.
It was the very reason Walt had secretly purchased so much land in Florida to begin with.
They could also just do… well, nothing.
They could wait and see if it had a use later on down the line.
However due to it being undeveloped pasture, the fear Disney had was that if they went
too long without using it, the state might be able to use that to build a case to take
the land via condemnation through eminent domain.
So Eisner quickly came to the conclusion that they’d be better off using the land, rather
than risk losing it.
One idea from the Disney Development Company’s Peter Rummell was developing the land into housing.
But of course this was Disney.
While any other company might have just settled on a regular old housing development, they
wanted to go one step further.
And while Disney wasn’t otherwise in the housing industry, they eventually realized
that this could be their moment to make good on Walt’s vision of an idealized community.
"Every lesson ever learned from any master planned community in the country or throughout the world
was studied in the design and the development of this particular community."
"We've dealt with cars in a positive way. We've dealt with garbage in a positive way, if you can say that.
We've dealt with the way you live, the way you can live in a mixed use environment with stores, apartments,
and houses and banks and post office all together in a walk-able way. I think we're showing that
you can do a new town and be respectful of the people that live there."
They wanted to build a picturesque American town.
It would contain all of the details and design that Disney was known for in the parks, but
it would be somewhere people could actually live.
It would embrace a concept known as neotraditionalism, otherwise known as new urbanism.
It was a movement that argued that the rise in suburbs after World War II actually did
more to harm our sense of community than it did to help.
Lots of space and big lawns were nice, but it meant neighbors living further apart from one another.
Widespread layouts weren’t a problem with the explosion of automobile use, but it meant
less personal connection with the neighborhood since you’d always just drive from A to B.
Neotraditionalism was the idea of going back to before those times, and scaling everything down.
Town centers within walking distance so that going shopping or out to eat didn’t mean driving anywhere.
Smaller plots of land with an emphasis on the front yard rather than the backyard so
that neighbors were more inclined to socialize with one another.
The town would ultimately get put on hold throughout the late 1980's as the Disney Development
Company focused on other projects such as Disney-MGM Studios, Pleasure Island, and Euro
Disney over in France, but in 1990 work would resume.
Some potential names for the town included Oak Tree and Green Meadows.
During a visit by Eisner and his wife, Jane, the two were showed plans for a shopping center
that was tentatively named Celebration Gardens.
The two thought the name would work even better for the town, so it was the name Disney went with.
Later on it would be further simplified to just ‘Celebration’.
In 1991 the project was announced to the public.
Celebration was planned to ultimately house 20,000 residents across 4,400 acres.
It would have a cozy town center complete with shopping, dining, and a movie theater.
It’s original main selling point was going to be an continued education institute for
adults that would cover all sorts of subjects and be called The Disney Institute.
Eventually that idea would spin off into its own standalone project, so instead the town
would substitute it with a cutting edge K-12 school that would embrace new and experimental
forms of education.
The houses themselves, starting at $125,000, would vary between six different pre-suburban
architectural styles, including colonial revival, classical, french country, coastal, Mediterranean,
and Victorian.
Disney’s design guidelines were that no house could share the style of either of its
neighboring houses, and with the exception of white, no two houses next to each other
could share the same color either.
The lots were built with an emphasis on front yards and the garages were set in the back
along a back alley so that cars wouldn’t be parked out on the street and so that garbage
collection would occur away from the public eye.
In short, while homeowners had a choice from a range of options, Disney maintained a sense
of overall control when it came to how Celebration would look from the outside, which is no real
surprise considering how much control they exercise with the detail in their parks.
Now while Disney focused on making the town look like the small quaint communities of
yesteryear, they wanted the homes themselves to feature some new technology.
All of the houses in the town would be wired with a fiber optic connection and Disney even
toyed around with the idea of a computerized media system that would allow residents to
select, pay for, and watch movies without having to leave the house and go to a video store.
But before the company could start building any part of this perfect Walt Disney World
town they first had to do one thing: remove it from Walt Disney World.
"EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative
centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed,
but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems."
Back when the resort was first created, legislation was passed that grouped Disney’s land into
their own governing jurisdiction called the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
It essentially gave Disney the freedom to create and manage their own emergency services
and utilities, and more importantly to set their own building codes.
This allowed them to build out the resort as they saw fit without having to constantly
turn to the county for permission, and it was a crucial element to Walt’s dream of EPCOT.
The board that controlled Reedy Creek was made up of individuals that Disney allowed
to live on their property who, in turn, voted with Disney.
This would have worked with EPCOT because the original plans called for all the residents
to rent their homes and apartments from Disney rather than own them.
Without owning land in the district, they’d have no voting powers with the board.
However if Celebration came along and Disney found themselves sharing the district with
20,000 new permanent residents, they’d suddenly risk losing control over Reedy Creek and potentially
the freedoms that came with it.
So in December of 1993 Disney would work with the county to de-annex the land that Celebration
would sit within, so that it would fall back to being unincorporated Osceola County land
instead of Reedy Creek land.
By 1994 interest in the town was plentiful.
Despite all of the aesthetic restrictions that came with buying a home, and all of the
usual homeowners association rules and fees, and even the fact that prices were non-negotiable,
which was unusual with buying a house.
there was still more than enough people looking to move into Disney's backyard.
So much so, that rather than opening up sales of the homes the way most developments would,
Disney held a lottery to select the buyers for the first 350 homes and the tenants of
the first 120 apartments.
The visitor center that was built to promote and pitch the community would start to see
as many as 15,000 people a month.
It would still be a year until the first residents would be able to move in, and there
wasn’t so much as a sample house to show potential buyers what they were getting, but it didn’t matter.
Disney carried with it a name and a legacy that people were willing to trust, even blindly.
By July 18th of 1996, the very first residents would be ready to move into Celebration, Florida.
By that point 99% of the 350 homes were sold, every single apartment was occupied, with
a waiting list that was growing, and 50% of the following 95 homes that would make up
the next part of the town were already sold as well.
Everything was going great.
The town was the picturesque slice of Americana it promised to be.
Neighbors got to know each other, Disney would hold events for the community, and it all
happened a stone’s throw away from the most magical place on earth.
However that perfect veneer wasn’t going to last for long.
Join me next week as I explore the troubles that began to arise in Celebration, Florida,
the criticisms that plagued it, both from within and outside the community, and the
eventual fate of the town which would include Disney stepping away and selling it off.