Found this interesting excerpt through a Lexis-Nexis perusal. There are tons upon tons of Disney related articles, interviews, and tidbits found in this great database (any newspaper, magazine, television news transcript, or legal case imaginable) from 1979 (sometimes before even) through 2004. If you wish me to post publicly or you wish to view privately any of these articles, feel free to drop me a PM, as I would be more than happy to oblige.
Well, anyway, I found this interesting mini-history of WDW and its relation to Florida, out of the St. Petersburg Times, though it is really an excerpt from a Florida history book published in 1989. It is $2.34 on Amazon.com, if you are that curious. This man is obviously not a Disney fan, though I would not say he is anti-Disney. He appears to be a third party observer curious of how one man completely transformed Central Florida in less than a decade.
Well, here is the article should you wish to read it. It is actually a shortened version, so you might consider buying the book for the whole story.
Well, anyway, I found this interesting mini-history of WDW and its relation to Florida, out of the St. Petersburg Times, though it is really an excerpt from a Florida history book published in 1989. It is $2.34 on Amazon.com, if you are that curious. This man is obviously not a Disney fan, though I would not say he is anti-Disney. He appears to be a third party observer curious of how one man completely transformed Central Florida in less than a decade.
Well, here is the article should you wish to read it. It is actually a shortened version, so you might consider buying the book for the whole story.
Times Publishing Company
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
October 22, 1989, Sunday, City Edition
PERSPECTIVE; Pg. 1D
TOMORROWLAND TODAY
Disney's fantasies take a heavy toll on Florida's reality
MARK DERR
-Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida (William Morrow & Co. $ 24.95) is a newly published social and environmental history of Florida. In the book's final chapter, "Tomorrowland, Today," author Mark Derr details Disney World's impact on the state. The following is a shortened version of that chapter.-
Walt Disney World redefines tourism and development patterns in Florida. For many people the future is now in a paradise lost. Does redemption follow the fall?
A 900-room Victorian-style hotel, called the Grand Floridian Beach Resort, occupies 40 acres fronting the Seven Seas Lagoon between the Magic Kingdom and Polynesian Village. Coconut and canary palms wave at the breeze from the pristine white sand lining the canal. The place is not the South Pacific or even South Florida, and there's no ocean within miles of the beach. This Grand Floridian Beach Resort is in Central Florida, specifically the Reedy Creek Improvement District, especial construct bridging parts of Osceola and Orange counties, the legislative umbrella for Walt Disney World, the vacation destination of choice for 25-million travelers a year from around the globe. Like the Standard Oil can and Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse has achieved total market penetration. When Mickey wiggles his ears, the world squeaks.
The Disney "official guide" tells its readers that the Grand Floridian possesses all the opulence of "yesteryear" and adds to it the conveniences of the 21st century - air conditioning and monorail service. They're available now, which means that visitors to Disney World are running 12 years ahead of schedule ...The architecture expresses a "strong" Key West influence "but with a delicate touch."
Disney World is that way -a scrubbed, sterilized, denatured, sexless fantasyland built on idealized notions of a romanticized past. History serves the illusion or doesn't exist.
On the Caribbean cruise, the pirates - Audio-Animatronics that do the same thing for everyone in the same way - sing about bottles of rum, rape, and pillage, while tippling from dry bottles and chasing buxom lasses round and round the sleeping quarters of houses in a burning town. There are flames but no fire; mayhem but no blood and guts; rapine but no touching, and certainly not a hint of penetration.
A riverboat, stern wheel churning, rides a rail- like every other Disney World conveyance - in a man-made river that is the Mississippi or Missouri of the mind running around an artificial island inhabited by Audio-Animatronic Indians, station masters, and cavalry charging to rescue helpless white settlers from those noble savages. The Swiss Family Robinson lives in a super-realistic faketree. Gold rush trains run amok through Thunder Mountain at controlled breakneck speed while their aerodynamic cousins hurtle through the spirals of Space Mountain.
The attractions of Disney World, in short, offer little of Florida, and no one seems to care. But by establishing this 27,400-acre fantasyland in Orange and Osceola counties, Walt Disney did more to redirect the development of Florida than any individual since Henry Flagler. And he did more for the state's tourist industry than Carl Fisher, Flagler, Henry Plant, and all the other promoters combined. Thats what Disney did with his proletarian rat, turning him into the sexless Mickey Mouse, and what Disney's heirs and successors in the Disney empire did to Disney himself, elevating him to kindly sainthood while ignoring his most grandiose and redeeming visions.
Through dummy corporations and trusted lawyers and bankers, Walt Disney assembled his kingdom of swamp, flatwoods, lakes and creeks in1965, buying it for $ 5-million, an average of $ 180 an acre. Only a handful of people - including the publisher of the Orlando Sentinel, who agreed to embargo the news - knew what Disney was doing, and Disney kept it that way by threatening to scrub the entire deal if word leaked out. He had already rejected St. Louis after a well-publicized flirtation and falling out triggered by Augustus Busch, who said a man wanting to build a theme park that didn't sell beer and booze was loco.
Disney didn't want a replay in Central Florida of that aborted courtship or of the run-up in land prices that would surely follow news of his intent. His secrecy, threats of early Mouse withdrawal, and fronts buying small parcels worked well - too well for those who lust for a larger slice of the riches his domain has wrought.
Orange County hadn't scored such a major economic coup since 1957when defense contractor Martin Marietta moved to town with a work force of 10,000, many of them from its original plant in Baltimore.
Landowners were eager to ride a new boom because often their chief and only assets were their acres. (After the news of Disney World broke, land adjacent to it sold for $ 80,000 an acre.) But Disney planned more than just an amusement park, and to guarantee absolute control over his domain, he ordered his attorneys to draft legislation establishing the Reedy Creek Improvement District (named for the creek running through the property), which the Legislature passed with barely a whimper of dissent in 1967.
The district effectively creates a company fiefdom, giving the board of supervisors - comprising only representatives elected from among landholders in the district, by the formula one vote to each acre- power to drain, ditch, run power lines, create a fire department, provide a security force, assess taxes, develop and impose a master plan and building codes, construct roads and towns and theme parks.
Reedy Creek officials say the legislation was necessary because Orange and Osceola county officials had no way to judge the structural integrity and safety of oddities like fiberglass mountains and therefore Disney required authority to regulate itself according to standards it set.
Equally important was Walt Disney's desire to create a buffer zone shielding his theme parks from the ticky-tacky that surrounded Disneyland in Orange County, Calif. Through Reedy Creek, the Disney engineers and imagineers, as they are known, could create the world they dreamed, and the resort's safety record points to the skill with which they built. On the other hand, opponents like to argue, Disney has virtual police-state powers in Reedy Creek, which complaint, although not fully accurate, carries a ring of truth because Disneyworld is classed as private property and, in most cases, it gets what it desires from the state and county governments.
A vision on the ceiling
Walt Disney died in 1966, two years after taking the New York Worlds Fair by storm with his robotic Animatronics, five years before his Florida dream opened. Fortunately for the Mouseketeers, he completed the master plan for his Central Florida kingdom, although on his deathbed. Adm. Joseph W. Fowler, who directed construction of Disneyland and later Disney World, told the Orlando Sentinel of a meeting with the dying showman: "Early in the visit, Walt pointed up to the ceiling and verbally started sketching how the park should be laid out, pointing this way and that way, improvising all the time. As ill as he was, he acted like a boy just let out of school. Finally, the last draft of what is now Disney World was sketched out, figuratively, on that ceiling. And the next day he died. There were many times later, when I was walking the property, that I felt him looking over my shoulder."
The company spent $ 400-million - $ 275-million more than originally estimated - in creating the Magic Kingdom and the rest of Disney World.
It formed its own construction company to complete the work after the initial contractor swore he would never meet his 1971 deadline. Disney did, by working crews seven days a week and paying top dollar.
Under the direction of a retired major general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the chief engineer for Robert Moses on the 1964 New York World's Fair, and former governor of the Panama Canal Zone, William Everett "Joe" Potter, Disney's crews constructed 26.1 miles of canals, 19.3 miles of levees, and 27 flood control structures to prepare the land for the Magic Kingdom and its assorted hotels, campgrounds, monorail, trains, rides, towns, restaurants, and parking lots. Unlike other artificial waterways in Florida, the ones in Reedy Creek looped and curved enough to appear natural. Bay Lake, the central body of water in the World, looks real too, and it is, in a way: Tannin from cypress trees gave the water the brown tea color common to Florida fresh water and evocative to many urbanites of pollution, so the engineers drained the lake, cleaned out the muck, created a sand bottom, and refilled the basin, following a procedure that may be the only way to restore atrophied lakes like Apopka.
The cypress vanished as the Magic Kingdom, Discovery Land, and the Polynesian Village rose.
While doing the resulting, the crews managed to create a model water system - installing extensive recirculation systems for the well water used to fill the ponds and streams from which customers view the mysteries of the kingdom; establishing state-of-the-art water treatment facilities, which include use of 100 acres of wetlands to filter wastewater; and setting aside 7,500 acres for conservation, which serve as a buffer zone between Walt Disney World and the rest of Central Florida.
Disney in recent years has run afoul of its own astonishing growth and corporate negligence. Early in 1988, Walt Disney World was cited for improper storage of hazardous material in the nether reaches of the Magic Kingdom. Over the past few years, the expansion of attractions and guest facilities has resulted in the dumping of more sewage into the artificial wetlands than they could handle, and Disney World has become another large industrial polluter of the water supply of Osceola and Orange counties. Disney and conservationists have a stake in making these artificial swamps and bogs, which many experts have promoted as a safe and ecological solution to disposal of human waste, function properly. Orange County has already created an elaborate wetland, stocked with native plants and named, with no apparent irony, Wilderness Park, to complete the treatment of wastewater before releasing it to the St. Johns River; and other areas watch its progress.
Nothing is left to chance
Disney World is a study in contradiction. The facades, costumes, scene design, the Audio-Animatronics, the rides and attractions themselves, are remarkable for their exquisite detail: The fake trees look real, the castle appears made of stone not fiberglass and steel, and although no one will confuse the androids with humans, their appearance from afar is at least disconcertingly real. Some of the monorail cars looked, at the end of February 1988, a little worse for wear (by Disney standards; by those of public transit, the cars were immaculate) but new ones were on order and the system works. Service was prompt and courteous; attendants and stanchions managed a crowd with ease. Disney World is the shining example of a service industry - the leader in the new world economy, according to some experts.
Ordinary workers find it a future to dread - low pay for work that is mind-numbing at its most stimulating moments. Nothing is left to chance: The ushers, usherettes, and guides on the river craft that travel at a set speed with preprogrammed pauses, bumps and stops, utter the same phrases in the same tones on every cruise.
Even the mistakes turned to magic in the world according to Disney. On an island in Bay Lake, Disney's planners created a semitropical jungle and bird sanctuary, a place of bamboo and palms, of plants from Central and South America, India, China, and the Canary Islands. Parrots, macaws, cockatoos, trumpeter swans, brown pelicans, flamingos and a pair of southern bald eagles were imported or settled on their own, finding a haven in the midst of the tourists. As a sort of ironic commentary on the value of Audio-Animatronics, the living birds and plants took over what was initially built as an attraction called Treasure Island, to be filled with mechanical creatures. (In September, Disney employees where charged with beating vultures to death with sticks on Discovery Island, illegally taking eggs and nests of egrets and ibises, and trying to capture wild hawks.) Walt Disney World opened with a bit of a whimper in October 1971, when Central Florida was still calm and quiet, its landowners, businessmen and bankers eager for growth but uncertain of its extent.
Many of them believed Disney officials overly optimistic in their projections: They should have listened more closely. From its slow start, attendance gathered momentum and accelerated, drawing first 8-, then 10-, 12-, 20-, 25-million visitors a year, 250-million since it opened - and Central Florida scrambled to cash in, building motels and hotels, fast-food outlets, gas stations, subdivisions, strip shopping centers and huge malls, roads and more roads. Californias Disneyland, by comparison, draws less than one-half the total of its Florida counterpart.
Before the place opened, company officials sent monitors to count traffic on Interstate-4, only to find them asleep after a few hours of watching empty highway. Now the road is never still, and on Dec. 23, 1986, it was impossible for travelers between New York and Winter Park to find a motel room out of tens of thousands along Interstate 95 between Richmond, Va., and Savannah, Ga., unless they had reservations.
The bulk of the cars were heading for Disney World and other nearby theme parks, like Sea World; on Dec. 29, Disney set its single-day attendance record, 148,500, waiting in line.
Walt Disney World draws nearly 60 percent of the 44-million tourists who dump more than $ 20-billion into the Florida economy each year, compared with the $ 300-million that one-tenth that number of tourists spent 50 years ago. The 22-million-plus people who walked through the gates of Disney World in 1986 equaled the number who visited the entire state of Florida in 1972.Almost alone, Disney created a summer tourist season in Florida, drawing most of its visitors during those warm and rainy months. Although winter remains the tourist season in many coastal communities - especially wealthy towns like Palm Beach, where many hotels and homes close for the summer - the steady flow of travelers throughout the year means that in gross annual numbers the state's population is not 12-million but 56-million.
Tourists, like residents, consume food, water and energy, generate garbage, and use the public parks and beaches, the roads and medical facilities, the jails, exempting the schools and most social services.
The visitors' environmental impact is profound and surprisingly unexamined.
Development runs amok
In 1987, Orange County asserted that the Disney Corp. should help pay for roads, schools and other infrastructure improvements because it was responsible for bringing so many people into Central Florida. Osceola County soon made a similar argument. Disney officials countered that they would discuss the matter if the county commissions produced data showing who was using how much of what, but those figures didn't exist. As the situation stood in the first half of 1988, county officials and business leaders were concerned that expansion at Walt Disney World, which included the Grand Floridian and additional hotels, a convention center, a movie studio tour, and new attractions like Typhoon Lagoon, which offers the wonders of the sea inland, would draw more business directly into the park from the airport and highways, thereby cutting revenues for their non-Disney enterprises. A Japanese company's proposal to build a high-speed railway from the Orlando International Airport to Disney World heightened their fear that tourists would make no interim stops.
Central Florida's counties - Orange, Osceola, and Seminole - failed to control and regulate development. They succumbed to the greed of landowners and developers, suspending when beneficial those regulations on the books, making a mockery of their master plans as soon as they adopted them. As a result, Central Florida has repeated in the last two decades the patterns of unrestrained construction that tore up Dade County through the years following World War II and ravage Broward and Palm Beach counties now. Many of the new businesses and attractions, as well as the people they employ directly and indirectly, came to Central Florida because of Disney World's success, but Disney did not encourage or allow them to build wherever and however they wanted - those were county decisions.
Paradox defines Florida. During the past 20 years, while state politicians have enacted legislation they claimed would protect the environment and control growth, the state has experienced the most dramatic population increase in its history and acceleration of a precipitous decline in the quality of its water and the viability of its land. People of sufficient financial resources can buy a house or condominium on the Atlantic, the Gulf, an interior lake or river, but the vast majority of people settle for a tract home and weekend trips to overcrowded parks - hoping they can get in before the gates close.
Most of the lakes in Central Florida, which hosts a majority of the nearly 8,000 in the state, lack public access in the form of beaches or boat ramps - they are private preserves. The St. Johns River on the weekends is a clogged speedway for powerboats, while reverting on weekdays to a slow if muddy river. Golf courses outnumber parks, bike paths exist, if at all, as afterthoughts.
Depending on one's perspective, Florida is a retirement haven with golf course, clubhouse, swimming pools and assorted strange fruit trees in the yard or a strip of tract homes waiting for the next big hurricane that 10-million of the people in the state have never seen.
Immigrants from strife-torn, impoverished Caribbean and Latin American nations come for refuge and economic opportunity, as do young Anglos from northern states and a few blacks, although their migration is primarily northward. There are as many reasons for moving to Florida as there are people, and the problem becomes less one of controlling the influx than of assuring that the state's prime resources are cared for and respected - for a host of different goals. That can come about only if those officials and voters shaping the state's destiny approach their responsibilities with a feel for the land and water that transcends desire for quick profit. Once used up and despoiled, it is a paradise no more.
