The New York Times reviewed a new book about how WDW was conceived as well as how the plan to develop it was executed. In the book you'll learn about the unique arrangement Disney has with regard to governing itself in Florida. I think it's a must-have book for anyone interested in the historical roots of WDW. It really is a great reference book IMHO. The article has been copied and pasted below, since the subscription-based article cannot be linked.
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In the summer of 1965, central Florida was buzzing with rumors about mystery land buyers who were snatching up thousands of acres of old citrus groves. A local television station, swept up in the excitement, issued a bulletin with a scoop: the station had received a telegram from Detroit confirming the Ford Motor Company as the buyer. Pity the reporter bamboozled by that hoax a second telegram arrived later saying Ford wanted the land to grow hay for its Mustangs.
The real buyer, of course, was Walt Disney, who had a clandestine team of lawyers and real estate agents plotting each day's acquisitions on a large map inside his movie studios in Burbank, Calif. Mr. Disney's team had ruled out 12 other locations, including St. Louis, Niagara Falls and the Baltimore-Washington area, and assembled 27,258 acres for his dream theme park in Orlando.
Since then, Orlando and the surrounding area have been blessed and burdened by the Walt Disney Company empire. That is the relationship chronicled by Richard E. Foglesong in "Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando" (Yale University Press, $27.95).
Recent books have said much about Mr. Disney and his company, but Mr. Foglesong offers a different slice of life. His book is about those who courted the Mouse, as the Disney company is known by the locals, and which many think has grown increasingly ratlike in its behavior.
The author asserts that the state of Florida erred by giving what he calls overly generous powers to Disney in the 1960's, permitting it to create its own sort of government. The company is free to self-regulate land use and road building, among other basic services. State law even provided that Disney could build its own nuclear power plant or airport.
Of course, there is little wonder that lawmakers waived the magic wand for Disney: everyone wanted a new business in the area to ease its reliance on the boom-and-bust citrus industry and soften the effects of spending cutbacks on its military contractors.
Mr. Foglesong, a professor of politics at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., is a bit academic at times. But one of his book's greatest strengths is its rich detail about how a notoriously secretive company goes to great lengths to preserve its image as the home of the Magic Kingdom. He interviewed scores of elected officials and dug through property and court records.
He tells how Mr. Disney and his successors worked covertly to complete 47 land deals, sometimes courting individuals who held tiny plots worth $350 an acre. Buying such a huge overall tract was Mr. Disney's obsession after his 230- acre California theme park became surrounded by a "neon jungle" of fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops.
Mr. Disney's site selection, called Project X, showed the extremes reached by the company to avoid publicity. Disney emissaries checked into a Tampa hotel under assumed names. The company hired Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, a New York law firm whose lead partner, William Donovan, had directed the wartime Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the C.I.A., to help conceal the research project. Mr. Donovan procured business cards, letterhead and phone numbers in the name of Burke & Burke as a cover. When the Florida operatives needed to talk to Mr. Disney, they called the law firm, which connected them to Mr. Disney on the West Coast. Nobody at Disney was permitted to dial Orlando numbers, so as not to arouse suspicion.
The author also criticizes Martin Andersen, who at the time of Disney's site selection was the publisher of The Orlando Sentinel. The author writes that Mr. Andersen knew something about Disney's land purchases but sought to suppress publicity about them. The paper's editorial page, which Mr. Andersen controlled, published an editorial that said secrecy about Disney was understandable an odd position for someone who is supposed to endorse telling people what's going on.
Few officials kept an accurate accounting of what the Disney company promised at the time, versus what it built. Mr. Disney told the Florida Legislature that he would build Epcot as a community where 20,000 people "would live and work and play." In 1975, when Disney was about to build Epcot, Henry A. Kissinger, the secretary of state, even said that it would enhance world peace more than his shuttle diplomacy did.
Disney described Epcot as a city, in order to obtain power over its planning and zoning. But Epcot was built more like "a permanent world's fair," Mr. Foglesong writes. He again criticizes the media as fawning over Disney in its coverage of Epcot's opening in 1982. The television networks had live coverage of the event.
While Disney was happy with that type of publicity, it showed a different personality if media coverage cast the company in a way it did not like. When The Orlando Sentinel wrote a tough story about Disney in 1985, nearly 20 years after Mr. Andersen had sold the paper and stepped down as publisher, the company removed The Sentinel's news racks from its properties.
The book also chronicles how people feared challenging Disney. Finley Hamilton, for example, owned the local Hilton hotel, near Disney's construction site. Disney officials asked if they could train their future hotel staff at the Hilton. Mr. Hamilton said his hotel lost money during the Disney management training, partly because the chef spent so much time preparing meals for company executives and the hotel maids were used to clean their homes. Mr. Hamilton complained in a letter to Disney but chose not to sue for fear of losing future business, Mr. Foglesong writes.
In the years after Disney's arrival, smaller parks died, and Disney's self-regulated government gave it an advantage over rivals. Disney was the first to open a movie studio park, beating Universal Studios by 13 months, about the time it took that park to obtain land-use permits. Disney suffered no such delay because it effectively ran its own land-use department.
Mr. Foglesong also details how local law enforcement officials are often frustrated at Disney's behavior. One of Walt Disney World's security guards, for example, was involved in a traffic accident in which a 19-year-old man died; his family sued the company. The courts upheld Disney's refusal to release its records of the incident.
The author also writes that little information regarding serious crimes on Disney property, like burglary and rape, is reported to any law enforcement agency.
The book further questions Disney's good-neighbor image in describing its use of a limited pool of bond money in central Florida. In the three counties eligible for the money, one possible use for the bonds would have been to help finance housing, something that some of Disney's own employees lacked. Instead, an application from Disney's government district was granted the money. Disney used the money to expand a sewage treatment plant needed for its expanding hotel empire.
To be sure, Disney put Orlando on the world map. Before it opened, 3.5 million tourists visited central Florida annually. By 1971, that number had climbed to 10 million. The current estimate for 2001 is 55 million. The area now has 100,000 hotel rooms, more than New York City or Los Angeles. The company employs 55,000 people at its parks and hotels. And Walt Disney World generates more sales tax revenue than any other Florida company.
Still, the author wonders if too many people have been "blinded by pixie dust." True to the title, he recommends therapy for the relationship between Disney and Orlando. "It has the potential," he says, "to transform this one-sided economic development marriage."
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In the summer of 1965, central Florida was buzzing with rumors about mystery land buyers who were snatching up thousands of acres of old citrus groves. A local television station, swept up in the excitement, issued a bulletin with a scoop: the station had received a telegram from Detroit confirming the Ford Motor Company as the buyer. Pity the reporter bamboozled by that hoax a second telegram arrived later saying Ford wanted the land to grow hay for its Mustangs.
The real buyer, of course, was Walt Disney, who had a clandestine team of lawyers and real estate agents plotting each day's acquisitions on a large map inside his movie studios in Burbank, Calif. Mr. Disney's team had ruled out 12 other locations, including St. Louis, Niagara Falls and the Baltimore-Washington area, and assembled 27,258 acres for his dream theme park in Orlando.
Since then, Orlando and the surrounding area have been blessed and burdened by the Walt Disney Company empire. That is the relationship chronicled by Richard E. Foglesong in "Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando" (Yale University Press, $27.95).
Recent books have said much about Mr. Disney and his company, but Mr. Foglesong offers a different slice of life. His book is about those who courted the Mouse, as the Disney company is known by the locals, and which many think has grown increasingly ratlike in its behavior.
The author asserts that the state of Florida erred by giving what he calls overly generous powers to Disney in the 1960's, permitting it to create its own sort of government. The company is free to self-regulate land use and road building, among other basic services. State law even provided that Disney could build its own nuclear power plant or airport.
Of course, there is little wonder that lawmakers waived the magic wand for Disney: everyone wanted a new business in the area to ease its reliance on the boom-and-bust citrus industry and soften the effects of spending cutbacks on its military contractors.
Mr. Foglesong, a professor of politics at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., is a bit academic at times. But one of his book's greatest strengths is its rich detail about how a notoriously secretive company goes to great lengths to preserve its image as the home of the Magic Kingdom. He interviewed scores of elected officials and dug through property and court records.
He tells how Mr. Disney and his successors worked covertly to complete 47 land deals, sometimes courting individuals who held tiny plots worth $350 an acre. Buying such a huge overall tract was Mr. Disney's obsession after his 230- acre California theme park became surrounded by a "neon jungle" of fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops.
Mr. Disney's site selection, called Project X, showed the extremes reached by the company to avoid publicity. Disney emissaries checked into a Tampa hotel under assumed names. The company hired Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, a New York law firm whose lead partner, William Donovan, had directed the wartime Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the C.I.A., to help conceal the research project. Mr. Donovan procured business cards, letterhead and phone numbers in the name of Burke & Burke as a cover. When the Florida operatives needed to talk to Mr. Disney, they called the law firm, which connected them to Mr. Disney on the West Coast. Nobody at Disney was permitted to dial Orlando numbers, so as not to arouse suspicion.
The author also criticizes Martin Andersen, who at the time of Disney's site selection was the publisher of The Orlando Sentinel. The author writes that Mr. Andersen knew something about Disney's land purchases but sought to suppress publicity about them. The paper's editorial page, which Mr. Andersen controlled, published an editorial that said secrecy about Disney was understandable an odd position for someone who is supposed to endorse telling people what's going on.
Few officials kept an accurate accounting of what the Disney company promised at the time, versus what it built. Mr. Disney told the Florida Legislature that he would build Epcot as a community where 20,000 people "would live and work and play." In 1975, when Disney was about to build Epcot, Henry A. Kissinger, the secretary of state, even said that it would enhance world peace more than his shuttle diplomacy did.
Disney described Epcot as a city, in order to obtain power over its planning and zoning. But Epcot was built more like "a permanent world's fair," Mr. Foglesong writes. He again criticizes the media as fawning over Disney in its coverage of Epcot's opening in 1982. The television networks had live coverage of the event.
While Disney was happy with that type of publicity, it showed a different personality if media coverage cast the company in a way it did not like. When The Orlando Sentinel wrote a tough story about Disney in 1985, nearly 20 years after Mr. Andersen had sold the paper and stepped down as publisher, the company removed The Sentinel's news racks from its properties.
The book also chronicles how people feared challenging Disney. Finley Hamilton, for example, owned the local Hilton hotel, near Disney's construction site. Disney officials asked if they could train their future hotel staff at the Hilton. Mr. Hamilton said his hotel lost money during the Disney management training, partly because the chef spent so much time preparing meals for company executives and the hotel maids were used to clean their homes. Mr. Hamilton complained in a letter to Disney but chose not to sue for fear of losing future business, Mr. Foglesong writes.
In the years after Disney's arrival, smaller parks died, and Disney's self-regulated government gave it an advantage over rivals. Disney was the first to open a movie studio park, beating Universal Studios by 13 months, about the time it took that park to obtain land-use permits. Disney suffered no such delay because it effectively ran its own land-use department.
Mr. Foglesong also details how local law enforcement officials are often frustrated at Disney's behavior. One of Walt Disney World's security guards, for example, was involved in a traffic accident in which a 19-year-old man died; his family sued the company. The courts upheld Disney's refusal to release its records of the incident.
The author also writes that little information regarding serious crimes on Disney property, like burglary and rape, is reported to any law enforcement agency.
The book further questions Disney's good-neighbor image in describing its use of a limited pool of bond money in central Florida. In the three counties eligible for the money, one possible use for the bonds would have been to help finance housing, something that some of Disney's own employees lacked. Instead, an application from Disney's government district was granted the money. Disney used the money to expand a sewage treatment plant needed for its expanding hotel empire.
To be sure, Disney put Orlando on the world map. Before it opened, 3.5 million tourists visited central Florida annually. By 1971, that number had climbed to 10 million. The current estimate for 2001 is 55 million. The area now has 100,000 hotel rooms, more than New York City or Los Angeles. The company employs 55,000 people at its parks and hotels. And Walt Disney World generates more sales tax revenue than any other Florida company.
Still, the author wonders if too many people have been "blinded by pixie dust." True to the title, he recommends therapy for the relationship between Disney and Orlando. "It has the potential," he says, "to transform this one-sided economic development marriage."
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