   The New Yorker, July 22, 1996, pp.36-39.


   TOMORROWLAND. Living in a community planned by Disney has
   to be a nightmare, doesn't it?

   By Witold Rybcznski


   Famous firsts are recorded by sports statisticians,
   academic journals, and the Guinness Book. Everyday firsts
   are not. I've never heard of a statue to the suburbanite
   who sprinted through the first mall, or to the person who
   punched into the first ATM. I have these thoughts while I'm
   standing in front of 931 Jasmine Street. It is unlikely
   that there will ever be a commemorative plaque here, but
   perhaps there should be. The building itself, while
   attractive, is unremarkable. It is a one-story house of a
   type that is not uncommon in the South. The hipped roof
   extends over a deep front veranda. The walls are clapboard;
   the double-hung windows are shuttered. There is a U-Haul
   van in the driveway. I'm standing on the sidewalk watching
   Larry Haber move into his new home. He is a good sport and
   pauses so that I can take a photograph. Larry and his wife,
   Terri, and their two young children are the first residents
   of an unusual town: a town that is being built by an
   organization whose chief business is storytelling and
   make-believe -- the Walt Disney Company.

   It was Walt himself who had the idea of building a town.
   Exactly thirty years ago, he announced that he was going to
   create a showcase for advanced technology -- a kind of
   urban laboratory. It would be called EPCOT, for
   Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it would
   be an actual community. But Disney died before he could
   realize his vision of a city of the future, and his
   successors were unable to reconcile his coercive brand of
   social engineering with the demands of American home
   buyers. When EPCOT finally opened, in 1982, it did feature
   futuristic technology, but there were no residents. It was
   a theme park.

   EPCOT is situated in Walt Disney World, on the enormous
   tract of land -- twenty-eight thousand acres -- that Disney
   owns outside Orlando, in central Florida. There are two
   other theme parks there -- the Magic Kingdom and the
   Disney-MGM Studios -- and a fourth, Disney's Animal
   Kingdom, is slated to open in 1998. Even so, about a third
   of the land remained unused. The idea of building a
   residential community had lingered on in the Disney
   Company's corporate memory, and when a master plan was
   being prepared under the aegis of the current C.E.O.,
   Michael Eisner, it was determined that it was finally time
   to implement Walt's vision. There were also practical
   considerations: highway access to the theme parks and
   various wetlands restrictions made residential use
   attractive. "At that point, we could have gone in any
   direction," says Disney's Tom Lewis, who oversaw planning
   during the first five years of the project. "It could have
   been a second-home community or a resort or a retirement
   village. Instead, we decided that it would be a place where
   families would have their primary residences. We wanted it
   to be a real town."

   The notion that Disney World could be a setting for real
   life will strike most people as improbable. Yet the town
   promises not only to be real but to be a model for others
   to follow. Celebration, as it is called, is not a theme
   park. It is an unincorporated town under the rule of
   Osceola County. There will be a school, a health campus,
   and an office park. Planned recreational facilities include
   a golf course, a lake, and miles of walking trails and bike
   paths. The town center will have restaurants, shops,
   offices, a supermarket, a bank, a small inn, and a cinema.
   When Celebration is completed, in ten or fifteen years, it
   could have as many as twenty thousand inhabitants. It is
   the most comprehensively planned new town since Columbia,
   Maryland, and Reston, Virginia, were built, in the
   mid-sixties.

   Celebration's temporary preview center opened last August.
   Although no houses -- not even a model home -- had actually
   been built, twenty thousand people visited the site during
   the next two months. So many of them expressed an interest
   in buying homes there that it was decided that the only
   fair way to sell lots was to draw names out of a hat.
   (Entrants were not screened, and Disney employees were not
   given preference.) About twelve hundred prospective
   residents put down refundable deposits of up to a thousand
   dollars for the chance to become one of three hundred and
   fifty-one home buyers or a hundred and twenty apartment
   renters in Celebration's first phase. Lots were drawn that
   November. "Things have moved very quickly," I was told by
   Don Killoren, who is the general manager of the Celebration
   Company, a Disney subsidiary. "But I'm not really
   surprised. We did a lot of research. We knew the type of
   houses that people wanted."

   Killoren is being slightly disingenuous. Undoubtedly, one
   reason people wanted the houses was that they were Disney
   houses. (A 1990 international study identified the five
   brand names that were most widely recognized and most
   highly esteemed around the world. They were Coca-Cola,
   Sony, Mercedes-Benz, Kodak, and Disney.) The house that the
   Habers are moving into was built by David Weekley Homes, of
   Houston -- one of two home builders chosen by Disney after
   an exhaustive national selection process. House prices
   range from about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars for
   a town house to more than three hundred thousand dollars
   for the largest detached house. A rigorous selection
   process was also used to arrive at eight local builders who
   are building more expensive, one-of-a-kind houses, which
   constitute a quarter of the total in the first phase.
   Prices for these custom-built houses start at around four
   hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

   You would look in vain for manifestations of any of the
   current vogues in high-fashion architecture. There is no
   free-form deconstructivism here, no corrugated-metal high
   tech. Instead, there are gable roofs with dormers, bay
   windows and porches, balustrades and columns. Like all
   houses built commercially in the United States today, these
   houses favor distinctly traditional styles. The Habers'
   house, on Jasmine Street, is an example of Coastal, which
   is a loose interpretation of the type of house that was
   built in the South Carolina low country. It is a style
   characterized by deep oneor two-story porches, high
   ceilings, full-length windows, and first floors raised off
   the ground. Coastal is one of six -- and only six --
   architectural styles permissible in Celebration; the others
   are Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Mediterranean,
   and French. The six styles are defined in a pattern book,
   which insures that the builders achieve a degree of
   architectural clarity that is missing in most builder
   homes. Unusual, too, is Celebration's approach to parking.
   Alleys running behind the houses give access to garages in
   the rear, and many of these garages have rooms above them.
   Larry Haber has built a suite for his mother-in-law above
   his garage.

   Leaving the Habers' house, I drive down Campus Street,
   which has town houses on one side and the site of the
   future school on the other. The town houses are still under
   construction, but ahead of me is a group of about twenty
   completed buildings: the downtown. Most of them are three
   stories high, fronting narrow streets. There's not a
   pedestrian mall in sight. The buildings seem vaguely
   familiar, like the sort of smalltown architecture that is
   found across America -- or used to be, for this looks, at
   first glance, like a nineteenth-century downtown, and
   actually recalls Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A. The
   buildings line up to the sidewalk, and I can't see any
   parking lots. (I later discover that the lots are
   shoehorned into the center of the blocks, behind the
   buildings.) The sidewalks are shaded by trees; the main
   street -- Market Street -- is lined with palm trees. At the
   base of Market Street is a small lake. The street beside
   the water is called Front Street, as it is in many old
   river towns. The downtown doesn't really feel historical,
   however, for there is no consistency to the architecture.
   There is a plain office block that might be of the late
   eighteen-hundreds, a two-screen cinema -- the only building
   not quite finished -- that looks as if it might turn out to
   be Art Deco, and a bank with colored horizontal
   streamlining stripes that are straight out of the nineteen-
   twenties. There are also buildings -- including the town
   hall, the post office, and a visitor center -- that look
   quite modern.

   Michael Eisner is an architecture buff who has previously
   commissioned such world-famous architects as Arata Isozaki,
   Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, and Aldo Rossi to design
   buildings for Disney. Celebration, too, has a cast of
   celebrated architects: Graves designed the post office,
   Philip Johnson the town hall, Robert Venturi and Denise
   Scott Brown the bank, Cesar Pelli the cinema, and the late
   Charles Moore the visitor center. I dislike the town hall:
   as with so much of Johnson's work, it tries to be
   monumental and manages to be merely bombastic. Most of the
   other signature buildings appear to me to be lacklustre
   rather than inspired; Graves's post office, though, is
   delightful, and Pelli's cinema will be appropriately
   dramatic. But I am most impressed by what architects call
   the "background buildings" -- the ordinary buildings that
   give character to a town. Here they manage to be both
   unpretentious and charming, which is more difficult to
   achieve than it sounds. They are all the work of either
   Robert A. M. Stern or Jaquelin Robertson, of Cooper,
   Robertson & Partners.

   Stern and Robertson are also the planners of the town,
   although the credits for the design of Celebration resemble
   those of a Hollywood screenplay. (With an estimated cost of
   two and a half billion dollars, however, Celebration is
   much more expensive than any movie.) First, in 1987, Disney
   held a design competition. It invited Andres Duany and
   Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, whose concept of traditional
   neighborhood development is a major influence on
   Celebration's residential areas, alongwith Charles
   Gwathmey, of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, and Stern to
   submit plans. Then, instead of choosing a winner, Disney
   asked the architects to work together to develop a
   consensus design. An expanded program, including more
   commercial uses and a new expressway, required a revised
   plan, which was prepared collaboratively by Skidmore,
   Owings & Merrill, and Cooper, Robertson & Partners. And,
   ultimately, Stern and Robertson were commissioned to
   prepare the final master plan, and also to design the
   health campus (Stern), the golf clubhouse (Robertson), and
   all the background buildings downtown.

   The downtown buildings are owned by Disney and are leased
   to retail tenants. But there is no Banana Republic here.
   Instead of major national chains, Disney has chosen only
   local and regional shops and restaurants. The intention is
   to attract the public by creating an experience different
   from that found in a typical shopping mall, Don Killoren
   told me. Though a downtown like Celebration's, with but a
   single landlord, does resemble a shopping mall, there is
   one crucial difference here: this is a commercial area
   where people will also live. All hundred and twenty
   apartments are in the downtown area, many of them above
   shops or restaurants. As I walk around, I see construction
   workers putting finishing touches on four apartment
   buildings; the tenants are due to start moving in this
   month. When the bank, the post office, and the town hall
   open to the public, which will be in August (the formal
   opening of the downtown is scheduled for November), the
   mixture of tourists, shoppers, residents, and office
   workers should provide precisely the sort of daylong
   activity that is the hallmark of a successful downtown.

   A lively downtown, apartments above shops, front porches,
   houses close to the street, and out-of-sight garages all
   add up to an old-fashioned sort of place. But there is more
   to Celebration than nostalgia and tradition. What families
   like the Habers really want -- what most Americans really
   want -- has less to do with architecture and urban design
   than with good schools, health care, safe neighborhoods,
   and a sense of community. "We understand that community is
   not something that we can engineer," I was assured by Todd
   Mansfield, who is an executive vice-president of Disney
   Imagineering, the division that oversees the design and
   construction of all the company's enterprises. "But we
   think that it's something we can foster." Despite Disney's
   reputation for obsessively leaving nothing to chance,
   fostering has not meant controlling. The Celebration school
   (kindergarten through twelfth grade) will be owned and
   operated not by Disney but by the Osceola County School
   District. The school will open next year and will
   eventually serve about fourteen hundred students -- from
   the surrounding county as well as from the town. What is
   unusual about the school, apart from pedagogical
   innovations, is that it's in the center of the town.
   Children will be able to walk and bike to class. This fall
   will see the opening of the Teaching Academy, a
   teacher-training facility that is owned by Disney, run by
   Disney and Stetson University, and housed in a handsome
   building designed by William Rawn, who is also the
   architect of the school.

   The health campus, now under construction on the outskirts
   of town, is a large facility belonging to Florida Hospital
   and including outpatient surgery, advanced diagnostics,
   primary-care physicians, and a fitness center. A
   fibre-optic network will eventually link both the school
   and the health facility to individual homes. This is just
   the sort of technological innovation that Walt Disney
   imagined would be the cornerstone of life in the future.
   But Michael Eisner's Celebration is actually the opposite
   of Walt Disney's urban vision. Walt Disney imagined a world
   in which problems would be solved by science and
   technology. Celebration puts technology in the background
   and concentrates on putting in place the less tangible
   civic infrastructure that is a prerequisite for community.
   Home buyers agree to be governed by their own homeowners'
   association and by a set of restrictive deed covenants
   whose purpose is to strike a balance between individual
   freedom and communal responsibility. You can park your cars
   in front of your house, for example, but no more than two
   cars. You can sublet your house -- or your garage apartment
   -- but you can't lease individual rooms. You can hold a
   garage sale, but only once a year. Writers and artists can
   work out of their homes, but not dentists -- unless they
   live in the "home business district," where professional
   offices are allowed. A real sense of community can't
   develop in a vacuum, however, and Disney seems to have gone
   out of its way to insure that Celebration will not become
   a hermetic place. It is neither walled nor gated, unlike
   many recent master-planned communities. None of the streets
   are private. Policing is by the county sheriff's office,
   not by hired security guards (although the homeowners'
   association may hire additional security if it chooses to).
   The golf course, designed by the Robert Trent Joneses --
   father and son -- is a public daily-fee facility, not a
   private club.

   Yet, in spite of these efforts to make Celebration open to
   the outside world, much of the public assumes -- or, at
   least, hopes -- that a Disney town will be a perfect town.
   "It's one of my fears," says Todd Mansfield, who is himself
   going to build a house in Celebration. "We have people who
   have purchased houses who think they're moving to Utopia.
   We keep having to remind them that we can't provide
   safeguards for all the ills of society. We will have
   everything that happens in any community." He's right. I'm
   confident that despite the advanced Honeywell security
   systems there will be break-ins. Despite the fibre-optic
   networks, there will be children with learning problems.
   Despite the state-of-theart medical technology, there will
   be sickness. And, despite the sociable appearance of the
   front porches, there will be neighborly disputes. If there
   weren't, Celebration would not be the real place that
   Disney says it will become.

   Charles E. Fraser has thought a great deal about creating
   real places. He is the creator of Sea Pines Plantation, on
   Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina; between 1956 and
   1982, he oversaw the building of about thirty-four hundred
   homes there. Fraser pioneered the post-Second World War
   application of many of the concepts such as deed covenants,
   architectural-review boards, and neighborhood planning
   which are today standard practice in master-planned
   communities. I ask him how a sense of community was created
   at Sea Pines. "My wife and I gave a party every Saturday
   night for the first ten years," Fraser says. "We invited
   all the new residents and second-home owners who were on
   vacation. I was only twenty-seven and not very
   knowledgeable, but I knew it was important to introduce
   people to each other." It was a good idea: by the time
   there were two thousand residents, Sea Pines had as many as
   two hundred clubs and social groups. Modern mobility means
   that the process of neighborhood creation, which previously
   took decades, must be "jump-started." Fraser adds, "I've
   come to the conclusion that relatively small groups -- two
   hundred or three hundred families -- that share a common
   responsibility such as a swimming pool or a park are the
   answer." At Celebration, where he has been a consultant for
   the past seven years, innovative covenants have been
   written to permit the creation of precisely such small
   sub-neighborhoods.

   According to census projections, the population of the
   United States will increase by more than twenty-six million
   people during this decade. Most of this growth, Fraser
   points out, is now occurring randomly in metropolitan areas
   that are too large to have a single focus, like the old
   center-city downtown. What is needed, he suggests, is
   smaller planned communities at the edges of urban areas,
   which can offer people a sense of belonging. "Celebration
   is a model of such a smaller-size town," he says. "It can
   offer the range of neighborhood services and amenities --
   schools, churches, shops -- that used to be the benefits of
   small-town living."

   After leaving Celebration, I drive to Winter Park, which is
   just the sort of small town that Fraser has in mind. Winter
   Park, with a population of about twenty-five thousand, is
   not far from greater Orlando. It started life in the
   eighteen-eighties, as a master-planned community. The main
   commercial street, Park Avenue, was laid out beside a
   twelve-acre strip of green, named -- what else? -- Central
   Park. The focus of the park was a railroad depot, which was
   the chief place of arrival for winter visitors. The
   surrounding residential neighborhoods have comfortably
   shaded curved streets and a variety of houses. Park Avenue
   is lined with low buildings containing shops and
   restaurants with offices and apartments above. I'm sitting
   in a bar that opens out onto the sidewalk. It's five
   o'clock, and people are stopping by for a drink before
   going home. The bar is noisy, bustling, and convivial.
   People appear to know one another. It isn't hard to imagine
   that this is what Celebration will be like. More than
   thirty years ago, the developer James Rouse (who went on to
   build the town of Columbia, Maryland) called Disneyland
   "the outstanding piece of urban design in the United
   States." Disneyland radically transformed the amusement
   park. Celebration, with its curious mixture of old-
   fashioned values and new-fangled organization, is a far cry
   from Walt Disney's vision of the future. Still, it will
   change the way we think about planning new communities,
   which is, after all, what Uncle Walt had in mind in the
   first place.

   [Four thumbnail watercolors] Downtown Celebration: Philip
   Johnson's town hall; Jacquelin Robertson's apartments (two
   views)' Robert Stern's shops and restaurant.

   [End]

   For 4 watercolors see:

      http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/celeb4.jpg






