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Celebration Resources Page
A marching band struts down the spotless street as children clap and parents smile. It's another perfect day on Main Street USA in Disney World's Magic Kingdom.
Disney has made billions tapping into this market of make-believe and happy endings. Now the huge entertainment company, infamous for the total control it maintains over its projects, is venturing into riskier territory: reality.
Five miles south of the Magic Kingdom, the Walt Disney Co. is building its own town, Celebration. When complete, it will have a downtown, public school, post office, town hall, golf course, health center and 20,000 residents.
The first 352 units for sale, priced from $127,000 to $750,000, go on sale Nov. 18, Mickey Mouse's birthday. Downtown, and the first phase of housing, opens July 4. Yes, there will be a parade.
"It's not a theme park, it's a real town," says Don Killoren, head of the Disney project, emphatically. "It's going to be a great place to live." Killoren also says the estimated $2.5 billion project is a one-shot deal, allaying any fears that Disney villages will be sprouting nationwide.
Celebration is billed as a 19th-century town for the late 20th century, harking back to a time when lemonade stands, not crime, were on every corner. Disney is selling turn-of-the-century safety, charm and orderliness.
Today's market is ripe for such a product, experts say.
"Disney again has its thumb on the pulse of the American public - to return to community, to a neighborhood, to a place where they think they have some control," says John Kasarda, director of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Adds John Marsh of the Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa: It's not considered chic to approve of anything Disney does. . . . But for whatever flaws it might have, Disney understands what buttons to push to make people feel warm and fuzzy, and be a huge commercial success doing it. But Alexander Moore, an urban anthropologist at the University of Southern California and longtime Disney watcher, says while Disney is picking up on the nostalgia of Main Street, there's a bigger question: Whether they can turn it into a happy, imagined community in todays world. Patrick Burke, senior associate at Michael Graves Architects, designer of Celebrations post office, says people need to give it a chance. Peoples' perceptions might get in the way at first, but otherwise I think they've done the right thing, says Burke. We all initially were dreading what this could be, but not anymore. . . . I just wish it had a different name. Many have commented on the town's name, calling it trite at best, insipid at worst. Disney's Killoren concedes the company had dozens of focus groups discussing names. In the end, the decision was made by CEO Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane. It's for the celebration of the human spirit, Killoren says.
Disney is doing everything in its power to make Celebration work: big-name architects to design the buildings, big-name universities to consult at the towns school. But most important, it's using its own big name to market Celebration.
The whole cache is Disney, and they want to capitalize on that, says the University of Miami's Peter Muller, an urban planning expert. This town is the ultimate cache, and (buyers) want to be part of the Disney name. The fact that you can pay your mortgage every month to the Disney bank will be the height of it, the ultimate experience. And to have your baby born in a Disney maternity ward? Wow! Planned communities are not new. But Reston, Va., and Columbia, Md., for example, were built by companies whose specialty was real estate development. Disney adds a new twist.
The notion of building communities that resemble theme parks is an old idea, so I guess its reached its culmination with a theme-park manufacturer building such a community, says Evan McKenzie of the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Privatopia: Home Owners Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.
The notion that you can get away from social conflict and crime, that's an overvalued idea. It's not possible, he says. It's escapist and secessionist. It says, I'm going to be leaving America and going into this fantasy kingdom where there is no crime, with only people like me. Celebrations premise is that residents will stroll treelined streets to afternoon matinees, waving to their neighbors on front porches along the way.
They're trying to create what the rest of us are trying to preserve, says Rich Unger, chief planning/zoning officer for the City of Orlando.
Residents can even find baby sitters through the system.
Is this the dawning of a new age in town living? Or will Celebration just be a sterile high-tech wasteland in Victorian clothing? Disney officials are sensitive to the fact some think this is just another perfect set with Disney pulling the strings.
Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 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 werent the brainchild of one committee have. You can't fake it. The big difference is Disney is dealing with real people in Celebration, not theme park employees they can control, right down to their facial hair. Muller sees that as a big step for Disney: They have to come out of the land of make-believe into the real world. That's the risk theyre taking. The risk seems to be paying off. Interest has been so great, Killoren says, Disney is holding a Founders Day Drawing Nov. 18 to select Celebration's first residents.
Normally, we'd simply open the doors, but people have been inquiring about this for years, says Killoren. On Nov. 12, a builders' fair for prospective buyers will be held at the Contemporary Hotel in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom.
But the minute you drive onto Celebration's property, Disney's visual magic takes hold. White fences, reminiscent of Kentucky's bluegrass country, surround the property. (Upon closer inspection they prove to be plastic.) And from a distance, the preview center looks like a classic mansion. It's not. Its a facade. Behind the mansion door is a pre-fab.
More than 21,000 visitors have come through since it opened in mid-August. What they see inside is part Norman Rockwell, part apple pie and all Disney.
In a living room, a video plays continuously. It begins with home movies of birthday parties and baseball games. A paperboy makes his rounds and kids throw autumn leaves to the sky as the narrator talks of bake sales, fireflies and kicking the can. Life as comfortable as a pair of worn-out jeans. . . . Celebration - a place to take you back to a time of innocence. The lure, says Frank Bucco of nearby Bay Hill, is Disney and a Disney-run community, and all the benefits that come with that. He built a home two years ago after giving up on the long-anticipated Celebration, nine years in the making. Now he's selling it and moving into Celebration as soon as he can, adding hes also lured by the school, and the absence of crime and things of that nature. Can Disney can actually eliminate crime? Oh, yeah, he answers without hesitation.
That it not be gated was a conscious decision, says Mark Paris of Celebration's sales/marketing. You go to a small Southern town and you don't see a gate at the front door. Pat Fish, a community guide at the preview center, summed up best why Celebration isn't gated: Walt Disney would turn over in his grave if it were. Celebration is the culmination of a dream Walt Disney had decades ago: to build a town where people would live, work and play in an environment that embraced new technology. What came out of that dream was EPCOT, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which turned into yet another Disney theme park instead of a community of the future.
If they started pushing the walled community concept, they were going to be accused of separating the people, Balkanizing the public, and that's something Disney doesn't want to do, says the University of Miami's Muller.
The small print: Rules aren't out yet What happens if you don't mow your lawn in Celebration, let alone don't whistle while you're doing it? Disney isnt releasing any of the rules yet about living in Celebration.
The town's covenants - the do's and don'ts of living at Celebration - will be given to prospective buyers at the drawing.
What Disney is saying is that people will have to sign a contract that they'll live at Celebration nine months of the year, an effort to prevent it from being a seasonal community.
James Moore, on leave from the Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida, assumes the deed restrictions and covenants at Celebration will be very rigorous, following Disneys tradition of strict control. And in that case, you're limiting the community of it. In mailings to prospective homebuyers, Disney says it will impose reasonable restrictions. But even with those restrictions, which can get down to what color you can paint your front door, Disney will still have to deal with things totally out of its control.
When that first hurricane hits, the first murder, the first shooting, they're not immune, says Muller. This is the kind of thing that gives them nightmares. They want to sanitize that. McKenzie, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, says retreating to such a private utopia has a high price.
Most people don't realize what the price is - you give up a substantial price of freedom, he says. At Disney World, they'll toss you out if you don't behave. . . . They squelch anyone who behaves differently. He believes Celebration will be just as strict.
Disney World is a totalitarian environment where you're being watched and manipulated at every corner. There are security cameras everywhere. So when they say they're going to be safe at Celebration, maybe they're going to be surrounded by the same kind of security.
My prediction is there will be trouble in paradise, McKenzie says. It won't come from the unwashed hordes outside, but from inside, from restrictions put upon the homeowners. As for how much extra one pays to live at Celebration, that too remains to be seen. Association dues will be released at the builders fair. The cost to live in Celebration will be comparable to other high-quality communities, says Killoren.
What the public is saying In the course of two days, dozens of people file through Celebrations Preview Center. While Disney is stressing ethnic and economic diversity in its brochures, recent visitors were only upper middle-class whites.
Killoren says Disney has no profile of the Celebration resident. We have a diverse product for a diverse population, he says, pointing to housing prices ranging from $650 apartments to $750,000 homes.
AT&T retiree William Alsberge from nearby Bay Hill likes what he sees: Anything Disney touches, everything they do is first class. If Disney doesn't pull out, it'll be gorgeous. If I could live in an area that looks like it does around EPCOT, that's kept up like that, I would do it in a minute. Not Kristeen Ewart, a psychologist from Winter Park Pines. This reminds me of during the war years of those who bought into separatism - just worry about what's happening here, not out there, she says. I'd much rather go to the Great Smoky Mountains and buy a large piece of property and get my security that way. To tell you the truth, this really scares me. I just asked the girl if she heard of the movie Stepford Wives and she hadn't. I'm not sure I believe that. David Hood of Orlando, and his wife, Marylou, have concerns, too. I like the concept and I'm interested to see if Walt Disney can pull off having live people live on their property, he says. But if you break the law are you going to Mickeys bad place? Actually, it sort of gives me the Stepford Wives feeling. Marylou Hood doesnt like the neighborhood feel that is one of Celebration's hallmarks. I want my privacy. I don't want to know what my neighbors are doing. Verdict will be decades in coming Will everyone live happily ever after in Celebration? Experts say the verdict won't be in for years.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami's school of architecture and the creator of Seaside, the community on Florida's panhandle to which Celebration is often compared, thinks Disney's intentions are good. It's more than a planned community, she says. They're legitimately trying to make a community that functions as a neighborhood. Ralph Taylor, professor of criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, agrees: It'll be a real community, not an amusement park. People will die there and fight there. It will have a life of its own. There will be things there people won't like, but hey, that's life, isn't it?
By Craig Wilson, USA Today. (The Detroit News published another version of the same story)