Word: orlandos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Millionaires in jeans is the stuff of ordinary boomtowns. But not every boomtown has the Mouse as its Medici. When the $5.8 billion Walt Disney organization established itself near Orlando, it settled on a 43-sq.-mi. property (twice the area of Manhattan) and won from the Florida legislature a sovereignty often compared to the Vatican's. Above all, it brought to Orlando the power of the Disney ethos, which can never be overstated. Executives have traveled to the park to learn about the Disney style of management, which trains employees to cherish Walt, despise stray gum wrappers, follow...
...even Walt, ambitious social engineer that he was, might have been taken aback by the adoption of his commercial vision as Orlando's urban-planning model. Many new arrivals value the place because it offers the virtues of an escape: it is a suburban sprawl that strives to eliminate every kind of vexatious complexity. "People come here because they know it's going to be safe," says Thomas Williams, head of Universal Studios Florida. "They don't have to worry about the weather. They don't have to worry about the car getting broken into. They don't even have...
What it says is that Disney World is predominantly white and middle class -- and so is Orlando. The city, like Disney World, offers relief not just from the pressures of geography (it is flat and still undeveloped) and of history (more than half the area's population arrived during the past 20 years) but, most of all, from contending ethnicity. In that sense, Orlando is a new psychological frontier, a jumping-off place for a society that revels in the surface of things, even if deeper problems remain unaddressed...
...Orlando spends tax money, for example, to have workers pick cigarettes out of tree planters, but the Florida Symphony Orchestra, one of Orlando's major cultural adornments, almost folded four months ago for lack of community support. Orlando faces all the pressing burdens of a boomtown, from lengthening traffic lines on its highways to pollution in its lakes, but the region will not raise taxes to deal with them. (Orange County has lowered its property-tax rate almost annually since 1969.) In the post-Disney real estate explosion, bureaucrats, farmers and tire salesmen have become instant millionaires, but so little...
...Orlando does not know what it wants to be, it knows at least how it wants to behave: cheerfully, at all cost. Boosterism is almost a civic duty, with a Disneyesque tinge. The city's pitch for a National League baseball team included a promise to build not just a concrete mega-ballpark but an old-time, intimate "field." Orlando hopes to embrace mass transit, but an old- fashioned trolley line is getting priority over a modern elevated rail system. Orlando basketball games are not games but "theatrical productions," in the words of Magic manager Pat Williams. He spent more...