Word: walt
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...Walt Disney was the messiah," says Bob Ward, designer of Universal's 444- acre theme park. "Disney saw the future, and it was the themed environment." Ward may be right, but even Disney planners are sometimes surprised by the infectiousness of their founder's idea. Everyone might have been less surprised had they observed the Magic Kingdom's effect on a small ^ corner of nature. When they were creating the theme park, Disney planners turned an island on one of the property's lakes into a semitropical jungle and bird sanctuary, a place of bamboo and palms, of plants from...
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...
That's because the city and the park are looking more like each other every day. The heart of Disney World is Main Street U.S.A. -- constructed, at the creator's specifications, so that the buildings are subtly miniaturized. "This costs more," Walt Disney said, "but made the street a toy, and the imagination can play more freely with a toy. Besides, people like to think their world is somehow more grown up than Papa's was." Now architect Andres Duany wants to bring a residential equivalent of Main Street to eastern Orange County. His proposal is named Avalon Park...
Epcot never took that form, in part, according to author John Taylor, because Walt realized he would have had to subsidize residents to attract them to his closely monitored community. Epcot today is a permanent world's fair that includes two sets of pavilions: scientific ones that celebrate mankind's technological mastery of the universe and a clutch of foreign lands without masses of foreigners -- 11 cultural boutiques that fit around a man-made lagoon as a symbol of human fellowship. "Probably it's much cleaner here than some of those countries you would go to," says visitor Sandy Hyde...