TIME Magazine

December 4, 1995 Volume 146, No. 23

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BUSINESS

A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

Disney wants to sell Americans the ultimate fantasy: a utopian community

BY JOHN ROTHCHILD/ORLANDO

Thousands of prospective home buyers recently converged on a former cattle
pasture in Orlando, Florida, hoping to become the first permanent residents
of a Disney attraction. It is the new town of Celebration, which is going
up just 15 miles south of Cinderella's Castle and the Pirates of the
Caribbean.

As familiar Disney melodies (When You Wish upon a Star and
M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E) were piped over the loudspeakers, the crowd piled
into five tents where names were picked from revolving bins, one for each
level of housing: Estate, Village, Cottage, Townhomes and Apartments. There
was an extra bin for the rentals. The occasional cheer went up as the
winners were read out. People whose number came up early got first crack at
signing a contract with one of the approved builders and choosing a house
style: Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Coastal, Mediterranean or
French. (Alas, nothing resembling the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse.) The
first 350 units are scheduled to be occupied by June 1996, but it will take
several years for Celebration to reach its full size of 8,000 homesites and
a population of 15,000 to 20,000. Sources at Disney estimate that the
company will spend $100 million on the entire project, but the
entertainment giant stands to make at least three times that amount on lot
sales alone. If all goes as planned, Disney will have two Main Street
U.S.A.s--one with inhabitants and one without, but both extremely
profitable.

With kites flying overhead, clowns on stilts, popcorn vendors, jugglers and
puppeteers, the event lived up to the town's name, which was chosen to put
future residents in a positive frame of mind from the outset. The streets
have been named already, mostly for trees, but Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Drive and
Hip-Hip-Hooray Highway would be fine choices for the larger arteries.

Walt Disney himself had the original idea for a Disneyfied utopia, built
under a giant dome, where residents would be whooshed from skyscraper to
skyscraper on a high-speed monorail. As Walt envisioned it, no retirees
would be allowed to live in his Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow, and nobody could own property. It was to be a paradise of young
renters, a notion that surely would have been vigorously opposed by the
senior-citizen lobby. But Disney died in 1966, before the plans were drawn
up.

Somewhere along the line, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow
got turned into the EPCOT theme park, where people could visit the future,
but only from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Walt's idea of a utopia with residents was
put on hold for a quarter of a century. Only then did the Disney Co.,
realizing it had more acres than it would ever need for theme parks, put
the dream town back on the drawing board.

The dream town of the 1990s doesn't need Walt's domes, skyscrapers or
monorails. By offering good schools, clean streets and grass around the
edges, Disney is creating a fantasy world so far removed from common
experience that people are amazed at the prospect.

The overall layout of Celebration is the work of two noted architects,
Jaque Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern. Their biggest inspiration came from
East Hampton, Long Island, where Stern spends his summers along with the
rest of New York City's Upper East Side. Says Stern: "Drive into East
Hampton, and you see a worship site [read church], a grassy area with
trees, a big flagpole, a school, a library and a cemetery that lead you
into town. We're looking for the same sort of lead-in here."

The big flagpole, church, cemetery, etc., will come later, but right now,
the visitor is confronted with a lone office building and a sculpture that
looks like the pyramid on the U.S. dollar, only without the eye. Both were
designed by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi, who also put in an elevated
green--more or less a copy of the green in Pisa, Italy, over which the
Leaning Tower continues to cast a long shadow.

Beyond the Rossi building the bulldozers roam, and construction is
proceeding apace, especially in the downtown district, which is laid out in
a semicircle around the man-made lake. The commercial buildings, all owned
by Disney, are arranged in Spanish style, with a plaza in the middle that
will serve as a gathering place for parked cars. The tallest point in
Celebration will not exceed three stories. Famous names will be attached to
other edifices: the city hall will be designed by Philip Johnson, the post
office by Michael Graves and the golf course by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and
his son Bobby. The golf course will extend along the edge of a road, giving
nongolfers a chance to enjoy the view from their passing cars. That vista
should be a boost to the windshield-repair business.

By various estimates, the home buyers will pay 10% to 25% more for a Disney
house than they'd pay for a similar house in a traditional suburb, but they
are getting a lot of extras for their money. There's the model school,
kindergarten through 12th grade, run by the county school system but with
the best equipment a $9 million cash boost from Disney can buy. A
teacher-training academy, also partly financed by Disney, will be connected
to the school. There is the 60-acre "health campus," a cross between a
full-service gym and a hospital, where people can keep in shape downstairs
to avoid the medical wards upstairs.

The houses will be wired into a fiber-optic grapevine through which people
can vote in straw polls, order groceries and gossip by way of E-mail. Their
home computers may someday be linked to the health campus' computers, so
vital signs can be monitored at a distance. There will also be home
connections to school computers, so notes from a teacher will never get
lost on the way home. Presumably, homework could be turned in via modem,
thereby eliminating the timeworn excuse that the dog ate it.

Unlike the average designer suburb, where all the houses carry a similar
price-tag, Celebration's $1 million estates on the high end will coexist
with $120,000 town homes on the low end, along with a sizable group of
renters, to produce a general rubbing of elbows not seen in America since
small towns went out of style. (At the lottery, there were singles,
families and couples, old people and young, a few Asians, a man wearing a
turban; still, it was mostly white faces in spite of Disney's efforts to
advertise in the local black press.) There will be no municipal government:
the sewers, water and police will be provided by the county. Meanwhile, the
public spaces, just like the commercial buildings, will be owned and
controlled by Disney. A homeowners' association will rule on local issues,
such as a junk car parked in a driveway or a house freshly painted in an
unapproved color.

It's common practice for planned towns to put very tight restrictions on
what people can put in their yards or do to their houses, and in
Celebration a long list of restrictions is written into the sales contracts
for every house. Example: no clothes on the line in any front yard. But at
the same time, there will be no litter to worry about. At the recent
drawing and Celebration celebration, the confetti had hardly hit the ground
before a Disney confetti picker materialized to sweep it up.

Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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