Disney’s Small-Town Tomorrowland Borrows From Yesterday
Bob and Susan Raffell bought their new $250,000 house strictly on faith, in a town that’s not yet open.
When they arrived to sign the contract, there were no model homes to look at, just some plans and drawings and the outlines of two similar houses rising from the ground.
But Disney is doing this town, and that’s enough for Bob and Susan.
“We felt like pioneers,” said Raffell, 48, a security manager for the Federal Aviation Administration at Orlando International Airport. “It’s a bold experiment, really. There’s a lot of faith involved on our part.”
Celebration is a $2.5-billion, self-contained, real-life community being built by a company with few, if any, peers in the make-believe industry. It is smack in the middle of Central Florida’s theme-park world.
Walt Disney Co. is gambling much of its reputation and money earned from theme parks and movies on the development of a small town harking back to the pre-World War II era, with elegant homes reminiscent of the Old South.
Celebration--just a few miles down the road from Disney World--ultimately may have a population of 20,000 in 8,000 dwellings ranging from $130,000 townhouses to $750,000 estates.
The first homeowners start moving in this summer, and Celebration will be formally unveiled to the general public during Walt Disney World’s 25th anniversary festivities in October.
Mickey and Goofy are nowhere in sight on village streets with names such as Mulberry Avenue and Elderberry Court.
There are stately trees, front porches and rear-entry garages. There is also cutting-edge technology in such things as energy-efficient building materials, a community computer network, sophisticated security systems and fiber-optic cable for interactive communications.
Disney is marketing the town as a community of diverse styles for people of varying incomes. Buyers have a choice of 15 variations on six architectural styles.
“We’ve taken some of the best ideas of the past and melded them with the planning ideas of the future,” said Don Killoren, Celebration’s general manager. “It’s a sort of modern-day nostalgia--something that has come about from Disney listening to what people wanted.”
Celebration will be an unincorporated town within Osceola County, governed by a Community Development District that maintains utilities, roads, street lights, landscaping and other services.
Residential associations will control property use and maintain common areas and facilities.
The 4,900-acre community is rapidly taking shape on what was once a cow pasture near the intersection of Interstate 4 and U.S. Highway 192. The Central Florida Connector, a loop around metropolitan Orlando, puts Disney’s town 15 to 20 minutes from the airport.
Workers for 10 builders are grading lots, erecting framework and roofing houses in the first phase of development.
In the town square, utility workers scramble around heavy equipment on streets adjoining a man-made lake. Scores of plumbers, carpenters and landscapers are finishing work on the town hall, retail stores, restaurants and apartments.
A public school for 1,400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade, within easy walking distance of downtown, will not be completed in time for classes this fall.
A health-and-medical complex run by Florida Hospital is taking shape nearby. A business park, Celebration Place, is separated from the village by an 18-hole golf course and a winding thoroughfare that leads into the network of streets and neighborhoods from the honky-tonk clutter of U.S. 192.
The greens and fairways of the golf course bordering two sides of the community have been shaped and are undergoing “natural” landscaping, along with parks, walking trails and waterways.
Bob Shinn, vice president and general manager of the Disney Development Co.’s real estate division, said sales have been steady.
The first phase of construction calls for 351 homes. Disney had almost 200 buyers under contract by late February and estimates that the first phase will be completed by this fall.
Some critics have dismissed Celebration as a sterile, escapist fantasy land. But Charles Fraser, who helped develop Hilton Head, Amelia Island and other communities in the Southeast, scoffs at that.
“Celebration is dynamic, ever-changing. It will be a model for the industry and the country,” said Fraser, an advisor to Disney’s community designers.
Peter Muller, an urban geographer at the University of Miami specializing in suburban communities, also praises the project but has reservations.
“Disney has this wonderful status, almost like a myth,” he said. “People think of Disney and they think of a special environment, of some kind of sanitized and protected community.
“What they have to be very wary of is that things will start to happen that are typical of communities around the country: the first murder, a kid bringing a bomb to school--the kind of thing we see on TV every day.
“There is no way they can prevent these things. Human nature is human nature. Eventually, this could tarnish their image.”
For Warren and Sally Edwards of Springfield, Va., the move into a $285,000 Victorian home in Celebration early in 1997 will be a major milestone in their long romance with Disney.
“We know that everything that Disney does is quality and family-oriented,” said Warren Edwards, 58, who is on disability leave from IBM. “Florida isn’t the draw. It is flat-out Disney World. Living next door to Disney is ideal. I think it will enhance our family life.”
The Edwardses, who have three grown children and a 13-year-old daughter, like the small-town concept, but realize that they will have to give up some freedom to comply with neighborhood association rules and restrictions on property usage.
“For what you gain, we are going to give up some of our individuality,” Edwards said.
Raffell said he doesn’t mind having rules if they help make the town a good place to live.
“There are no more covenants in this place than I found in subdivisions,” said Raffell, a baby boomer who grew up in an area of northwest Baltimore with large houses, broad alleys, garages in the back and friendly neighbors.
“A sanitized theme park? I don’t think so,” he said. “My personal feeling is that most of the people who bought into this concept did so hoping that there would be these types of rules. I think that we may be willing to go along with even more than Disney is levying upon us--specifically to have this kind of environment.”
The project is attracting attention within the construction and resort-development industry as well as with consumers, said Don Furtado, a Tampa-based developer with 25 years of experience throughout the Southeast.
“Of course, the bottom line is that it must be proven to be economically viable,” he said.
