A Disney You Can Go Home To

Recalling his boyhood in Rochester, Minn., Joel Kostuch pictures in his mind’s eye an idyllic yesteryear of front porches, community songfests and friendly neighbors. “I want James to experience those same things,” he says with a nod to his 2 1/2-year-old son.

A couple of blocks over from Joel and Laura Kostuch’s home on Teal Avenue, the Thomases--Larry, Paula and their 15-year-old daughter, Sara--have settled into their own small-town dream, a four-bedroom house on Veranda Place.

“For us, the overriding decision-maker was the school,” says Larry Thomas, 47, a computer consultant. “Sara didn’t want to change schools, but she was so excited by what she saw here--the challenging curriculum, the Teaching Academy.

“Of course, we assumed that Disney would do it right. We believe in their philosophy. We feel like we’re getting the best of the best.”

The Thomases and the Kostuches are pioneers. They are among the first 150 households--about 450 people--to move into a real-life experiment sponsored by the masters of make-believe, the Walt Disney Co.

If Celebration were an amusement park, the theme would be “back to the future.” But Celebration is what Disney calls “an American town,” where, within a decade, 20,000 people are expected to live in a planned community that combines the comfortable tradition of a 1930s Main Street with the technology of Tomorrowland.

Celebration has not been inhabited long enough for a real rhythm of life to have set in, or for residents’ great expectations to be fulfilled--or dashed.

But there are signs of the “Mayberry” ambience that Disney hopes will take hold. Merchant Dottie Mathison says residents are eager to greet each other on the street and know each other by first name.

“People moving here are coming with a community spirit,” says Larry Rosen, an education professor who moved in a month ago. “They want to talk to each other, get out and socialize, do things together.

The first restaurant is scheduled to open Monday, and shopkeepers are moving in merchandise and stocking shelves. “People living here just walk by the shops every night to see what’s going on. They are so anxious,” says Mathison, whose casual clothing store opened this week.

Set on 4,900 acres south of Orlando, Celebration includes a picturesque downtown of shops, offices and apartments surrounded by homes on tree-shaded streets.

Nine years and $2.5 billion in the making, Celebration has been as carefully engineered as any of its Disney World corporate kin, the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and Disney-MGM Studios. But Celebration has also been “imagineered,” in Disney’s coinage, to appeal to many Americans’ nostalgic desire for a retro ideal, a small-town life where residents know their neighbors, where the streets are safe, where parents are involved in their children’s schools and where a friendly, lakeside city center becomes a community meeting place.

Celebration is not a gated community, and residents are screened only by their ability to afford a home, at prices ranging from $127,000 to $750,000, or apartments with rents starting at $600 a month. Thus, Celebration residents have shown up with all the usual human characteristics, virtues and foibles. “Nobody expects utopia,” says Larry Thomas. “There will be people you get along with and those you don’t.”

Rosen, a professor at nearby Stetson University and director of the Teaching Academy, moved with his family into a Colonial house on Teal Avenue. He says he already has seen changes in the behavior of his 14-year-old son, Ryan. “We lived in a small Florida town before, but there he stayed in a lot, didn’t connect with the neighbors. But here, he is out in the neighborhood, making friends.

“We’ve had neighborhood barbecues, although the downtown isn’t really open yet.

“Last night we had a community meeting of all the parents with kids in the school. And in 23 years as an educator, I’ve never seen people so excited about education.”

For Disney, a company renowned for operating its theme parks with authoritarian zeal, setting the stage for the free-form flow of life is a risk. And, indeed, Disney engineers, along with an all-star cast of architects and town planners, have tried to think of everything: Street patterns and lot plans are designed to foster relationships between residents. A thick handbook of restrictions governs everything from the color of the front door to where to store a canoe.

Disney officials insist that Celebration is a one-of-a-kind project and not an attempt to “Disney-ize” America. But the mere fact that Disney, one of the best-known brand names in the world, has taken the plunge into what is called the new urbanism has changed the landscape of community planning.

“Disney is a business, but it is also an institution, known for success, trust, quality products,” says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and creator of Seaside, a Florida resort community that was one of the models for Celebration. “There was a segment of the development community that felt these ideas were too high-risk. Now Disney has mitigated some of that risk. These ideas are not radical anymore.”

For the settlers of Celebration, life in a prototype community can be a fishbowl experience. An average of 1,000 people a month drop by the town’s visitor center for information, and more than one curious stranger has walked right in on residents, as if the homes here were open exhibits. “The stream of people driving by is so steady we feel like one of the rides,” says Thomas. “I’ve thought of putting a sign up: We are not animatronic.”

Celebration is far from finished. In fact, even as moving vans pull in from around the U.S., hundreds of construction workers are putting up more houses and rushing to finish the downtown business district, whose grand opening is set for mid-November.

Downtown’s striking, circular post office was designed by Michael Graves. Philip Johnson did the town hall, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott the bank, Cesar Pelli the two-screen, 550-seat cinema, and the late Charles Moore the visitor center.

Classes for 180 students in grades kindergarten through 12 began last month, but the Celebration school, part of the Osceola County public system, is not yet built. Students are meeting in the Teaching Academy, a joint venture with Stetson University and the local school board in which up to 3,000 educators each year will attend programs designed to improve their performance.

The 18-hole public golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Jr., is to open Oct. 7, but the Celebration Hospital won’t be ready until next fall.

At first glance, Celebration looks like a movie set so carefully crafted and decorated as to merely suggest the heart of a living, breathing town. That sense of illusion is heightened when visitors turn in from Route 192 in Kissimmee, surely one of the longest and tackiest strips of fast food/video arcade/T-shirt shops in the nation.

The change of scene is startling. To enter the unincorporated town, visitors drive through acres of green pasture, bordered by Kentucky-style white rail fences, and past protected wetlands. Once there, they will find neighborhoods of houses that draw on the styles of the Southeastern United States.

Many homes have front porches, picket fences and neat little gardens, and each comes with a garage accessible through a service alley that keeps parked vehicles and trash cans out of sight.

Every home is energy-efficient and wired for fiber optics and computer hookups for access to the community bulletin board and neighborhood chat rooms.

Home buyers move in with high expectations. “People are moving here specifically for that sense of community,” says AnneMarie Mathews, a Disney spokeswoman. “But one of the biggest challenges we have is to make sure they know we can’t control everything that happens here. We tell them: ‘You are not moving into Main Street of the Magic Kingdom. You’re moving into a town. Your life is not going to be perfect. Your kids will not get all A’s. Bad things will happen. Life will go on.’ ”

Indeed, Joel Kostuch, a 32-year-old filmmaker, carried a bundle of expectations in June when he, Laura and James became the third family to move into Celebration. He has worked for Disney, and Laura still does, as a hotel manager. “I saw us as involved in an experiment to go back to traditional values,” he says, “to try and reclaim something that’s been lost.”

In nearly three months, Kostuch says many of his expectations have been realized. He has met fellow townspeople and potential baby-sitters in the community Internet chat room. Over a side fence he worked out a schedule with his next-door neighbor to share lawn-care equipment and mowing chores. And for weeks now, the Kostuches, along with several others on the block, have gathered each Friday at the home of a neighbor with a big-screen TV to watch a movie.

Neighborliness, and an assumption that residents will take part in community activities and associations, comes with the territory. “Yes, there is pressure to be involved,” says Kostuch. “But it’s a positive pressure. One thing Disney does well is gear up people with a team spirit.”

The idea for a town such as Celebration came from Walt Disney himself, In 1982, 16 years after his death, EPCOT--Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow--opened as an uninhabited showcase of futuristic technology.

When the idea of a planned community was revived in the 1980s, current Disney CEO Michael D. Eisner got behind it. He and his wife, Jane, are credited with coming up with the Celebration name.

To bring the project to life, Disney held an invitation-only design competition in 1987, and instead of picking a winner, asked all of the architects to work together. Their ideas were turned into a master plan by Robert A.M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson.

But even though Celebration is just down the road from Disney World, on company property, there are no mouse ears in evidence and no streets named after Goofy and Pluto.

Most of Celebration’s first residents are longtime Disney fans, among 5,000 people who showed up last November for a lottery to determine who would have first chance at the 351 homes and 120 apartments available in Phase One. Although company officials won’t release the complete demographic picture of the first wave of buyers, Mathews does say “they are a broad mix--empty nesters, retirees, young professionals, singles, racially mixed.”

In just three months, Kostuch says, he has evidence that his $225,000 home has appreciated wildly. “We are getting notices that suggest the price has gone up by $100,000.”

But Celebration is designed to encourage commitment to the community, not seasonal residence nor real estate speculation. Among a host of restrictions Disney has imposed is one that requires owners to spend at least nine months of each year in residence. No homes can be leased for the first three years. Owners can sell their property during the first three years only in cases of extreme hardship, and then any profits must be turned over to a Disney foundation.

Thomas says he was wary of Disney’s penchant for control. Both he and Kostuch already have stories of unauthorized mailboxes or wrong-colored lawn plantings that overnight either disappeared or were magically replaced, as if by Tinkerbell. Nonetheless, Thomas says, “I don’t feel any Big Brother feeling. I think there is someone out there helping keep things right, and I don’t see that as interfering with personal freedom.”

Although access to Celebration is not restricted, and police protection is the responsibility of the county sheriff, Disney does supplement security with private patrols. And residents express faith in both community spirit and Disney to ward off crime. “I don’t worry that we will find a neighbor with a huge gun collection, or be an ax murderer,” says Kostuch.

There are skeptics, however, who believe that not even Disney can hold the world at bay. “What are they going to do when the first drive-by shooting happens?” asks Peter Muller, an urban geographer at the University of Miami. “Frankly, it surprised me that they didn’t go for high walls and security stuff. Because there’s no way to shut out that type of problem.”

Despite that concern, residents and many urban experts believe Celebration will work.

“I had a concern about whether Disney could build a real town, as opposed to a theme park,” says Thomas, who moved his family here from Texas. “They have a lot of money, and they tend to do things their way. But as powerful as Disney is, they can’t make you enjoy sitting on the front porch and talking to your neighbor.

“Eventually, this will become bigger than Disney, and become a town in its own right and take on its own character. This is going to be a beautiful place to live, comfortable and safe.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.

* EISNER AND OVITZ: Are there tensions between Disney’s top executives? D1