Disneyland Hotel Is Getting Face Lift, New Swimming Pool

Walt Disney Co. has begun refurbishing its Disneyland Hotel by installing a Peter Pan-themed swimming pool, part of the Burbank company’s $1.4-billion Anaheim expansion that includes opening a second theme park.

The work is an early step in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar overhaul of the hotel, which was opened by businessman Jack Wrather as a 100-room facility in 1955, the year Disneyland opened. Growing over the years to 1,136 rooms, it is now Orange County’s second-largest hotel. Disney bought it in 1988.

The new Neverland Resort Pool, which will open in time for next summer’s tourist season, will resemble the lagoon in “Peter Pan,” Disney’s animated version of the children’s play. It will have a 100-foot water slide with a vertical drop of 16 feet, and perhaps also Skull Rock and Captain Hook’s pirate ship, both featured in the 1953 movie.

The latter icons once were part of Disneyland, where guests could munch hot tuna pie from the restaurant in the ship while gazing at the eerie rock. They disappeared in a 1982 make-over of Fantasyland.

Disney spokesman Ray Gomez said no final decision has been made on whether they will be included at the hotel pool.

Construction workers have walled off a central marina area flanked by three hotel towers, where a pool previously was devoted to paddle and remote-controlled boats.

The Disneyland Hotel already has two swimming pools off to the side, but the central pool “has been mainly just a visible water feature in the past,” Gomez said. “The replacement will be a real swimming pool, about 5,000 square feet.”

The hotel’s front section, which includes shops, restaurants and a Monorail station, will be torn down and rebuilt as part of a huge retail, dining and entertainment area similar to Downtown Disney at the company’s Florida resort complex.

That mall complex will sprawl across West Street, connecting Disneyland and the new theme park, Disney’s California Adventure, with the Disneyland Hotel and adjacent Disneyland Pacific Hotel to the west. A new Monorail station will be built at the hotels.

“It just makes sense to give the Disneyland Hotel a face lift to tie it in to the rest of the development,” Gomez said. He said the entire first level of the Disneyland Hotel will be remodeled, and probably the tops of the towers. The Disneyland Pacific Hotel is also likely to get new theming touches.

The Anaheim Resort area being redeveloped around Disneyland and the Convention Center is zoned for up to 16,000 new hotel rooms, including 750 at the Grand Californian Hotel that Disney is building inside California Adventure.