Because We Like You : CELEBRATION U.S.A.; Living in Disney’s Brave New Town By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins; Henry Holt: 330 pp., $25 : THE CELEBRATION CHRONICLES; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town By Andrew Ross; Ballantine: 320 pp., $25.95

Walt Disney always wanted to build a town. Not a stage-set town, like Main Street U.S.A., but a working community, with genuine full-time residents living the wholesome Disney life seven days a week, year-round. When his company bought up 30,000 acres of land in central Florida in the mid-1960s, the idea wasn’t just to have a theme park--or even a bunch of theme parks--but to leave plenty of room for the permanent settlement of Disney’s dreams. As he envisioned it, the new town would merge futuristic design and planning with the conservative values of the small Missouri towns in which Disney had spent much of his childhood. Its inhabitants would work in skyscrapers and live under a giant dome. But they wouldn’t do much driving--Disney was no fan of automobiles. Monorails would take people virtually anywhere they wanted to go. The creator of this community gave it the name of EPCOT, Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

This was one Disney wish that never came true. EPCOT turned out to be one more theme park where nobody lives. And by the 1980s, the design ideas themselves were painfully obsolete. Giant domes and monorails are alive and well at DisneyWorld, but practically nowhere else. The futurism that so excited Disney became little more than an icon for sterile mid-century technological hubris.

Thirty years after the patriarch’s death, however, a town has been built on Disney land in Florida by the heirs to Walt’s corporate empire. It would astonish Walt: The technology he worshiped is nowhere to be found. But the appearance wouldn’t necessarily displease him. Its architects designed it for people to walk around in, rather than having to drive everywhere they need to go. It is generously endowed with public spaces for community events and ordinary socializing. Its frame houses, sidewalks and wide porches, rather than reflecting the futurist hopes of the 1950s, make it look like the turn-of-the-century towns Disney romanticized.

This is Celebration, the neo-traditional experiment in the Florida swamplands. It is the most famous and controversial planned community built in America in the last decade and perhaps in the last generation. It isn’t the place Disney wanted to build but, at its root, it is driven by the same assumption: That the old-fashioned virtues of community have been casualties of modern human life and that design can help to re-create them.

Whatever one’s attitude toward Disney, Celebration is worth paying attention to. From the moment it was announced, critics of all persuasions have never ceased paying attention. So it was all but inevitable that, before the place was even half built, somebody would move in, spend a year there and emerge with the “inside story” of life in Disney’s experimental town.

In fact, two books have emerged at the same time. One is “Celebration U.S.A.” by New York Times correspondent Douglas Frantz and freelance writer Catherine Collins, a husband-and-wife team who bought a house and moved in with their two children. The other is “The Celebration Chronicles” by Andrew Ross, director of the American studies program at New York University. Unmarried and unattached, Ross took a duplex apartment above a restaurant on the main commercial street. The perspectives from which these two books are written could not be more different. But the story they tell is very much the same.

Celebration opened in 1996 with 1,800 pioneer inhabitants forming the nucleus of a town that will eventually grow to 20,000. They had won a lottery held the previous November, the prize being the right to buy a new house built to incorporate the best aesthetics and design qualities of the American past. There were six style choices: classical, Victorian, Mediterranean, colonial, coastal and French Normandy. The homes were not cheap by the standards of most of the country: Narrow townhouses started at $120,000, and the cost of a detached house ranged from $220,000 for a “cottage home” to as much as $1 million for one of the custom-built “estate homes” on premium lots. As Ross and Frantz and Collins make clear, many of the original purchasers saw themselves as making considerable financial sacrifices to move to Celebration, stretching to meet monthly mortgage payments far beyond the ones they left behind. “With all this talk about sacrifice,” Ross writes sarcastically, “I might have been excused for inferring that I was living in a training camp for humanitarian workers, rather than one of the wealthiest towns in central Florida.” But the Celebration pioneers were happy to be there. Nearly all shared the belief that when Disney makes something, whether it is a ride or a movie or community, Disney does it the right way.

In addition to their new homes, the first residents of Celebration took possession of an instantly functioning downtown, designed by some of the nation’s most prominent architects. The town hall was by Philip Johnson, the bank by Robert Venturi, the movie theater by Cesar Pelli. The main business street was lined with palm trees and sloped down to a man-made lake. The original marketing brochure for Celebration described it as possessing “the special magic of an American hometown.” The first residents expected nothing less. In fact, quite a few of them expected perfection.

Perfection was not what they got. The houses, put up on a crash schedule by a Chicago builder unfamiliar with Florida conditions and desperate for labor, turned out to have a disconcerting number of structural problems. Pipes leaked, support columns twisted and bowed and one entire mini-neighborhood of 74 houses had to have every roof torn off and replaced. The retail shopping district didn’t turn out to be the multipurpose Main Street that many of the residents envisioned. It was well-stocked with restaurants, boutiques and entertainment--features that could attract curious Disney World tourists--but too many of the basics were lacking. Everybody wanted a hardware store, but no hardware dealer could be lured in. And Disney’s promise to create a 21st century technological village, with households linked by high-speed fiber optics, was years from fulfillment.

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Most disappointing of all, Celebration School, a public institution built in part with Disney subsidies, turned out to be a source of endless tension and controversy. One might expect a neo-traditional community to operate a traditional school, emphasizing order, discipline and the basic learning skills, but what the community got was the opposite: a risky experiment in progressive education, designed by a committee of academics from all over the country. There were no grades or textbooks and very few books of any kind in the library, which was referred to as the “old media” center. Pupils of different ages were mixed together in “unwieldy learning neighborhoods” that often degenerated into chaos. “We came here as a family with a dream, and all we received was an educational nightmare,” one father wrote to Disney in the fall of the first school year. Before the winter was over, the family had moved back to Pennsylvania.

But even in its first shaky months, Celebration was making progress toward achieving its most important goals. Its residents quickly came to know one another, socialize on the sidewalk and in the town square, to trade gossip as they strolled downtown to shop. “Friendships, like the town itself, were instant,” Frantz and Collins report, “popping up as fast as the moving trucks unloaded new lives.” The natural instincts for sociability were reinforced by myriad planned events that drew wide participation: block parties, parades, sock hops, pumpkin carving on Halloween. It was a more communal life than many Americans would want to live. But it was the life most Celebrationites came to the town for, many of them fleeing anonymous suburban subdivisions whose inhabitants scarcely knew one another.

That Celebration generated strong ties of community is indisputable. Whether these were the product of the town’s neo-traditional design features or of its unique circumstances remains a difficult question. Virtually all built-from-scratch communities create bonding experiences among the first residents, even ugly ones as Levittown, N.Y., did in the 1950s. The first Celebrationites shared not only the pioneer ethos of a new place but the adversity of construction mishaps and a troubled school. Those would have helped bind them together no matter what the town looked like.

On the other hand, any fair reading of these two books makes it clear that the layout did make a difference. As Ross says, “The physical design of the town meant it was virtually impossible not to know your neighbors.” The sidewalks, the closeness of the houses, the public spaces, the compact downtown--all these features served the crucial purpose of getting people out of their cars. Liberated from the automobile, most of them developed relationships more easily than anywhere else they had lived. “I didn’t lock the house, I didn’t get in the car,” one charter homeowner exulted. “It was the first time I had really walked in forty years.”

Neither of these books is a tirade against Disney or Celebration; neither is a whitewash of the community’s problems. Both are admirably candid and readable; both end with an air of ambivalence. Ross, an earring-wearing Scots-born leftist on sabbatical from his home base in Greenwich Village, never seemed comfortable with Celebration’s relentless family friendliness. He spent much of his time cultivating the town’s misfits, its alienated high school students and gay residents looking to create an alternative culture. He was troubled by all the Disney-generated rules and norms that restricted expressions of individuality by property-owners. And yet he closes with a dig at his New York friends who congratulated him at the end on his escape from suburbia, drawing from their “haughty repertoire of cosmo attitude.”

Frantz and Collins seem most disturbed by Celebration’s middle-class homogeneity, at the absence of minorities and of low-cost housing, at the blandness of the overall experience. “The uniformity of the place got on our nerves,” they say. “The pastel colors of the houses grew wearisome. We longed to see grass growing through a crack in the sidewalk, to get some sense of reality.” They decide they want to move back north.

And yet, when the time comes, they choose to stick it out for one more year. More than that: They agree, somewhat to their own surprise, that when they do move, it will be to a town something like Celebration. More diverse, a lot funkier, but similar to it in other important ways. It will be a town where the residents ride bicycles and all the stores are within walking distance. “Wherever we went next,” they say, “we would choose to live differently because of our time here. . . . Neo-traditionalism, or post-traditionalism, had rubbed off on us.”*