Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town - Hardcover

9780805055603: Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town
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A prize-winning reporter, his wife, and their two kids describe life in Disney's vision of the future.

In 1997, six months after the first residents had moved into Celebration, Florida-Disney's town of the future with its distinctly retro link to a longed-for past-Doug and Cathy and their two kids closed on their new home and settled down to participate in (and observe) this new venture. Their report from the trenches will surprise both Disney haters and Disney fans.

What is it like to start a new community-not a suburb or subdivision, but a town, inted to be a self-supporting community with the best of the new technologies (including the very latest in teaching techniques) and the most cherished elements in American towns that existed before the automobile turned everything into a mall? For almost two years the family lived this experiment firsthand. Their report is vivid, funny, and painful-and it tells us as much about ourselves and our hopes and dreams as it does about the daily reality of building a community from the ground up.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:
Nick was eleven and Becky was ten when Doug Frantz and Cathy Collins moved to Celebration, Florida. Doug is on the national staff of The New York Times, and he is the author of four books, including From the Ground Up and Levine and Co. He and Cathy are the authors of Teachers: Talking out of School.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CELEBRATION, U.S.A.
1The Cult of the MouseOur big yellow Ryder truck rumbled and squeaked down the ramp off Interstate 4 twenty miles southwest of Orlando and onto U.S. Highway 192, perhaps the ugliest and most garish stretch of blacktop in America. Less than ten miles from Walt Disney World, the once-quiet road is clogged every day of the year with tourists in rented minivans. In excess of sixty thousand cars daily, according to county traffic counters. If you were to hold out your hand and stop traffic for the day, that's 47.52 miles of vehicles, fender to fender, almost enough to reach to Florida's east coast.The bad-tempered congestion on the four-lane road passes multiple outlets of every fast-food chain known to mankind, countless T-shirt shops and tattoo parlors, an American Gladiators dinner theater, endless cheap motels, discount outlets, and a three-hundred-foot-tall contraption called the Skycoaster that somehow induces people to pay $35 to be strapped into a harness similar to a swing and hurled toward the ground at speeds up to seventy miles an hour.The right turn onto Celebration Avenue, past the shiny white fence and old-fashioned water tower proclaiming "Disney's Town of Celebration," provided a welcome relief from the tedious traffic and unrelenting orgy of shopping. Celebration seemed like a sanctuary. Peopleturning off the interstate just a few miles farther along experienced the same sensation when they found themselves on the broad six-lane road leading to Walt Disney World. Of course, the similarity of the experiences owed everything to the fact that the same company that operates the most-visited tourist attraction on earth had conceived and built Celebration.But if Disney World was meant to entertain and excite, everything within the town's confines was intended to be soothing to the eye and comforting to the soul. The street patterns and architecture alluded to another era. Unlike houses separated by the broad lawns of a typical suburb, homes were grouped close together and set close to the street, the way they were built a century ago in places like Savannah and Charleston. The architectural guidelines created a distinct sense of consistency that, to our eyes at least, was pleasing. The one- and two-story houses were variations on a limited number of designs, so they seemed to fit together like pieces of an architect's puzzle. Garages were tucked discreetly behind the houses along alleys that ran parallel to every street. Lawns were clipped, and there was no sign of litter anywhere. The streets themselves were laid out on a modified grid plan, attesting in that singularly American way to order, virtue, and rectitude. With their shade trees and wide sidewalks, the streets were also attractive and inviting to pedestrians. It was a town of pretty buildings, neat streets, and smiling people, with an overall effect quite similar to the one we would have found had we made that other turn and wound up in the Magic Kingdom.But Celebration was a real town, and it was an ambitious attempt by one of biggest and best-known corporations in the country to advance town planning and community building in America. In designing Celebration, the Walt Disney Company had brought together some of the finest minds and biggest names in the architecture and urban-planning professions and come up with a concept that could serve as a model for other developers and, possibly, as an antidote to the isolation and sterility of the modern suburb. The company's team had examined the full range of town development over the last century, from Frederick Law Olmsted's groundbreaking 1868 design for Riverside, Illinois, to the hottest new trend in urban design, neotraditionalism, which relies on scaled-down, pedestrian-friendly planning. Disney's idea was to siftthrough the best practices of the last 130 years to build a new town that would resurrect the vitality and neighborliness of America before the postwar rush to the suburbs.Several elements made the town Disney planned different from anything else in the country. The concept was far different from the vast tracts of homes in Levittown, New York, the prototypical American suburb. Celebration's scale was small, and its plan revolved around a town center that would serve as a physical and psychological anchor for the community. In addition, where Levittown had provided modest housing for veterans of World War II, Celebration aimed higher on the income scale, offering interesting architecture to the middle and upper classes. Celebration also was a sharp contrast to the suburbs that had followed Levittown. It was oriented toward pedestrians and endeavored to engineer away some of the reliance on the automobile that is the hallmark of the modern suburb. And it was different from other well-regarded new towns of more recent vintage, like Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, in that its residential housing was denser and its individual lots less parklike. Celebration even attempted to improve on neotraditional design by incorporating broader streets and more commercial space. Whether or not you liked the results, the effort was worthy of serious examination.Had the grand scale of the planning experiment itself not been enough to warrant our moving to Celebration, the involvement of Disney put it over the top. The entertainment giant is one of the most admired and reviled corporations in the world. To millions of people, its name is synonymous with fun and high-quality entertainment; thirty-six million people a year go to Disney World alone. But to others, Disney's products, from its theme parks and films to this new town of Celebration, have all the flavor and appeal of boxed mashed potatoes. Whichever side you are on, there is agreement that anything Disney does on the scale of town-building merits attention.The town that Disney built is a lovely place physically. Eventually it will spread over a full five thousand acres, but the initial development occurred in an area shaped like a fat wedge of pie, American apple pie. At the tip is a small man-made lake, which was created to anchor the town center and provide the fill dirt that added three to four feet of elevation to the surrounding swampland, keeping the town high and dry.The small town center nestles around one side of the lake, and three main arteries extend outward from it, defining the shape of the wedge. The two avenues on the edges, Celebration Avenue and Campus Street, are sweeping and embrace the residential neighborhoods. The third, Water Street, flows straight through downtown and follows a tree-lined canal up a slight incline to its end at the golf course clubhouse, which forms the lush green crust that encloses the top of the pie shape.The town center is the place where most people get their first impression of Celebration, and therefore its most prominent corner lots were reserved for public buildings--the Town Hall designed by Philip Johnson, the bank designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the preview center by the late Charles Moore. The intention was both to signal that this was a real town, with civic institutions, and to highlight the most architecturally interesting buildings. Less-distinctive three-story commercial buildings line Market Street, the town's version of Main Street, and extend in a semicircle around the small lake. There is a wonderful relationship among those structures, which planners call background buildings. They set the tone for downtown. In a salute to another era, they are clad in stucco in various shades of pastel, no two quite alike but all of them blending into a pleasing and seemingly timeless street scene reminiscent of small-town architecture found across the country. Fitting in with the tropical climate, the buildings feature deep overhangs, arcades, and the occasional fountain courtyard. The buildings sidle up to the sidewalk, reaching out to engage a street shaded by trees. As befits its stature, Market Street is lined with towering poodle-headed Washington palms. Above the shops are apartments, with broad balconies overlooking the street and lake. Those with a good view from the balconies can catch a glimpse of what once was--a stretch of undeveloped, protected wetlands--now flush against Disney's man-made lake.Across a small green on the edge of downtown, along Campus Street, construction of the new school was proceeding at a furious pace the day we arrived. One of the great appeals of Celebration, to us as well as to a majority of other people moving in, was the school. It was billed as a true community school, serving students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. And it was billed as a model of education's "best practices." The latter point was particularly important. Given a choice, no right-thinking person would move to Florida for the schools, which areperennially at or near the bottom of national rankings. But Celebration School promised something special.Osceola County would operate the school, but education experts from places like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Auburn, and Stetson universities had designed its program. The school would be so good, the marketing line promised, that an affiliated teaching academy would share its techniques with educators from across the country. Indicative of its central role in the community was its placement, smack dab in the middle of town, unlike in other developments where the school is shunted aside on the cheapest land possible, usually next to a highway.The town would also have a sixty-acre health campus, and this, too, was key to Celebration's appeal. Not just a plain hospital, the facility would combine medical care with a fitness center. The focus in Celebration's facility was not to be on fixing illness but on maintaining wellness. The health campus was at one far end of the wedge, and within the wedge were the homes of Celebration, though they spilled out over the edges and eventually would encompass a far larger area.But the health campus was barely begun and the school was far from finished the day we arrived in town with our truck and pulled into one of the downtown parking lots, which are screened from view behind the buildings. We took up half a dozen spaces with the truck and its trailer, which bore Doug's midlife crisis, a taxicab-yellow Ford Mustang convertible.Five days earlier, we had packed up the twelve-ton, twenty-four-foot-long Ryder with most of our belongings and driven south gingerly, wincing at every pothole from New York through the Carolinas. At the time, moving ourselves had seemed like a romantic way to start our journey. We shipped Nick and Becky off to stay with Cathy's parents in Nova Scotia. Elizabeth was staying behind at her summer job in New York City. So the two of us planned a leisurely trip to our new home.We had discovered our error by the time we had traversed the Cross Bronx Expressway and arrived on the George Washington Bridge. The huge truck bucked at every bump, forcing Doug to wrestle the wheels back onto the pavement. The edge of the bridge seemed perilously close, particularly from Cathy's perspective in the passenger's seat. The slightest incline seemed to strain the diesel engine to capacity as big rigs and grandmas in compacts whizzed around us, often with horns blaring. Bythe time we passed out of New Jersey, three hours later, we had managed a compromise with the truck--we didn't drive too fast, it didn't throw us off Interstate 95. As a result, we made it to Florida two and a half days later, safe and sound and without breaking a single piece of furniture or china. But there was precious little romance, as we learned that our truck-driving skills required huge amounts of turnaround space, available only at restaurants where the best house wine was a cold Bud.For the first three days, we stayed in Doug's parents' condominium east of Orlando while the last-minute work was done on the house, driving back and forth each day to watch. The pace of construction throughout Celebration was frantic. Four houses on our block alone were scheduled for completion in the same week. Inside ours, a two-man crew was painting the woodwork, electricians were hooking up outlets, and the guy installing the air-conditioning units was trying to make them work. Some items clearly would not be finished by the time we closed, but we wanted to be certain the air-conditioning was not one of the things left for later.Three days after our arrival, at four o'clock on the afternoon of June 26, we met at the house with Todd Hudson and Jason Meyers, two builders with David Weekley Homes, the Houston company building our house. The purpose was to do a walk-through, noting anything that was not finished properly. The items would be written on a "punch list," and the builder would make them right in the days after the closing. Hudson and Meyers were surprised to find that we had brought along a building inspector, Bob Bidwell. Cathy explained that we had never bought a new house before, but we figured it was a good idea to get another set of eyes on the place before we signed off on it.We spotted most of the aesthetic problems--a chair molding cut at the wrong angle, a bow in one of the bathroom walls, scratches on the porcelain sink in the kitchen, the absence of frosted glass in the window beside the Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, that sort of thing. Bidwell picked up a few bigger items--electrical wires that ran too close to the attic opening in the granny flat above the garage, the absence of a mandatory shut-off valve on the water heater. Bidwell said the house was sound structurally, and while he thought Celebration prices were very high, he seemed content with the overall quality of construction.This was the sixth house we had bought in fourteen years of marriage, but it would be the first closing we had attended without our own lawyer. Gene Kane, the mortgage officer at the local branch of SunTrust Bank, where we got our loan, had told us a lawyer would be a waste of money. "Disney won't change anything in the contract anyway," he said. "It's their way or the highway." A quick check with other new residents bore him out. Buying a house in Celebration was sort of like buying a Saturn--no negotiating, everyone pays sticker price.On June 27, 1997, we were ready to sign the final papers for the mortgage. As we walked toward the preview center, where Celebration Realty had its offices and where the house closing would occur, we were as nervous as might be expected. We were about to sign a mortgage on a new home when we already owned another, also mortgaged. Waiting for us were Kane, the mortgage officer, and Cheryl Marlin, a paralegal with the title company, who would actually conduct the closing procedure. She confirmed what Kane had told us: No changes were allowed to the contract."We've had attorneys from all over the country call up when they see this contract and say, 'What's going on here? I've never seen anything like this,'" Marlin explained. "We tell them that it's all legal and that's the way it is. The questions usually have to do with the buyer having to pay the entire cost of title insurance and all of the transfer taxes. Usually those costs are shared with the sellers. Not in Disney's case."As we read through the closing statement, we could see clearly how much Disney's rules cost us. We were paying $1,589.50 for title insurance and $3,608.05 in state and county transfer taxes. In a normal closing, the seller would have picked up half of that total, or $2,598.77. We also paid the first installment of $213.36 in debt-service fees that would be used to pay off the municipal ...

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  • PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 0805055606
  • ISBN 13 9780805055603
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages352
  • Rating

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