The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  “[A] FINE-GRAINED, NUANCED BOOK…

  [Ross] has brought his theories to the heartland and tested them against the ever surprising realities of the ongoing American experiment.”

  —U.S. News & World Report

  “Fascinating … Ross is self-deprecating and funny, but also respectful of the dreams of the Celebrationites.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Ross does a great job explaining Disney’s concept behind Celebration, the residents’ motivations in moving there, the controversy around the experimental school, the conflict with the builders over shoddy building practices, and the media spotlight under which the town developed. He not only tells the story of the town, but also gives a tour of many of the issues confronting modern American society.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Informative … thoughtful analyses … Fluid, well written”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Ross plunges into the whole-wheat Wonder Bread communitarianism of the place.… [He] is a likable and an … entertaining observer of the social ecology.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Fascinating … Excellent analyses…[An] enduring summation of what Celebration may mean for the future of America.… [An] expansive portrait of late-twentieth-century American values.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  “Ross is at his best.… His observations about Celebration’s dating scene and forced pageantry are hilarious.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Ross [is an] intrepid investigator [who] describes the inner working of Disney and the Celebration Company in telling anecdotes that speak volumes about the Disney ethos.”

  —The Orlando Weekly

  Also by Andrew Ross

  Real Love

  The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life

  Strange Weather

  No Respect

  The Failure of Modernism

  No Sweat (editor)

  Science Wars (editor)

  Microphone Fiends (editor, with T. Rose)

  Technoculture (coeditor, with C. Penley)

  Universal Abandon? (editor)

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by Andrew Ross, Ph.D.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-105827

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78846-7

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Acknowledgments

  1 Homeward Bound

  2 The Price of Tradition

  3 The New Geewhizzery

  4 Main Street Is Better Than Alright

  5 Our Much-Rumored Life

  6 Riders on the Storm

  7 The Siege of the School

  8 Oil and Water

  9 It Takes a Village

  10 Kinder, Gentler Government?

  11 God’s Houses, a Picture of Health, and the Color of Our Minds

  12 Not an Island

  13 Learning from Celebration

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book chronicles a year I spent in residence in Celebration from September 1997 to August 1998, in addition to several visits before and after that period. During that time, I participated fully in the community life of Celebration, and conducted six or seven hundred hours of interviews, primarily with town residents, company employees, and area inhabitants. Unless otherwise cited, quotations in the book are from these interviews, or from comments made in public meetings and in semi-public settings. The Celebration Chronicles is primarily based on the stories of the people I talked to. Some of the names of residents have been altered to protect their privacy.

  I had no association with the Walt Disney Company, but Ann-Marie Matthews, Ralph Kline, and Marilyn Waters, each of whom served as communications officers of The Celebration Company, responded promptly to my requests for information and for interviews with Disney employees.

  My special gratitude goes to Dave Eaton, Brian Haas, and Diane Polsen-Haas, who showed particular kindness and generosity during my residence.

  There were many others in Celebration whose help and hospitality I enjoyed. Among them were:

  Christine Herzog, Larry Rosen, Brent Herrington, Dawn Thomas, Ron Dickson, Jackson and Sarah Mumey, Lenny Savino, Scott Biehler, Sarai Cowin, Donald and Joan Jones, Carolyn Hopp, Melissa Rodriguez, Donna Leinsing, Charmaine Gabel, Jackie Flanigan, Bob Shinn, Jim Whelan, Marty Treu, Margo Schwartz, Charlie Rogers, Leonard Timm, Robin Delaney, Pam and Bob Morris, Debbie Lehman, Charles Adams, Perry Reeder, Tom Dunn, Karen and Tom Zirbes, Beulah Farquarson, Larry Haber, Jeff La Mendola, Debbie Delevan, Joseph Palacios, Peter Rummell, Paul and Iris Kraft, Alex Morton, Tom Vitale, Heather Krawsczyk, Ron Clifton, Ray and Debbie Chiaramonte, Andy Carson, Dot Davis, Rachel Binns, Sarah Fields, Kennedy Donofrio, Peg and Rod Owens, John Arcuri, Joe Barnes, Todd Mansfield, Dee Stevens, Kathy Johnson, Gregory Ross, Jim and Shirley Bailey, Melie Ablang, Don Killoren, David Pace, Lise and Ron Juneman, Wanda Wade, David and Jo Ann Tennant, Al and Judy Ziffer, Bob Stern, Andres Duany, Betty and Roger Popp, Patrick Wrisley, Rodney and Debbie Jones, Mike and Lorraine Turner, Tom Lewis, Lance and Karin Boyer, Raffaello, Lisa, Max and Caitlin Sessoms, and Fred and Darlene Rapanotti.

  All the best to the Honeysuckle Potluckers and the Montessori Initiative!

  Thanks to John Hayt, who was kind enough to take some photographs for me.

  A big shout-out to my cronies in Orlando, especially to Lisa Stokes and Michael Hoover, whose fulsome comradeship knew no bounds. All hail to the deathless ninja soul of Tyler Stokes! To Wendy Brandon, I owe many thanks for the culinary wisdom, and the vibe from that white Porsche. And to Kevin Meehan—let us salute the rockin’ memory of the Shirtless Wonder.

  Jeff Truesdell, editor of the Orlando Weekly, and Rick Bernhardt, at the City of Orlando Planning Department, were both helpful and gracious.

  Constance Penley first introduced me to the people and landscapes of Central Florida through family visits.

  Many thanks to my colleagues at NYU—George Yudice, Lisa Duggan, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Philip Brian Harper—who all filled in for me during my year’s sabbatical, and my students, who either respected my leave, or, better still, who came to visit, like Mabel Wilson, Alondra Nelson, Kitty Krupat, and Nichole Rustin.

  Lisa Maya Knauer, Robyn Dutra, and Alison Reddick all provided essential research assistance, early and late.

  Faye Ginsburg read a manuscript draft and offered valuable suggestions, and Emily Grayson, at Ballantine, provided crucial help.

  A deep debt lies with Katherine Silberger, who never lived there, but who lived with Celebration each day of the year that I did.

  Peter Borland, my unflappable editor at Ballantine, and Elyse Cheney, my unstoppable agent at Sanford Greenburger, cooked up this assignment for me over a portentous lunch. Peter kept me on track, while Elyse was an energy source of ideas and inspirations. I am very grateful for all of their attention, support, and hard work.

  1

  HOMEWARD BOUND

  “Home is where the mortgage is.” —American proverb

  I live in a country that never runs out of promises. There is always a fresh start, a new frontier, a shiny
next step, opportunity, or bargain for which enough people will put down some cash, or pick up all their things, and go for broke. Even in the rosiest of times, the prospect of satisfaction is not much better than the chances of coming out on top after a casino visit. Running on such odds, the long-distance stamina of the American Dream is pretty impressive. But much more startling is the widespread tolerance for lesser outcomes when that wobbly old dream, in whatever shape, goes unrealized, as it must for the majority. Most people accept that there exists a cruel gulf between the soapy promises of the hucksters and boosters and the school of hard knocks that is their daily lot. Tacit acknowledgment of this gap has become a staple of American life. As a result, the landscape out there is not a junkyard of dreams, though there are many shabby memorials and woebegone ruins. It is the messy result of what people have to settle for when their aspirations fall short of the mark.

  This book has a lot to do with dreams, because it is about people who regularly used that term when they spoke to me and to each other about their recent lives. Whatever their dreams had been in the past, they had become lately entangled with the designs of a company that controls a lion’s share of the dream business, and had opted to offer, in the realm of real estate, some of the wish fulfillment it had long traded in the realm of make-believe. Selling dream homes is not unlike selling dream vacations, but for the live-in consumer, it’s quite a different story. My book draws upon a year in the life and times of a new town built by the Walt Disney Company amid the cypress swamp, open pineland, and palmetto groves of Central Florida. Named in the hopeful American tradition of towns like Harmony, Eden, Experiment, and Amity, Celebration is not just a constellation of dream homes, lavishly packaged by a canny developer. It is also the product of a company that merchandizes the semi-real with an attitude that the architectural historian Vincent Scully once described as “unacceptably optimistic.”1 Many of the pioneers who flocked to the new settlement were plainly charmed by the prospect of living, and dying, on Disney land. Yet they would spend a good part of their fledgling years here trying to prove to themselves and to the outside world that this was a real place, “with real problems,” and not a theme park village cooked up by the Imagineers. In the process, they would be under pressure to perform above par while everyone else was watching.

  WHEN YOU BANK UPON A STAR

  What sets such people in motion? Treasure seekers, colonists, settlers, runaways, frontier homesteaders, and immigrants of every stripe can testify abundantly to the original motive for their movements. America has always been a harvest of advertising. From mythic word of mouth to Renaissance travelers’ tales about the Blessed Isles and the Fountain of Youth, and from emigrant societies’ breathless pamphlets to realtors’ lustrous brochures, the odysseys across prairie, mountain, ocean, and Jim Crow state line have been spurred on by consistently good advertising copy. The same pledges and guarantees crop up over and over again, like so many versions of a single promissory note. Florida has cornered the market on many of them. The state’s reputation as a haven for migrants has been actively promoted for over three centuries in successive policies offering religious sanctuary, free land, low taxes, and Medicare. At times, its climate of warm expectations has been oversold by bogus assurances, earning it the title of “the most lied-about state,” most notably during the notorious land boom of the 1920s, when unbridled speculation caused land to change hands several times a day, sometimes tripling in price. At the height of the boom, national anti-Florida sentiment about realty fraud forced the governor and a group of businessmen to invite the national press to a promotional “Truth About Florida” meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.

  Nonstandard real estate advertising, on Route 192. (Photo: the author)

  It’s best, then, to start with the ads. By the time I moved into Celebration, advertising for the new town was featuring a bold pun—“Isn’t this reason enough for Celebration?” On the billboards outside of town, this slogan ran below an image of two girls savoring their go on a playground swingset. Their fresh gusto was bathed in radiant sunlight as they rose up into a blue-sky future. Their self-assurance was barely tempered by the giddy liberty felt at the summit of the swing’s arc. Almost at once, you could see that this picture of carefree play was meant to contrast with the risky thrills and spills of the tourist attractions that vie for the attention of visitors to this part of the world. The homey technology of the traditional playground swing evokes a world of values quite at odds with the over-mechanized apparatus of terror that fills the theme parks and their spin-offs lining the tourist strips of the Orlando region. In that other realm of vicious vertigo machines and virtual bungee-jumps, there is a clear contempt for balance, let alone gravity. Adjacent to Celebration itself is a tourist site that features “the tallest swing in the world,” a freaky contraption that plunges riders into a cardiac-challenging arc from its 200-foot-high tower.

  So the real message of this and other Celebration ads was not visible on the billboards themselves; it lay in the contrast with their surroundings. Located on arteries that steer motorists past concrete and neon thickets of fast-food shacks and discount malls, acres of asphalt parking lots, and subdivisions of dull duplicate housing, the ads could afford to be subtle. The reason for Celebration lay all around, though to call too direct attention to this fact would be unneighborly. Playing to people’s loathing for the strip-mall landscape, its gaudy commercialism and plug-in housing tracts, was the best tactic for selling this new town. Over time, the ads began to approximate the typical Florida developer’s pitch—“Buy a New House and Get a New Town! From 160s to 750+”—but even then you could still feel the subtle twist of the knife.

  Like most new blueprints for the pursuit of happiness, the reason for Celebration was rooted in repulsion for the existing order of things. In the early 1950s, Walt Disney’s disgust for the postwar urban sprawl of Los Angeles (and his distaste for the lack of hygiene in other popular entertainment facilities) fueled his idea to build a theme park in Anaheim. Disneyland sprang up as a quarantine zone, artificially purged of the urban ills, design tragedies, and traffic atrocities that plagued its California area surroundings. Almost overnight, however, the park spawned a commercial tourist sprawl directly outside its gates.

  A land grab of 28,000 acres in Central Florida in 1966 promised enough space for the company to deliver a second, more self-contained solution—Disney World, with its own resorts and full menu of visitor facilities. Walt’s designs even included plans for a utopian residential city, the EPCOT that was never realized. In turn, of course, the collateral impact of Disney World, soon to become the planet’s number one tourist destination, transformed the entire landscape of Central Florida’s sleepy lakeside towns and cow pastures into a purgatory of fast growth and fast food. The Orlando region became a three-alarm signal for runaway strip mall development everywhere.

  Solution number three—a showcase town for 20,000 residents, designed as a corrective to sprawl—broke ground in Osceola County to the south of the theme parks in 1994. First and foremost, this master-planned community was a bid to maximize the value of 10,000 acres of company land, de-annexed from the virtually autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District that governs Disney World. With half the site preserved for a wetland greenbelt, Osceola Multi-Use Development, as it was called in early planning stages, promised to earn the company a much-needed reputation as a Good Neighbor, since Disney was operating for the first time in the public domain and under the klieg-light scrutiny of the media. In addition, the town was to be a stepchild of New Urbanism, a zealous new movement in town planning that had declared war on auto-driven development and vowed to reintroduce suburban Americans to the civic virtues of active community involvement. Flush with utopian assurances handed down from centuries of American pioneer settlement, Celebration would be yet another fresh start in a world gone wrong.

  So what was I doing here? Unlike most of the new residents streaming into town in the late summ
er of 1997, neither attraction nor repulsion had drawn me to Celebration. I was on a year’s sabbatical from New York City. The dense turbulence, multicultural throngs, and ultraliberal lifestyles of downtown Manhattan, where I live and work, seem to repel more Americans than they attract. For people like myself, it is a step closer to utopia than just about anywhere else (and about as far from a master-planned community as you could imagine). But Manhattanites are chronically insular and loath to recognize other signs of terrestrial life, especially the quality and purpose of suburban Middle America. If we are ever to be good neighbors in the larger landscape, there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon map of the “New Yorker’s View of the World.” It was partly in this spirit that I accepted my publisher’s assignment to live and work in Celebration. Friends, colleagues, and familiars of my past writings were dubious of my motive. Disney-bashing is a favored sport in New York City, and has taken on a fresh vigor with the company’s new presence on 42nd Street. I left behind a town frothing with offense at the Disneyfication of Times Square. But if Disney-bashing had been my chief goal, I could have written this book from a safe distance, in common with most armchair practitioners of that ballooning genre. Conversely, once in Celebration, it would take some energy on my part to dispel the suspicion, inside and outside of town, that I was somehow in cahoots with the Walt Disney Company.

  With two marriages under my belt and no offspring to rear, my resident’s profile would be matched by very few. This was a family town, and with many more outsize families (three or four children) than you would expect from its highly educated late boomer parents. Like most of my new neighbors, however, I had been highly mobile in my history of residence. Americans normally move every five years or so, and I was batting above average in the seventeen years I had lived in the United States, with spells in California, the Midwest, and various Northeast locations, but never in full-blown suburbia or the South. In common with many Celebration residents, I had grown up in a small town. Mine was in a patchwork part of Scotland where notches of the lowland industrial belt sit alongside farmland and upland grazing country. For a town that was not in the least wealthy, the housing mix was as varied as could be. About half of it was public housing, including some of the most notorious slums in the country. Among the private, single-family houses were one or two new subdivisions and a sprinkling of mansions and estates kept by the local aristocracy and well-to-do. Through a relic of the feudal system, my family still paid a small sum (a “feu”) to the former owner of the land on which our house was built. The settlement was several hundred years old, and its communal memory bore the legacies of many waves of economic and religious change. In the 1970s, the town’s social fabric had been rent apart by de-industrialization, and most of its residents had been in survival mode ever since. It was a very unpretentious place, and impossible to idealize or endow with sentimental qualities, even in the rosy mood of retrospection.