The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  Farther back, at the top of Market Street, is the town’s tallest structure, currently in use as the Preview Center for realty sales. The last building to be designed by the quixotic Charles Moore, it is topped off by a stair-wrapped tower that harkens back to earlier years of Florida settlement, when such towers beckoned newcomers to town and served as a vantage point for homesteaders to pick out a lot. In Celebration, however, this tower, like the watertower at the entrance off route 192, is purely for show—you can’t climb above the second floor. Across the square sits Michael Graves’s faintly nautical, open-air post office. Next to it rises Philip Johnson’s Town Hall, its grove of spindly columns mocking the solemnity of civic architecture. Just beyond the eighteen-acre downtown, an Old Glory big enough to grace a medium-size car dealership flaps above Founder’s Park. At the back of the park are the stubby towers and muscle-bound facade of the newly completed school. In view of the bloody trials it will shortly undergo, this building appropriately resembles a military fortification built to withstand a siege. Farther out but still within easy walking distance, the streets of the main residential lots—with names like Mulberry Avenue, Longmeadow, Elderberry Court, Sycamore Street, Honeysuckle Avenue, Arbor Circle, Wisteria Court, Veranda Place, and Jasmine Street—are filling rapidly with porched houses of different sizes and styles. From the lakefront rockers to the golf clubhouse at the end of the formal Beaux Arts canal corridor on Water Street, the Celebration logo—a dog tagging behind a ponytailed girl riding a bicycle past a picket fence and a spreading oak tree—dots the streetscape, appealing shamelessly to the iconography of innocence.

  Stores and apartments on Market Street (Robert Stern, architect). (Photo: the author)

  The lake itself is manmade, but has been skillfully sculpted by Disney’s water engineers, preeminent in a state renowned for its dubious dredging feats. The creek that runs off to the east by Lakeside Park is pumped, but already boasts a surface carpet of algae. In almost any other master-planned development, the lake would be encircled by fancy houses, commanding a high premium for their waterfront location (and in some earlier plans for the site these houses do appear). Instead, Celebration’s lake is ringed by a greenbelt of preserved wetlands and walking trails. In like fashion, the expensive estate homes that sit on the outer belt of Celebration Village are separated from the public golf course by a curving road and sidewalk, preserving the green expanse for walks and views. These exorbitant mansions, with builders’ names that are 100 percent nouveau riche Anglo (Bromley Hall, Belle Manor, Creighton Hall, and Downing Hall), share narrow back alleyways with middle-income homes, and some of them are a spit away from multifamily apartments. There are many such departures from the conventional suburban landscape. By suburban standards, houses here have modest lots (the very largest are only 90 feet wide by 130 feet deep), scanty setbacks from the street where broad porches address passersby, and garages, with granny flats on top, tucked in at the back.

  But the biggest violation of convention is the downtown area. No one in modern building history has opened a full-fledged town center on day one before 98 percent of the residences have even broken ground. It flies in the face of the cardinal rule of development that all commercial realty must be demand driven. Only a developer with very deep pockets, and the PR resources to pull in tourists, could underwrite this risk simply to beget an instantly vibrant town center. With barely five hundred residents, downtown already boasts fifteen stores, three restaurants, a coffeehouse, a cinema, a sprinkling of services, and about a dozen offices. Clearly chosen for the upscale tourist market (many of them are boutique retailers from bijou Winter Park, north of Orlando), the merchants I talk to are having a tough time making sales. The visitors ambling their way down Market Street are easily identifiable as denizens of Middle America. High socks cling tightly to the bare upper calves of the men, floral tote bags hang from the forearms of the women. None of them look as if they will be shelling out top dollar for a bar of Provençal soap at L’Occitane, the parfumerie, or a sylphic size 4 cocktail dress from M Fashion, or a twee English curio from Thomas Dunn, the antique furniture store. Time, repute, and retail Darwinism, I have been told, will take care of this problem. But things in Celebration, as I will soon learn, tend to happen prematurely.

  THE BIG DRAW

  Less than two years before, on Founders Day (November 18, 1995), almost five thousand people thronged around the marquees on an open field between route 192 and Celebration Place, the town’s 100-acre business park (opened six months earlier). Three hundred and fifty home sites were up for lottery, and prospective buyers waited, checkbooks in hand, to lay down a deposit if they drew a respectable number. A good deal more orderly than the Oklahoma land rush, it was still a scene from the storyboards—a heady stir of Disney fever, America fever, and property fever. A brass band played, and the county-fair ambience included balloons, hot dogs, and puppet shows. The assembled were from far and wide, but mostly from Florida, the eastern seaboard, and the Midwest. Few of the people standing in line had seen anything like a detailed rendering of a house, let alone a floor plan. They had been drawn there by gilded rumor and a boffo advertising campaign that often read like scenes from a Ray Bradbury story stripped of all the stuff that makes your scalp stiffen:

  There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch swings provided easy refuge from the care of the day. The movie house showed cartoons on Saturday. The grocery store delivered. And there was one teacher who always knew you who had that “special something.” Remember that place? Perhaps from your childhood. Or maybe just from stories. It held a magic all its own. The special magic of an American home town. Now, the people at Disney—itself an American family tradition—are creating a place that celebrates this legacy. A place that recalls the timeless traditions and boundless spirit that are the best parts of who we are.

  Or

  There is a place that takes you back to that time of innocence. A place where the biggest decision is whether to play Kick the Can or King of the Hill. A place of caramel apples and cotton candy, secret forts, and hopscotch on the streets. That place is here again, in a new town called Celebration.… A new American town of block parties and Fourth of July parades. Of spaghetti dinners and school bake sales, lollipops, and fireflies in a jar. And while we can’t return to these times we can arrive at a place that embraces all of these things. Someday, 20,000 people will live in Celebration, and for each and every one of them, it will be home.

  The brochures also promised them a state-of-the-art package of progressive education, high technology, unequaled health facilities, and quality homes, but the fantasy glue that sealed the package was a story about going home again. Traditionally, this country’s luckier migrants have always been promised something new, somewhere different, some place in the future they had never been before—whether in a little house on the prairie, a brownstone apartment in the city, a bungalow in a canyon, or a Cape Cod in the suburbs. This was a different kind of promise. It seemed to be channeling the sharp rush of baby-boomer hunger to be homeward bound to a place that lies well off the century’s main drag—behind the fast curve of modernity, where their grandparents had once lived. At prices ranging from $150,000 for a townhouse all the way to a cool million for a mansion, it would not be a cheap detour.

  Farther along route 192, Disney was drawing a different kind of migrant to Osceola County. Workers from Central America and the Caribbean were arriving to fill minimum-wage jobs at the theme parks. The same day that families from the suburbs of Detroit and Miami were banking on Disney’s gilt-edged name in the Celebration drawing, families from San Juan and Guadalajara with the promise of a thin Disney pay slip in hand were combing the apartment complexes just off the Kissimmee strip for affordable shelter. The company had at least two hands at work on this land, ushering people hither and thither, and the left one did not always care to know what the right one was up to.

&nbs
p; In the meantime, back on my first day in residence, in a place where I had imagined I would feel a little like a Hell’s Angel, I have already been upstaged. Real bikers have come to town! The leathery visitors—the men sporting a few too many whiskers and the women way too much mascara—are clustered in Sweet’s ice cream bar on Front Street, digesting the wares and absorbing the lakeside vibes. It’s a long way from Hollister, California, where the ton-up mavericks made their most infamous appearance almost exactly fifty years before (providing the storyline for the The Wild One), and yet Sweet’s, modeled to evoke that era, is a suggestive backdrop. These might well be the baddest boys and girls I am likely to see here, and yet they could have been hired hands, absorbed into the scenery. It will take a little while for this illusion of stagecraft to wear off. Celebration is a picture-book town with a Kodak moment on every corner, and it reminds all first-time visitors of a film set.

  My biker urges dissipate overnight, and the next day I trade them for a different American fantasy—a Cadillac of a certain age. Scouring the classified pages, I seek out a vehicle distinct from the freshly polished new cars in Celebration’s streets and parking lots, but respectable enough not to violate the town’s aesthetic standards (“unsightly vehicles” are prohibited, according to my rental agreement). After an adventurous foray around the metro region, I lay down cash for an ’85 Coupe de Ville, champagne colored and handsomely maintained. According to the ad, it is “fully loaded,” which appeals to the long-dormant road warrior in me, though I have little idea what the phrase means and will often wonder as the car gradually turns into a money pit, losing its life gracelessly in the last weeks of my Florida residence. As we cruise across the North Orlando mallscapes to an insurance shack to complete the sale, the owner, soft-spoken and bashful, casually reveals that he is an ex–bounty hunter. He even has an unpublished book manuscript detailing his exploits. Without much further prompting, he delivers a few gamey stories about the pursuit of outlaws with a price on their heads. He still sleeps with a shotgun under his bed. I resolve to change the tags as soon as I can.

  Back in Celebration, and en route to the DMV office in Kissimmee, I pick up a British tabloid newspaper, readily available for visiting tourists in the Goodings grocery store. It carries the story of Becky Howell, an Orlando waitress who has won a Porsche in an endurance contest. Her winning performance involves kissing the car continuously for 33 hours and 17 minutes, a feat that required medical attention to her cramped legs, swollen neck, and two loose teeth. Life without automobiles—the far-fetched dream of places like Celebration—would surely be dull for some, but people like Becky might soon learn to apply their affection in ways less hazardous to their health.

  2

  THE PRICE OF TRADITION

  “The dampers for some bathroom fans have been painted shut and therefore the fans cannot remove air. To test for this condition, pull off 4 sheets of toilet tissue. Moisten one end and stick the tissue on the end of a broom handle. Turn on the fan and hold the handle near the fan’s grill. The fan should pull the tissue up vigorously across the entire grill, not just part of the grill. Otherwise the damper is not free to open.” —extract from the renegade Celebration

  Homeowners Association’s “Town House Bulletin”

  By the time Celebration’s lake was being scooped out of the soggy soil, Osceola had become one of the most schizophrenic, and fastest-growing, counties in the United States. But you didn’t have to go very far to run into Old Florida. The county’s pine and palmetto prairie that ran south from the nineteenth-century cowboy towns of Kissimmee and St. Cloud to Yeehaw Junction was still under the sway of the Cattlemen’s Association and the old ranching families. Over 80 percent farmland and water, Osceola boasted a huge chunk of the largest ranch east of the Mississippi: the Mormon Church–owned Deseret Ranch, at 316,000 acres all told, with its thousands of head of Brahma cattle (the only breed with sweat glands). Cowboys, crackers, good old boys, and the Ku Klux Klan were no longer all-powerful, but they had not quite relaxed their grip on the county’s legislature. To the north and west, on the tourist strip between Walt Disney World and Kissimmee, the scrubland was now ruled by brand names: CK, Ray-Ban, Seiko, Reebok, Timberland. Haunted Gothic mansions, Pizza Huts, Denim Kingdoms, electronics flea markets, trailer parks, and time-share apartment blocks had sprouted overnight in fields still freshly splashed with cattle dung. Over half of Osceola’s jobs were now in tourism, residential land use had doubled between 1990 and 1997, and, at peak times, its seasonal visitors added another 70,000 to its standing population.1

  Celebration, at the far western end, is the new kid on this block. It is the indirect legacy of the short-lived local residency of Elias Disney, Walt’s father, who married Flora McCall, a vacationing Ohio schoolteacher, in Kissimmee, and then tried his luck, and failed, as a citrus grower in the late 1880s. But if you drive out west along the strip and make the turn left into town, expecting to see the future of the county, you will be met by rows of sumptuous, porch-saddled houses that have not been built in Florida for well over sixty years. You may be excused for asking, in the words of urban theorist Kevin Lynch, “What time is this place?”2 This is a version of the future, but it doesn’t look futuristic, not like the one you passed en route—Xanadu, the House of the Future (a space-agey tourist attraction that was outdated even when it was built well over a decade ago). Back in the earliest planning stages, there had been some talk about “dating” this town by providing it, Disney style, with a themed backstory. In one rendering, the town was built by survivors of a shipwrecked Spanish galleon, and the residents had an elaborate monument in the town square by which to remember their heroic ancestors.3 In another, Celebration had been built anew out of the rubble left by General Sherman’s ruinous march through the South.4 Thankfully, for the sake of the current residents, this planning approach, which bore the jaunty trademark of the Imagineers, was shelved. Instead, Celebration came into being as a neotraditional town, the product, among other things, of market research that showed how much prospective homebuyers would be prepared to pay for re-creating the past while preserving their modernity.

  CONSUMER SCIENCE

  Not long after I moved into my Celebration apartment, I took a house call from representatives of a company called European Lifestyle. This was a local start-up on route 192, outside of town, that offers interior design consulting, along with a range of other domestic services, including uniformed maids and car valeting. A lush brochure left at my door had guaranteed “bespoke, upscale” results that drew upon “centuries of traditional service,” and promised that I would be the envy of my neighbors. Clients in pursuit of the elegance and sophistication of Europe could choose from the “simple, functional and practical styles of Scandinavia” or the “reserved, classic originality” of Britain, the “flamboyant and laissez-faire liberalism” of France, the “formality” of Teutonic styles, or the “creativity” of Italy. From the evidence of their advertising, the company had probably assumed that recently moved-in Celebrationites would be ideal customers. So I made an appointment, hoping to learn something about how outsiders saw us.

  In deference to the crisp authority of the brochure, I had prepared myself for some fierce autocrat of style, a Cruella De Vil who would issue design edicts as she swanned around my apartment. I did not bargain for an hour of strenuous people pleasing from my visitors. The owner, Gail, had a relaxed and homespun manner, and a distinctly northern English accent with no superclass overtones. She had set up near Orlando because the embassy was willing to grant her a visa to work in a region with the highest rates of home building in the nation, and where there would be a crying need for her services. Sure enough, she had estimated that Celebration residents would be a steady source of income.

  Gail had just returned from a design show in London, and was full of news about what’s in at Harrods. Alice, her senior designer, was more tightly wound-up. A fast-talking, tanned blonde from Alabama, she warned me that she was itching
to be let loose to redesign my “little space.” Protocol demanded that she consult my tastes, however, and she promised that when the time came we would go shopping together to the showrooms. Passing on each of the national traditions on offer, I expressed my preference for Mediterranean colors and local decorative elements. This was a frank provocation, because it did not cater directly to the expertise of my guests. Tourists and part-time residents of Florida are expected to favor this indigenous style, which is basically a knockoff of the Hispanic fantasies woven by Addison Mizner in the first Palm Beach resort after the First World War. Tom Wolfe would call it something like Time Share Mediterranean. Gail and Alice were supposed to be offering something else, for residents with cosmopolitan taste, who don’t necessarily want to be reminded that they live in or near Orlando. But they were undeterred by my lack of imagination. What colors interested me? Turquoise and jasmine. Both were “in” at the moment. Everything I mentioned happened to be “in.” We agreed on leopard-skin prints, a choice my Cruella might have approved. Gail assured me they were “very masculine” and, of course, they were still “in at Harrods,” and would lend some dash to the stark black leather furniture I had brought down from New York. Gail suggested some “window treatments,” which I took to mean curtains, and a “faux finish to the back walls,” which I simply let pass with approving silence.