More outspoken than most, and certainly more iconoclastic (in a whimsical affront to the zoned taste of downtown retail displays, an undernourished E.T. sat prominently amid the pretty clutter in their window), the Zirbes still represent the majority of merchants who decided to bank on the Midas touch of the company name. But there are also a few retailers who see the Disney name as a liability. Greg Gentile, owner of Café D’Antonio, aims at building a regular clientele of “business travelers and discriminating diners.… We don’t want Mickey Mouse people here,” he admitted. These competing views are inevitable in a retail mix chosen for its diversity. But residents would still feel neglected, especially when they began to petition hard for a hardware store, fast-food outlet, and other convenience shops that could not be sustained with a small population, or that would upset the tasteful ambience of downtown. Among the four restaurants, Max’s Cafe was the only one that could offer a truly affordable family meal. While townsfolk tried to support some of the other stores out of loyalty, their needs were better served outside of town, where they had full access to the strip’s shopping facilities and yet suffered none of the aesthetic hardship of living with the strip. For the Christmas season of 1998, the town found a solution, albeit temporary, to the retail chill. TCC installed snowblowing machines on Market Street. Every evening, the streets were jammed as hundreds of locals and tourists flocked to see the showers of soapy flakes. Central Florida had finally discovered Celebration, as “the town where it snows.”
Living in an instant tourist attraction could be taxing, especially when the steady stream of visitors cruised through the residential areas. Ironically, in a town designed to favor the pedestrian over the auto, a semi-serious traffic complaint was directed at the sluggish crawl with which tourists made their tour of the town, retarding all in their wake. As one resident joked to me, “what we need is a minimum speed limit in this town.” The other traffic issue of relevance to New Urbanist design affected the narrow (usually 10 feet) alleyways that gave access to garages at the backs of houses, and were used as service roads for trash haulage. In many instances, it was difficult to park in the garages without running over the facing neighbor’s property, trucks had a tough time negotiating some bends, and the longer alleyways on curvilinear blocks posed a problem for two-way traffic. Eventually, the developer decided to add a couple of feet in width to the alleys in future phases of construction.
Some of the more skeptical residents saw the narrow lots and alleyways as simply an opportunity for the developer to maximize profits by squeezing more houses onto the block. But most accepted the principles of social interaction behind the design, praising the ease with which they could meet neighbors while parking at the rear, and hail passersby at the front, thanks to the small setbacks and porches. Without extensive backyards, children were obliged to mingle and play in the parks and public spaces. With the small lots, relief from extensive lawn maintenance, especially in luxuriant Central Florida, was considered a boon. On the other hand, the long, punishing summer took its toll on Celebration’s famous porch life, as did the Florida bugs. Some porch dwellers were unstoppable, and were renowned for doing the porch thing, greeting passersby as if it were a civic duty. But in most houses I found there was little porch activity or use. In an age before air conditioning, porches had been a physical necessity of life in the South, utilized until late in the evening when interiors cooled down sufficiently. Celebration’s buildings had been designed to breathe, as if there were no air conditioning, but of course there was and everyone used it.
The physical design of the town meant it was virtually impossible not to get to know your neighbors. Most Celebrationites readily acknowledged their social lives had been altered appreciably by moving to the new community from places without sidewalks, where neighbors did not know each other’s names, and mailbox meetings were the only social encounters. Rodney and Debbie Jones, local transplants from a gated Kissimmee subdivision of ten homes, had been told by a former neighbor, “it will be nice to get to know you when we both move to Celebration.” Dumbfounded at the small lot sizes, friends had warned Bob and Diane Kupchak, owners of a distinctive mansion on Arbor Circle: “It looks like you’re going to have to talk to your neighbors.”
Some portrayed their first days in Celebration as akin to a conversion experience. “It’s almost as if our neighbors had been chosen,” remarked Ed Hinson, a military retiree. Jorge Comesanas, an ex-contractor, and one of the very first residents in town, wrote effusively in an early Town Hall newsletter about the day he and his wife closed on their home: “Mimi looked at the sky, it was one of those summer days where the sun, low in the horizon, made the few clouds glow in a million colors with the beauty and tranquility of the heavens. She looked at me and said, ‘Look Jorge. Walt is even providing the clouds for our enjoyment!! This is a real Disney sky!’ ”27 Sonny Buoncervello, a self-described “Italian-American from Miami Beach who acts Jewish,” who manages a limo service and sells real estate, recalled his first walk downtown on the day his house closed. “I didn’t lock the house, I didn’t get in the car. It was the first time I had really walked in forty years.” The experience of meeting many new neighbors in a short period of time was often compared to a first year at college. In their fondest moments, many residents imagined Celebration as an outsize, open-air version of the bar in Cheers, though no such bar existed in town, or anywhere nearby.
Virtually everyone had a story to tell about public sociability. Social intimacy was another matter. The closer people live to one another the more likely they are to guard their privacy, and Celebration was no exception. Estate homeowners on the largest lots were the most comfortable, socially, with their immediate neighbors, while those in apartments and townhouse rows maintained a formal distance from neighbors with whom they share an internal wall. Typically, I myself found it was easier to be friendly with neighbors two doors down than with those next door. Stronger friendships tended to be the outcome of socializing beyond the block, through religious organizations, the school, or one of the town’s many community initiatives. Relationships of proximity to neighbors were most important only for those who were not very active in the community. These were the people less likely to develop relationships of affinity formed around common interests.
Is the social strength of the community a direct outcome of the physical design of the town, or is this strength due more to the activity and character of the residents themselves? This is the one question that goes to the heart of New Urbanist belief in the power of design, and I discussed it, often at great length, with all the residents I met. The answer is not a simple one. Drawn by the promotional appeals to join a community-minded town, many folks had moved here with the express purpose of making friends and becoming active pioneers. Given this glut of society-seeking residents in a fresh setting, the community’s early vitality owed as much to pioneer gusto as to the streets, the lots, and the porches. The more involved residents became in the public life of the community, the less they were willing to credit the physical design for the richness of their social interactions. Naturally, they believed it was the residents, and not the planners or the street design, that made the community what it was. The emergence of a “real” or “authentic” community, they believed, would feel quite distinct from the planners’ “sense of community” prepackaged along with the town and fostered through the town’s community managers. In addition, the social shape of the community owed a great deal to the distinctive character of these self-selecting pioneers. While Celebration had attracted more than its fair share of energetic citizens, many of these Type A people were used to being “leaders” rather than “followers,” and were as likely to be “competitive” as “cooperative” in their community participation and their claims on resources. This generated some conflict within the community that had nothing to do with the town plan or its design principles. As for the less involved residents, they were willing to concede that the high sociability of the community may
be a result of the town’s physical layout.
As Celebration’s first “suburb” began to spring up—in the North Village, noncontiguous with the central Celebration Village—the pioneers’ loyalty to the New Urbanist credo of mixed housing was plain to see. Those fortunate enough to locate in Phase One had already begun to develop a defensive, almost anti-suburban, attitude toward the future occupants of the outlying villages. Occupying a site bordered by a freeway, and close to neighboring tourist attractions, the North Village posed the largest sales challenge for the developer, and the site plan clearly reflected decisions directed at the market. Accordingly, the most affordable styles—the Garden Homes—were built in the least desirable location, next to the freeway, and the more expensive estate homes stand directly on the golf course and are clustered in an enclave set off from all the other houses, with a single approach road. Joe Barnes, the town architect in residence, assured me that the latter decision was determined by the land mass and the need to plan around protected trees and wetlands, but few of the Celebration Village pioneers saw these changes in design as anything other than commercially motivated. They almost universally regretted TCC’s decision to compromise the mixed-housing principles and conform to a more conventional subdivision pattern that would render class differences visible.
Estate homeowners in the original mixed-housing settlement had learned to submerge their class status. “Early on, I stopped asking people about the location of their homes,” explained Longmeadow resident Paul Collins, “in order to avoid any awkward appearance of privilege.” Residents were proud of the fact that no one owned a status Mercedes or BMW in Celebration Village itself. When North Village lots were first offered, David Tennant, an early pioneer, remarked to me that he had seen luxury cars touring that area of the development. Appealing to our shared country of origin, he made a wry analogy with New Lanark, the utopian Scottish company town of the nineteenth century (now restored by preservationists), where the mill owners’ mansions ended up being segregated from those of the workers. The outer villages of Celebration, it was widely assumed, would be closer to business as usual and might even attract a more “suburban” kind of resident.
THE RULES
While the developer could alter site plans at will, no homeowner or builder could stray very far from the copious dictates of the seventy-page Pattern Book. TCC’s single most original contribution to neotraditionalist building was the decision to revive the illustrated Pattern Book, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had provided architectural instruction to builders about how to maintain proportion and unity in the design of a town. A legacy of the architects’ handbook first developed by Vitruvius in the Late Roman Empire, and resuscitated by Andrea Palladio in Renaissance Italy, pattern books (especially Asher Benjamin’s 1827 American Builder’s Companion) had an enormous influence in post-Revolutionary America on building in the classical style. The use of these books, as handbooks of styles and model plans, continued through the Victorian period—in classics like Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences (1838), Andrew Jackson Downing’s Cottage Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), Gervase Wheeler’s Homes for the People (1855), and Calvert Vaux’s Villas and Cottages (1857)—and were consulted as late as the Colonial Revival of the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, it became increasingly common for lawyers, and not architects, to write the specifications for building codes and standards.
Celebration’s Pattern Book is a comprehensive volume of recommendations for the placement and design of houses within streetscapes. The community patterns establish “correct” proportions for everything from massing and setbacks to the height and opacity of fences (3′ 6″ and 60 percent for Cottage homes, 6′ and 100 percent for Estate homes), the depth of porches, and the recommended facade material and color, each laid out according to the size of the lot and house. Landscaping is also strictly regulated: precise percentages are decreed for the appropriate mix of grass, hedges, shrubs, and trees. The degree of variety is prescribed: “No more than 2 different species of canopy trees, 2 different species of ornamental trees, 5 different species of shrubs or hedges, and 4 different species of ground covers.” “No synthetic or artificial plant materials” are permitted, and no palm trees will be allowed in the front or side yards. The architectural patterns are addressed to the integral unity of the house, and govern such matters as the spacing between its elements (dormers, doors, porches, columns, and bays), laying down additional rulings about the color of cladding material and other facade features for each of the six prescribed housing styles. For the Coastal style, for example, all windows, trim boards, columns and railings should be white, but they are to be brown in the Mediterranean; pale green, pale ochre, or pale blue in the French; and “a deeper shade of the body color” in the Victorian.
Like DPZ’s Seaside code (only one page long, and specifying eight building types), the book is intended to be a guarantee of urban quality, governing the relationship between architecture and urbanism long after the developer has gone. But it is also a formidable marketing tool, lavishly illustrating the ambience of classical, civilized living for those in the market for good taste. With the planned addition of a chapter of patterns for the corporate campus, emphasizing a deco style called “Celebration Modern,” it will be an irresistible model for neotraditionalist developers to follow.
The bureaucratic rigor of the Pattern Book’s building and landscape codes regularly draws ridicule among locals and in the press. While there are few Celebrationites who regret the style policing—the rules are expressly intended to protect property values—there are many instances when deviations from the Pattern Book became a matter of dispute between a homeowner and Joe Barnes, the resident town architect responsible for reviewing and approving all building and landscaping plans. If a tasteful historical precedent for a deviation could be cited, then the homeowner had a good case to present, although mutual agreements about taste are a hard target to hit in cases where the detail is inconsistent with the vision of the Pattern Book. One dispute I came across involved the veto of large glass engravings of Victorian golfers on the front door of Al and Judy Ziffer’s home on Canaan Place. A precedent had been found in a real Victorian mansion, and Judy was approaching the dispute as “a First Amendment issue, a question of civil liberties. If it had cost my whole bankroll for my retirement,” she declared, “I’d have spent it.” The engravings eventually stayed on the door, though they had not met with official approval. Donna Latour reported a long and stressful series of approvals for her house on Golfpark Drive, where many of the features she wanted, including twelve-foot ceilings and low bay windows, were vetoed as incorrectly Victorian.
Buyers whose houses have been rectified in this way closely scrutinize each new home for signs of an overly permissive review. Would anyone ever be allowed to put shutters on their Queen Anne? In the Pattern Book, the interpretation of “Victorian” draws on the Carpenter Gothic cottage style (characterized by “steep roof pitches with deep gables and dormers”) and a style described as “a decorated Classical box with a full width porch.” Interpretation of the Pattern Book’s own definitions of historical style can be a complicated affair, and it is no surprise that the result often seems overly legalistic. Judgments about what is properly Victorian and what is not can only end up in the realm of farce, worthy of a Monty Python skit.
Residents who had experienced stringent reviews and inflexible codes in other developments felt the architectural approval process was moderate in comparison. Immensely affable, and in no way resembling the caricature of a stiff-necked, rule-obsessed bureaucrat (people, he says, “expect to find some mean guy behind a curtain with a big nose span”), Joe Barnes explained that the Pattern Book is intended as a set of “guidelines” emphasizing what a builder or homeowner “can do,” rather than a set of rules prescribing what cannot be done. Not surprisingly, this distinction is often lost on residents in the heat of a dispute. As the buildo
ut progresses, more leeway is being given to home buyers’ plans for idiosyncratic designs. One ornate neo-Gothic pile on Arbor Circle—known around town as the Addams Family house—was permitted after the owners, Diane and Bob Kupchak, transitioning from twenty years of high-rise condo living in Fort Lauderdale, proposed building a replica of the Parrot-Camp-Soucy House, a famous 1885 mansion near Atlanta. The design was approved, and the Kupchaks moved in, appropriately, on Halloween (the builders erected a temporary “Bates Motel” sign). At an earlier stage of construction, Barnes admitted, this level of eccentricity might not have passed muster. Now it can be regarded as one of the town’s landmark buildings. The construction of an especially vivid, olive-green Mediterranean villa on Hippodrome Park in the fall of 1998 caused even more of a stir. When asked, one neighbor hopefully mused, “It looks like a primer coat to me,” but added, with more resignation, “I guess every neighborhood has to have one.” Not surprisingly, many residents saw this sort of architectural license as bending the rules for the well-to-do. It was well known around town that the most expensive houses were proving the more difficult to sell, and so the palette of approved colors had been opened up.
The Parrot-Camp-Soucy replica on Arbor Circle. (Photo: the author)
Architectural styles have always been beholden to rules, but the coordinated orderliness of Celebration’s classical styles is an entirely modern invention. For anyone truly interested in historical authenticity, the archives have a much more messy story to tell. Heritage-minded preservationists don’t like to be reminded that Greek temples and English cathedrals were once brightly painted. As for the Colonial landscape, those picture-book houses painted white with black shutters didn’t actually exist until well after the 1790s (they were stained red or green before). The idyllic village green, as J. B. Jackson reminds us, was a “bleak, uncared-for open space where cows and horses grazed, children played and where the militia drilled once or twice a year.” Tree-lined streets did not become a feature of town landscapes until the 1800s, and “the smooth, close-cropped lawn was unheard of.”28
The Celebration Chronicles Page 11
