The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  Haber’s view of the town as personifying his own ideal of a pure political utopia was probably exceptional. When people loosely referred to Celebration as a “utopia,” they generally meant that it was a good place to start over again, where other places had failed, or that it was a place of general happiness where no one had reason, other than his or her own personal misfortune, to be disenchanted. The use of the phrase had little connection to the venerable American tradition of utopian communities.

  In the fanciful European mind, the New World had always been imagined as a utopian place, with apocalyptic dimensions—the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of a new order. The early Puritan settlements, with their own form of community covenant, including a New Urbanist–type rule that required residents to live within a mile and half of the meetinghouse, established a model for hundreds of utopian religious communities to follow. These were founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the principle of the communal ownership of property by sects like the Shakers, the Rappites, the Moravian Brethren, the Zoar Separatists, and the True Inspirationists of Amana. Some survived for hundreds of years, and a few are still extant. The nineteenth-century versions were mostly secular, like Brook Farm, New Harmony, Fruitlands, Skanateales, Nashoba, Oneida, and the Phalanxes, and were heavily influenced by the anarchist and socialist ideas of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. More than a hundred sprang up before the Civil War, each with its own polished vision of a new age to come where inhabitants would be truly free to pursue a rational form of the good life.6 The equivalent in this century were the thousands of hippie communes founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s as living laboratories of a communal freedom that the materialism of consumer society promised but could never deliver. However short-lived, these were all intentional communities, planned as pocket-size correctives to the corruption and inequalities of dominant society. All of them, from the religious to the countercultural versions, experienced the tension between freedom and order that is intrinsic to the planned utopia.

  While Celebration was living through the same tensions, none of its creators or residents saw the town as a descendant of these earlier utopias. More important were the utopian ideals of the Dream Home and the Main Street town. Also relevant, perhaps, was Florida’s own utopian backdrop, having built long and hard on its early reputation as the site of the Fountain of Youth. Under Spanish rule, it had offered religious sanctuary to runaway slaves from the southern states. In its self-promotion as a frontier haven for settlers, it lured Civil War veterans, black and white, to a “soldier’s paradise” by offering free land.7 More recently, Florida had flourished as a resort and vacation utopia, and, thanks to Social Security, a retirement utopia where 25 percent of each generation of Americans now come to live out the rest of their lives, free from northern taxes and chills.

  In the historical utopias, community was an intentional goal shared by individuals with allegiances to commonly held beliefs. In today’s planned development, community is mostly a marketing term, aimed at a consumer niche to be attracted and recruited through effective advertising. True to the gospel of the “clustering of America,” TCC had done its share of niche-market research. But the company had also staked its brand name on the premise that residents would forge common bonds that exceeded the mere “sense of community” featured in advertising for the town. This was something of a gamble, since the outcome of overly zealous community building can easily threaten the property interests of residents and the developer. But the genius of the marketing concept would override any potential conflict. In Celebration, residents would be protecting their private interests precisely by building strong community bonds. The more community-minded the town became, the more its property values would improve, since its homes were built to attract buyers who wanted to come and be community builders. Of course, since no one wanted any single group or initiative to overreach itself, Town Hall and the Celebration Foundation were there, in part, to manage and channel the zeal.

  Between the two, community management had become a fine art. The Foundation, staffed entirely by women, kindled the flames of volunteerism. Herrington’s checking role at Town Hall was decidedly more paternal, though he lamented to me on more than one occasion that his job was mostly restricted to “housekeeping duties.” Professionally ambitious, Herrington was a leading light in the national association of community managers (the Community Association Institute), and while his Celebration job was highly prestigious, he was clearly hungry for responsibilities that would give him a more active role in designing communities.8

  This personal drive was reflected in the Town Hall newsletter that always carried the stamp of his own opinion. While the force of this opinion was powerful, it did not always sway residents. One good example appeared in the January 1998 issue, where Brent implored residents to kick the habit of referring to different parts of town as West Village or North Village, and even worse, Phase I and Phase II. These, he argued, are developer’s short-term labels, and

  tend to reinforce parochial thinking, stratification and division … words that do not currently come to mind when I think of Celebration. In adopting the “town” model, Celebration is committed to an entirely different ethos than is found in a typical residential subdivision. At Celebration, we are all stakeholders—whether apartment residents, estate home owners, cottage home owners, garage apartment residents, retail merchants or office building workers. We all have a stake in the future of the town. As fellow stakeholders, our shared goal should be to build a sense of community, shared responsibility and civic pride that runs through the width and breadth of our town. Somehow, dividing ourselves into “villages” seems to run counter to what Celebration stands for.9

  The proper frame of reference, he observed, should be traditional towns like Savannah, or Cambridge, or Kissimmee, where residents say “I live on the north side just off of Exeter Drive,” or “I live near Waterford Park.” In his next newsletter, Brent recorded that a majority of the respondents to his cause expressed agreement, but this one really was a losing battle. Around town, I found that most folks had taken the advice with a grain of salt, and were lacing their conversation with heavily ironic phrases like “In what used to be called North Village …”

  In September, Herrington abruptly announced his resignation. Those who knew him personally did not seem surprised, but the community as a whole was stunned. There was much speculation, though no real evidence, that he had been fired by Disney. Some residents viewed his resignation as an act of disloyalty, as if his duties had been bound by an oath of public office. Others surmised that he had been in a tight political corner, both as a Town and Country homeowner facing possible litigation with the builder and as the father of the only two children in town who could never be pulled from the school. He left for a plum job at DC Ranch, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the developer DMB was building a similar, but larger, master-planned community. Recruited to Celebration after the rules and governance structure were established, his job description had indeed been confining. With DMB he would have a more integral role in community planning, a business he considered more like a “cause.” In the course of our last conversation, he acknowledged that Disney’s connection to the town did not always help the advancement of this cause: “As wonderful and fun as it is to be a part of Celebration, it is a one-project deal, and, quite honestly, as powerful an asset as the Disney organization is in getting this project done, its sponsorship of the project to some extent colors the world’s perception of whether any of this is replicable, or meaningful in real terms.”

  Herrington joined the steady exodus of planners, managers, and teachers from the Celebration project, reinforcing the impression that a job in this town or at the school was simply a career stepping-stone. The name was like gold leaf on a job résumé, and he acknowledged that there was a “constant drumbeat of opportunities for everyone” associated with it. Herrington had done more than anyone to build morale, yet his abrupt de
parture did little to diminish residents’ perception of management as a corporate revolving door.

  TWO FROM LEFT FIELD

  Celebration had not witnessed anything on the scale of a community “barn raising,” but there were myriad small, interpersonal efforts that marked it as a caring community where people pulled together. Word spread very quickly about illnesses and personal difficulties, and the casualties were often deluged with gifts in the form of food and goodwill packages. More than one Celebrationite observed that they initially thought they had moved to a community with a high proportion of misfortunes, accustomed as they were to the anonymity of suburbia. It was clearly a place where residents could feel that they would be supported in the event of some personal mishap, and in ways that went far beyond neighborly expectations of mutual help.

  Even so, several community initiatives had taken on an organized life of their own. There were two—quite different in nature—that I chose to follow closely in the course of my year. The first was a plan to start a Montessori school, undertaken by a small group of residents against all odds. The other evolved out of the time-honored institution of block parties.

  The Montessori initiative grew out of residents’ dissatisfaction with the day-care services provided by Children’s World, a local company awarded an exclusive franchise by the developer. These services were widely perceived as overpriced and underattentive to young children’s needs. So, too, there was the dissatisfaction with Celebration School, originally planned to include a preschooling component, until the funding ran into complications. Several parents met to discuss an alternative—“a much better school at a fraction of the cost”—with the potential, eventually, to provide K–5 education. This group included residents with a wide range of incomes and was spearheaded by the resilient Lance Boyer, the Domino’s Pizza employee with a wry wit and a healthy instinct for independent equality of opinion. It began to meet regularly in the fall of 1997 to investigate all possibilities, and by the early summer had succeeded in launching plans for the school. It became the first truly successful independent initiative in Celebration.

  As the group built confidence in its efforts, the reception of my own attendance at meetings shifted. I progressed from being ribbed as a “spy in our midst” to being listed in Lance’s minutes as “scribe” and finally “historian.” This wasn’t simply a twist of Lance’s mischievous spirit. The first several meetings were marked by a decidedly conspiratorial air, as if the attendees were contemplating a coup against Disney. In the course of one of them, a mother in the group thought out loud, “If we could only get our foot in the door,” adding, on reflection, “Isn’t that silly? We live here.” Whenever someone made a disparaging comment about the company, my presence was acknowledged: “Did you get that down, Andrew?” No one was sure how the developer would react to an alternative educational initiative that intended to go all the way, and group members assumed, from the outset, that TCC would not be terribly helpful at all. The group was already disheartened by a flat response to their initial overtures. At Town Hall, Lance had been told that “surveys show that everyone wants a Montessori school, but it usually doesn’t work out. It’s the same with a hardware store.” The reference here was to the store that everyone in town wanted to see happen, but that the population was not large enough to support.

  Convinced that there was a big difference between a school and a hardware store, the group pushed ahead. They were now faced with the Herculean tasks of fund-raising and finding a suitable site on Celebration’s costly land. At that time, the going price was $330,000 an acre, almost three times the price of land outside the White Vinyl Fence. Over the course of several months, the group doggedly explored every possible site within a feasible radius of the town, and made loose contractual commitments to a Montessori principal in the region. The initiative might have fallen through at several points, but it was driven by a visible passion for the children’s well-being, and also, in some part, by the view that residents should have more than “a foot in the door” when it came to creating institutions independent of TCC. In due time, Lance and others learned the tactics of approaching Disney from other residential contractors in town, and eventually won over key TCC employee residents who decided that their own children might benefit best from a Montessori education. By late spring, the group had secured a site and a floor plan, teachers, and the registered interest of about forty families, and they laid down a deposit on a three-thousand-square-foot French estate home in the area to the east of downtown, where residents are permitted to run a business from their homes.

  The only serious setback occurred over internal disagreements about financing. Some members felt that the seed investors in the school would, in effect, be subsidizing the education of others, especially much wealthier parents who could easily afford private tuition for their kids. Would it not be fair, then, for these investors to expect a fair market return, by raising the tuition rate and charging market value for use of the space? This gave rise to a heated debate about the principles behind the initiative. What should be the goal of the group? To open the school at the lowest cost to everyone in the community? Or to make a reasonable return on a for-profit institution? Questions like this stirred up a small hornet’s nest, as the group factionalized for several weeks, one side pleading “from the heart” their simple cause of furthering education, the other adopting a more hard-nosed business approach. Amy Gould-Pilz, director of the Children’s Playgroup in town and an active Montessori participant from the outset, regretted the intrusion of class resentment in the discussions, but was hardly surprised. “There’s a reason why suburbs are divided into different income levels,” she joked. The specter of class friction faded when a pragmatic business plan (seven large investors with limited return on their investments) eventually prevailed over the more egalitarian proposal (many small stakeholder investors in a not-for-profit corporation). On September 3, the building broke ground, only a year after the group had first met, and the school opened its doors to fifty students in June 1999.

  Low-intensity class friction will flourish in any mixed-income community, and though muted, it was hardly absent from the social life of distinct neighborhoods in Celebration. Each block consisted of the same lot sizes, and so block parties, inevitably, took on a local, socioeconomic flavor. Residents in the middle-income homes took pride in the fact that all the townsfolk, including apartment tenants, were welcome at their potluck parties. Those in the newer and less central neighborhoods, like Lake Evalyn, which hosted the least expensive, detached homes, made a special effort to attract the rest of the townsfolk. It did not escape notice that residents on blocks of estate homes often had their parties catered and that the guest lists were more carefully zoned. In April, Town Hall launched its “block party trailer” (outfitted with barbecue grills, stereo system, ice chests, hula hoops, and water sprinkler games) for general use. Since every act of Town Hall was closely analyzed, the chuck wagon was perceived by some as an intervention in the “block party wars” and as a subtle invitation to keep these events nonexclusive and noncompetitive.

  Competition aside, one street had already achieved an unsurpassable record for its potluck performance. On Honeysuckle—an early pioneer row with middle-range Cottage lots—the zest for neighborliness was running far ahead of expectation. Regular monthly parties were slated at residents’ houses for almost two years in advance, and each was announced with ornate invitations. The driving force on Honeysuckle was the home team of Darlene and Fred Rapanotti, who supervised the soirees with cosy precision. Originally from Garden City on Long Island, with a “five-and-dime on every street corner,” the Rapanottis were one of the town’s many (ex-)military couples, long accustomed to the regulated environments of military housing. In addition, theirs was one of the houses decorated as a teeming shrine to Disney memorabilia. Shelves, tables, and wall space were lined with figurines, pictures, and sculptures of Walt’s entire entourage, including an awesome rendering of Cinderel
la’s Castle. The Rapanotti home was also a fount of hospitality, and I was always received there with uncommon largesse. Of Chinese-American descent, and with a culinary range to match, Darlene’s no-nonsense efforts at pioneering the potluck circuit were justly famous and had been lovingly archived. An attendance book registered residents’ comments at each event, a photograph album recorded past gatherings, and a range of custom invitations from each party were preserved. Darlene, who worked at Disney’s Caribbean Cruise Lines, had also been active in exporting the potluck protocols to other neighborhoods and had aspirations to link the several circuits together in an annual, communitywide bash. The Honeysuckle pot-lucks had hosted votes on block adornments—coordinated Christmas decor on the mailboxes—and Darlene wanted to organize discussions on how best to represent the town to visiting journalists in hopes of dispelling the media cliché that “we are all mechanical puppets and Disney mannequins.”