The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  9 Town Hall Newsletter, January 30, 1998.

  CHAPTER 11

  1 Mark Pinsky, “Celebration Church to be Disney’s 1st,” Orlando Sentinel, September 20, 1996, A1–12.

  2 Quoted in Deborah Kovach Caldwell, “The First Church of Disney World,” Dallas Morning News, July 12, 1997, G-3.

  3 Ibid. As it happens, the Presbyterian Church had already bared its social conscience as a major stockholder in the Disney Company. Troubled by the company’s use of sweatshop subcontractors in Haiti, China, and Burma, the church had helped place resolutions for shareholder review on the annual proxy in 1997. One resolution called on management to establish supplier standards in the countries to which it outsourced low-wage work, to guarantee a living wage to these workers, and to protect their right to organize. Another resolution called for “comparison of compensation packages for company officers with the lowest and average wage of Disney contract workers in the U.S. and three low-wage countries, including Haiti.” At the time, Michael Eisner was earning $97, 600 per working hour from salary and stock options, while Haitian workers were being paid 20 cents per waged hour to make Pocahontas and Lion King T-shirts. The resolutions had drawn a surprising volume of shareholder support (8 percent in favor, with 8 percent abstaining), and the company had made some limited reforms in response. Repeat resolutions in subsequent years followed on the company’s unwillingness to take any further steps in improving labor conditions among its contract suppliers.

  4 Leland Kaiser, “Health Care in the 21st Century,” Celebration Journal. This “inaugural issue” is the only issue of the journal, and is undated.

  5 “Celebration Gets Office OK,” Orlando Business Journal, March 14, 1997

  6 Edward Ericson Jr., “Hospital Vote Makes Architect Sick,” Orlando Weekly, April 3, 1997; Phil Galewitz, “Disney Isn’t Used to Getting ‘No’ for an Answer,” Palm Beach Post, April 20, 1997, 1F.

  7 Peter Covino, “State Deal Paves Way for Hospital at Celebration,” Osceola News-Gazette, January 8, 1998, A5.

  8 Holden Heights Community Action Plan: A Targeted Community Initiative, Orlando, November 1998.

  CHAPTER 12

  1 Quoted in Beth Dunlop, “Designs on the Future,” Architectural Record, January 1996, p. 67.

  2 See John Taylor, Storming the Magic Kingdom: Wall Street, the Raiders and the Battle for Disney (New York: Knopf, 1987).

  3 Donn Tatum, in a 1967 press release, quoted in Alan Bryman, Disney and his Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1955), p. 116.

  4 “A Sweet Deal for Disney is Souring its Neighbors,” Business Week, August 8, 1988, p. 60.

  5 If Celebration had stayed within Reedy Creek, its residents would have been able to vote on the affairs of Disney World. When the idea of de-annexation first came up, in the mid-1980s, Orange County officials, ever anxious about Disney’s tax status, were concerned that this plan of transferring resident-voters out of Reedy Creek might be a way of eluding improvement and service fees to the county. See Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 423–24, n 91.

  6 Mike Kloehn, “A Local Government’s Perspective of Celebration,” Proceedings of Growth Management Short Course, sponsored by Florida Chamber of Commerce, Kissimmee, April 10–11, 1996, p. 654.

  7 Lawrence Lebowitz, “Disney Plans a Celebration of Life, Work, Play in Osceola,” Orlando Sentinel, April 30, 1991, A-1, 4.

  8 Stanley Shenkman, quoted in “Landmark Center Plan Enormous,” Osceola Sentinel, October 1, 1997, 1.

  9 “No Exemption,” editorial, Osceola News Gazette, September 11, 1997, A4.

  10 Jamie Floer, “Celebration Says It Should Get Exemption, But Pays Tax Bill,” Osceola News Gazette, September 13, 1997, front page.

  11 Joe Barnes, town architect, also left the company to be general manager of a neotraditional community called I’On, in the Charleston suburbs. Designed by DPZ and Dover Kohl, it is being developed by Vince Graham, who built the highly successful New Urbanist development of Newpoint, near Beaufort, in South California.

  12 Duany Plater-Zyberg, Anton Nelessen, and Robert Kramer from Haile Plantation were on one team; St. Joe, UDA, Cooper Robertson, Arvida, and the Rouse Company on another; Peter Calthorpe on a third; with Mesirow Stein and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill heading up the winning group, as Orlando Partners.

  13 David Olinger, “Disney Rules a Real Kingdom,” St. Petersburg Times, September 30, 1996, 4b.

  14 Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (New York: Verso, 1997).

  CHAPTER 13

  1 Forest Hills Gardens, a railroad suburb nine miles from Manhattan, developed by the Russell Sage Foundation from 1911, is perhaps the best example, as Peter Hall points out in Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 124. Clarence Perry was the planner most involved in Forest Hills. His concept of the “neighborhood unit”—a compact, walkable residential area, whose population density is defined by its elementary school—had an influential impact on subsequent model plans, most famously on Radburn, New Jersey. Designed to exclude through traffic, the Radburn layout was subsequently absorbed into the auto-driven principles of postwar suburban development.

  2 Michael Pollan, “Breaking Ground: ‘The Truman Show’ and a Seaside Lawn,” New York Times, June 4, 1998.

  3 See Constance Perin, Everything in its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

  4 In February 1999, a monthly newspaper—the Celebration Independent—made its debut in a community that was already information rich. Published by resident Alex Morton, the first issue carried a front-page story excoriating BFI garbage disposal company for its deficient recycling program and for its use of large trucks that ravaged the grass on back alley lawns. A cautious editorial in the second issue applauded the “changes” at Celebration School. Most of the other stories boosted events and personages around town. Neither issue alluded to the ongoing history of construction problems.

  5 Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 526.

  6 See Edward Eichler and Marshall Kaplan, The Community Builders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); and Marc Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Large landowners, some of them with a clear social mission, like Robert Simon and James Rouse, had become community builders by the early 1960s, and, like Disney, none had prior experience in real estate development. Mission Viejo, Foster City, Irvine, Valencia, El Dorado Hills, Rancho Bernardo, and others were planned and built in California, Reston in Virginia, Columbia in Maryland, and several in Florida—Miami Lakes, Coral Springs, Poinciana, Weston, Palm Coast, Viera, Port LaBelle, Tampa Palms—each with thousands of acres to develop and population projections of up to 100,000. Companies like Gulf Oil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Mobil, Exxon, Westinghouse, and General Electric were large investors in these communities. Primarily aimed at the middle- to upper-income housing market, the towns also attracted a broad spectrum of support from local and state governments, all too happy to see property values rise and alternatives to the greed of merchant builders flourish. Most were granted special district status, or extensive zoning and planning powers under a planned community ordinance.

  7 Several failed attempts were made by the Johnson administration to petition Congress to authorize loans directly to community developers. Under HUD’s New Town Corporation (preceded by the New Communities Act of 1968), several hundred millions dollars of grants and loans were issued to sixteen new communities to support front-end expenditure on land and infrastructure. Contrary to popular wisdom, several of these places survived successfully—The Woodlands in Texas, Harbison in South Carolina, Jonathan in Minnesota, Riverton in New York, and Shenandoah in Georgia. See Reid Ewing, Developing Successful New Communities
(Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1991), and James Clapp, New Towns and Urban Policy: Planning Metropolitan Growth (New York: Dunellen: 1971).

  8 Mike Davis, “Homegrown Revolution,” in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 151–220.

  9 William Scott, In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 41–42.

  10 Richard Schickel, The Disney Version (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 34.