Shakedown at the Magic Kingdom

Walt Disney World is full of hidden history - experiments that didn't last, ideas that didn't make it, things that have either forgotten about or totally elided. These are, of course, the areas that the intrepid Walt Disney World researcher seeks to illuminate, but more often than not she's going to find herself at some opaque but inevitable dead end. Sometimes, however, a pattern begins to emerge, and today we're going to plunge very deeply into speculation and informed guessery. Sadly the decisions which shaped the history of the Magic Kingdom are largely not recorded or, if they are recorded, they're not available to consult. But the evidence speaks loudly. Something very significant happened in the early months of Walt Disney World, something that shaped Disney's design strategies for a very long time, and that something has a lot to do.... with food.

First, some on the ground reports.

"The theme park... the Magic Kingdom, was built exactly the way Walt Disney always intended it.. [...] We called it "the vacation kingdom of the world". I wrote that slogan, too. Before this, nobody went to Orlando for a vacation... nobody. In the late sixties, we were totally focused on Walt Disney World, of course. The company had made the decision, in late 1967, to go ahead with it. From then on, we just ran as fast as we could, to get that project open. We really didn't have a breather because we had to meet some surprising demands from the public. Buzz Price had originally projected six million people for Walt Disney World's first year. By the time we were really building the Florida site in 1969, Disneyland was already getting eight million a year. We tried to increase the capacity to handle eight million, and we felt a constant pressure during the Florida development. [...] But soon we were doing over ten million the first year alone." - Marty Sklar, The "E" Ticket, Number 30, 1998

"Nearly 40,000 visitors – the biggest crowd yet – jammed Walt Disney World turnstiles Saturday as the $400 million “Magic Kingdom” kicked off its three-day formal opening celebration with the arrival of a plane-load of Hollywood notables. [...] Crowds have increased steadily since the Oct. 1 opening for a three-week “shakedown” for employees and attractions. Opening with 10,400 visitors, the park had averaged around 15,000 daily with 20,000 to 25,000 on the weekends." - Orlando Sentinel, October 24, 1971

"The day after Thanksgiving, traffic ground to a halt ten miles up International Drive. By 2:00 in the afternoon, with thousands of cars crammed in and around its parking lot and 56,000 guests squeezed inside the park, Disney was forced to close the access ramp leading off Interstate 4. All four lanes of traffic slowed to a crawl in both directions, creating a 30-mile stretch of confused, angry motorists. Inside the park, guests had to wait two hours or more to ride the submarines, Country Bear Jamboree, and other top attractions. [...] There were also not enough restaurants nor time to instantly build them. Instead, Disney set up temporary quick-service stands throughout the park. In Fantasyland, a tent-like structure went up to sell hot dogs and hamburgers, and another sold pizza." - David Koenig, Realityland

Now anybody who's been to both Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida is bound to play the comparison game; in a way it's unfair to both attractions but in another it is indeed invited. Tony Baxter describes it perhaps most charitably when he terms Disneyland "charming" and The Magic Kingdom "spectacular". Although the difference isn't too shocking when comparing strictly acreage - 85 acres versus 107 acres - Disneyland is simply stuffed to the gills with stuff. As a result we find attractions stacked on top of each other, shops wedged strangely into the spaces between and restaurants often filling as much pedestrian space as they dare. Viewed today, especially compared to the cavernous meal spaces regularly offered to Walt Disney World visitors where space is not at a premium, major Disneyland eateries seem more like upgraded snack bars with two dozen extra tables.

If we go back in time and think about major food offering at Disneyland in 1971, you basically have the Plaza Pavilion, Coke Corner and Plaza Inn on Main Street, The Tahitian Terrace in Adventureland, The Blue Bayou, Creole Cafe, and French Market in New Orleans Square, the Casa De Fritos, Golden Horseshoe, and Aunt Jemima Kitchen in Frontierland, and then the Captain Hook Pirate Ship in Fantasyland and the Tomorrowland Terrace in Tomorrowland, and none of them are especially huge. Of the twelve mentioned above, five of them are table service restaurants. And of course there were plenty of snack stands and smaller cafes located between as well, like the Hills Brothers Coffee House on Main Street.

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Now let's compare that to what the Magic Kingdom offered in 1971. There was the Town Square Cafe, Refreshment Corner and Crystal Palace serving Main Street, with the Adventureland Veranda, The Liberty Tree Tavern, King Stephan's Banquet Hall, the Pinocchio Village Haus, and the Tomorrowland Terrace pulling for the rest of the park. Yes, that's about it. In terms of quick service, high capacity locations, the list is even shorter: Adventureland Veranda, Pinocchio Village Haus, and Tomorrowland Terrace.

Gentlemen... THE FUTURE!

The Mile Long Bar in Frontierland is listed as being open in an October 1971 Walt Disney World News, but an internal cast publication indicates that it wasn't ready until mid November. Pecos Bill Cafe next door wouldn't be on-line until December, and was therefore of little use to Disney in dealing with those nightmarish Thanksgiving 1971 crowds. Since the same issue of Walt Disney World News makes no mention of the Westward Ho shop next to Country Bear Jamboree, we can assume that it was not ready until later and that the walk from Country Bear Jamboree to the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes landing was a long walk past seemingly empty facades. Everything West of Country Bear Jamboree was unfinished.

The single restaurant listed for October 1971 in Liberty Square is the Tavern, although Sleepy Hollow Refreshments is listed on late 1971/early 1972 souvenir maps, meaning it may have been accidentally excluded or simply wasn't ready for opening day. The massive multilevel, multikitchen (remember that there was a serving counter upstairs until the late 1980's) Columbia Harbour House would not bow until mid 1972 and hadn't even had her name decided - on an early souvenir map the restaurant is called the Nantucket Harbour House. The Diamond Horseshoe was ready but was not treated as or expected to be used as a restaurant, always listed as an attraction. The sole shop that was ready - the tiny Tricornered Hat Shoppe near Frontierland - stood alone, for the bulk of Liberty Square's shops would not open until early 1972.

Missing from early maps and listings are two fairly significant Fantasyland establishments - Lancer's Inn and The Round Table - walk-up, take out restaurants occupying the space between Snow White's Adventures and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, meaning this stretch of facades across from the Submarine Lagoon was a possible original home for the Fantasyland Art Festival portrait artists. Lancer Inn and round Table do appear together on early 1973 maps, likely replacing the temporary tents described by Koenig. Instead, a new building near the Mad Tea Party was built to house the portrait artists, until a new juice bar moved in and displaced them once again in 1979. Lancer Inn and Round Table can today be observed in relatively untouched form as Mrs. Potts' Cupboard and The Friar's Nook.

Look in the background for a peek at The Round Table -- Photo from Daveland

Tinkerbell's Treasures, Merlins Magic Shop and the Aristocats Gift Shop didn't seem to exist, rendering the Cinderella Castle Courtyard another empty stretch of facades. Tomorrowland fared the worst of all, offering only the Grand Prix Raceway, Skyway station, a shop at the base of the Skyway station near the restrooms, and the Tomorrowland Terrace.

Now between 1971 and 1975, when Card Walker declared Phase One of Walt Disney World complete, Disney did indeed add shops and attractions all over the Magic Kingdom... but most of what they added was restaurants. Astonishing numbers of restaurants. Based on the information above and data I've compiled elsewhere, the roster looks something like this:

1972
The Fife & Drum Snack Bar
Columbia Harbour House
The Lunching Pad (inside the Space Port shop)
The Round Table
Temporary outdoor cafeteria near the future site of the Carousel of Progress

1973
Lancer Inn
Aunt Polly's Dockside Inn
Cantina (inside the fort on Tom Sawyer Island)

1974
El Pirata y el Perico snack stand
The Plaza Restaurant
The Plaza Pavilion (bridging Tomorrowland and Main St. on the south side)

1975
The Space Bar (base of the Peoplemover platform)

That's twelve additional food service locations - two of them massive and one offering table service and requiring Card Walker's elaborate Swan Boats to move to a newly built boarding location on the hub. The fact that Disney closed the original Swan Boat Landing and moved the operation of an attraction - one designed explicitly to increase capacity - to make way for a restaurant carved out of the old Borden Ice Cream Shoppe shows where Disney's priorities were.

It's easy to imagine their terror. It can be sensed in Marty Sklar's quote above. WED had given itself five years, in 1969, to exceed attendance of ten million. They succeeded in less than a year. But even worse, the park and resort was stretched to it's maximum almost immediately. Construction on Villas in nearby Lake Buena Vista began in November 1971. In 1972, the tiny clubhouse for the Palm and Magnolia golf courses was already being built out into a 151 room resort. Fort Wilderness expanded in 1974 and the Polynesian in 1978. Restaurants, bars, and dinner shows were added all along the way. It all speaks of a panicked response somewhere in Disney's corporate corridors - call it the Phantom Food Scare of 1971. The evidence is everywhere, except for the evidence of the panic itself.

If the numbers aren't compelling - opening nearly twice as many eateries as attractions in a four year span - then perhaps heading back to Disneyland will make the case clearer. Bear Country, opening just six months after Walt Disney World, was the first major addition to Disneyland since The Haunted Mansion in 1969, and existed primarily to add the extremely popular Country Bear Jamboree. Since the Florida version was then regularly commanding a three hour line which could only move every fifteen minutes or so (which means that besides the group in the theater - 350 people - there could be nine additional full theater loads of guests waiting outside and in the lobby, or over 3000 people, or about 15% of the park's total attending crowd), WED built two identical theaters back to back, and placed them in a new area of Disneyland which could accommodate a massive exterior queue. Next to the new attraction Disney placed a massive multilevel restaurant, The Hungry Bear. Even thirty-eight years later it still ranks amongst Disneyland's most massive.

In fact, everything added to Disneyland following the opening of Walt Disney World was built on a scale quite unprecedented in Walt Disney's little family park. Pinocchio Village Haus, if not quite the cavernous dining hall found in Florida, was added to the Anaheim Fantasyland in 1983 and offers seating for several hundred. The entire Flight to the Moon / Mission to Mars attraction was ripped out to make way for a huge new indoor restaurant as part of the ill-fated Tomorrowland expansion of 1998. Today even the intimate Blue Bayou is stuffed to the gills with tables and chairs, far beyond the original intentions.

Clearly Disney's facilities had been severely taxed in the effort to get Walt Disney World open and make it a success, and to paraphrase Sklar, the "surprising demands" from the public touched off a mad scramble to stay ahead. In the process, Disney's methods of evaluating the anticipated level of demand and their idea of scope had altered dramatically.

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Today in the era of bicoastal Disney passes and special events it's easy to look at the scope of the Magic Kingdom versus the Disneyland original and see something lacking or - perhaps more pointedly - see the start of the sort of thinking that would lead to the massive, monumental open spaces of Tokyo Disneyland and EPCOT Center, and perhaps something strangely impersonal. And although the Magic Kingdom does not lack for quiet, intimate corners, those massive walkways are still dwarfed by later inventions such as Communicore Center or any old walkway between buildings in Tokyo Disneyland. In Florida the scale of the street may be wider, but the scale of the buildings are built to match. Main Street may be twice as wide but the Main Street facades are bigger and taller, and the castle is enormous, costing alone what all of Disneyland cost in 1955.

What we have here then, apparently, is not just a key moment in the operation of the Florida property or even a key turning point in attendance at Walt Disney World but an opportunity to localize at a specific time and place the moment where Disney's theme park design strategy shifted radically, and the key to uncovering this secret history is in the food offerings of the Magic Kingdom. The Magic Kingdom was built up to hold 80,000 people, and EPCOT Center can easily accommodate 120,000. It's easy to spin alternative scenarios from this. Had there not been a massive strain on Disney's resources to keep people fed and happy in 1971, would Tomorrowland have been built in the way it was? Are the massive open spaces in the east and south area of Tomorowland direct descendants of that Thanksgiving day in 1971?


This blueprint of the Magic Kingdom is dated 1971. The finished park followed this blueprint pretty much exactly... except for Tomorrowland. This is the version of Tomorrowland with an Autopia instead of a Grand Prix, a monorail running through it on its way to the Persian Resort, and a Space Mountain contained inside the railroad tracks. Even the railroad tracks followed this blueprint exactly, possibly indicating that as of 1971 Space Mountain was still going to be built inside the plot of land within the Walt Disney World Railroad's "wooden o". So why was it built outside the tracks in 1974? Why did Disney bother to tunnel under the tracks instead of build inside them? Why keep a massive open concrete area when nothing else in the park resembles it? Something changed between 1971 and 1974, and my instinct is that aesthetics was only half of the equation.

There's a famous picture of cars lined up along World Drive waiting to get into the Magic Kingdom on Thanksgiving 1971. Even Disney, ever concerned about protecting their public image of efficiency, talks about that day. If the Magic Kingdom of October 1971 is Disneyland with the "expand button jammed", simply a bigger and fancier copy, then Thanksgiving 1971 is the place and time when Disney's entire approach to the design and construction of their theme parks would change forever. If we follow that herd of cars to their end at the horizon-line, what do we find? I suggest: nowhere real, they point towards the future. Already they're queued up to enter EPCOT. The line forms here.

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Reference:
The E Ticket Number 30, Fall 1998 "Imagineering and the Disney Image... an interview with Marty Sklar"
"40,000 Jam Disney Turnstiles; Three-Day ‘Opening’ Under Way" by Jack McDavitt, Dick Marlowe. Orlando Sentinel, October 24, 1971
"Walt Disney's Disneyland" by Martin A. Sklar, 1972
"Walt Disney World Information Guide Compliments of GAF", 1972, 1974, 1975
Walt Disney World News, Vol. 1, No. 1
Walt Disney World News, Vol. 2, No. 7
Walt Disney World Vacationland Summer 1974
"Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World", 1977, 1978, 1979

(This post is part of the Disney Blog Carnival Number 11. Click to enjoy more Disney blogs and all sorts of other stuff!)

History and the Haunted Mansion

I really didn't mean to start writing about that most over-covered of all Disney attractions again, honest. Just when I think I've written or seen or read or heard everything there is to write / see / read about the Haunted Mansion, new stuff crops up. This seems sort of impossible - I wish new information about, say, Country Bear Jamboree or Tom Sawyer Island cropped up every few months - but suffice to say my brain has gone back to mulling over that dusty old house on the hill.

Much like the ride itself, what follows will be a little here, a little there - all over the place really. But the Spooky House still fascinates and amazes while the luster of other attractions rubs thin, and every time I think I've brilliantly laid the old gal down to rest with my incisive observations she comes rocketing back up like a spooky rubber mask on a pneumatic lift. It's a welcome if inevitable return.

Those of you who have been following Chalet Foxxy (Passport to Dreams Old & New) since her inception may remember that one the the first questions I ever raised about the Haunted Mansion is why the heck it's in Liberty Square, an apparent skeleton in the closet of an otherwise masterfully realized park. I can put some meat on those bones now, but not yet - let's first discuss something nobody's talked about yet in relationship to the Haunted Mansion - historical reality on Main Street, USA.

Practically every Disney fan has a copy of Imagineering: a Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real, a now fifteen-year-old (!!) chestnut of the Disney Fan Library. As a result the fact that Disneyland's Haunted House was originally planned for Main Street is pretty well known now, along with Harper Goff's cool little drawing of a dilapidated old house behind Shady Rest cemetery. What isn't much discussed is why it was there and what that meant.

Harper Goff's original concepts for Main Street were not so rosy as what Disney finally built in 1955 - his Main Street was as much frontier as settled, with dirt roads, clapboard sidewalks, and such. Goff's view was as such not so upbeat as the midwestern boom town of Disneyland in 1955, and he may have included ideas floating around for a haunted house in his concept sketches in reaction to the economic realities of the time of his and Walt Disney's youth.


What I'm talking about here is what is formally known as the Long Depression, a succession of financial crises which began following the end of the American Civil War and lasted pretty much up until the turn of the century. The actual duration of these depressions is somewhat controversial. The depression began in 1873 following a series of worldwide wars and stock market crashes which led to many countries withdrawing currency from circulation. The United States took herself off the Gold Standard for six years, ending in 1879. Great Britian remained in severe depression for nearly two decades, which rubbed that nation of her financial strength. And although the United States entered a ten year boom period in the 1880's due to the railroad expansion and other corporate interests, the market again plummeted in 1893, thanks to failing banks and railroads. Just like today, mortgages could not be met, and many houses were left to rot. Over the course of the next few generations, as time and fashion passed these houses by, local legend took over and the popular American conception of the haunted house as a crumbling Victorian gingerbread mansion took hold.

(Right: U.S. Grant carrying the weight of the Long Depression on his back)

This is a fairly serious part of the Victorian period to take into consideration, and even if the economy did recover for another ten years until the next economic collapse (1907), allowing a neat little window of American economic and scientific and cultural dominance into which Main Street, USA neatly fits, Goff's idea of placing the Haunted Mansion right on Main Street - in a sense, bracketing the wealth and prosperity and success of the era with a reminder that it, like all economic bubbles, would not last - is a genuinely intriguing notion.

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One of the reasons the Haunted Mansion holds our fascination today is that, unlike so many other rides, its' imagery is always evocative and seems to move with a precise but interior logic that is essentially unknowable. It cuts through our defenses and lodges itself somewhere deep in the unconcious where the damage can really be done. The most effective and unsettling image in the attraction is the grandfather clock with 13 hours, its hands spinning wildly out of control. Across the face of the clock, a shadow falls - a ghoulish clawed hand. Why a hand? To match the hands on the clock face? Is the hand about to descend on us to snatch us out of our cars? The logic is opaque, but the density of this image makes it one of the few times the attraction seems to be authentically moving with the logic of a nightmare, a play in light and dark of the subconscious.

The question of time allows us to open the door on another question which is perhaps instructive about the darker recesses of this attraction. When I was younger and more literal-minded, the question of what I called the "continuity flaws" of the attraction bothered me to no end - when you're in the stretching gallery, for example, lightning flashes outside the windows, but later, in the Music Room, there's nothing but ominous clouds and moonlight. Later, at the conservatory, there's a foggy landscape, in the ballroom we have lightening again, then in the graveyard there's thick fog, rolling clouds and twinkling stars. All of these weather patterns, of course, are even stranger depending on the weather patterns outside the show building - in the real world - when you enter, but this further complication is usually swallowed up by the trancelike state inside the attraction, where it is perpetually night.

The logical answer to this question, of course, is that all of these scenes were developed independent of one another and linked in an order that most made sense, the atmospheric effects of lightning flashing through windows is only dependent on what will enliven the scene and give the proper atmosphere. I'm not interested in the logical answer here however, but the poetic one, for no attraction is like the Haunted Mansion in seeming to be a genuinely expressive freeflowing harmony of light, sound and motion. I think we can see the Haunted Mansion in terms of its 1969 promotional image, especially that old LP, The Story and Song From the Haunted Mansion, and her threadbare plot of teenagers spending a night in an old dark house.

Are we spending a night in the Haunted Mansion? Undoubtably, but I think the key here is that things may not be happening in quite the proper sequence or in quite the proper chronology - it's a stay in a Haunted Mansion with only the most exciting parts left in, just like how the Jungle Cruise packs 2 - 3 weeks of travel downriver into a 10 minute ride. These highlights have been arranged to provide the most visually coherent flow which somewhat sacrifices logical coherence. This is why the Ghost Host narration is the keynote which ties it all together.

Which brings me to yet another point, which is that some of the most hypnotic scenes, those which really play on the imagination, didn't quite turn out how the original WED team planned - but their unresolved quality is what makes them so haunting and memorable. There is the Endless Hallway, which originally played host to a traveling sound effect that didn't quite play as anticipated at Disneyland during testing. A floating candlebrum prop was pulled from the seance circle scene and placed in the hallway to give riders something to look at, and the scene remains that way to this day (in Florida a second scene was devised to set-up this now famous tableau). For years the Attic scene was all setup and no punchline, which burned it quite indelibly into the imaginations of riders and of WDI, who fussed for years trying to inject things into the scene that just weren't there (Florida's Mansion opened with a more gruesome skull-faced bride who was later replaced, possibly in an effort to make the bride figure seem more like the point of the scene). Years later, WDI built a whole Haunted Mansion around the idea of the ghost bride - Phantom Manor.

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"The bourgeois interior of the 1860's to the 1890's - with gigantic sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the balcony embattled behind its' balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing gas flames - fittingly houses only the corpse." - Walter Benjamin

Those unfinished but imagination-firing scenes are a consequence of the attraction's painfully long gestation period, which ranged from before the opening of Disneyland until 1969, a space of some fourteen or fifteen years. Another consequence is that the facade of the Haunted Mansion in California was finished well in advance of its' interior attraction, and the result is that the interior of the Haunted Mansion is fairly unlike what one would expect. While the Disneyland version is an Antebellum mansion, with the possible exception of the entrance room which does have a very authentic Old South look to it, the bulk of the house while on the ride is a fairly generic Victorian mashup which is never really specifically Southern. No ghost in the ride is heard to speak with a southern accent and somewhat violent interpretative methods are required to see any of the ghosts as specifically southern - are the dancing ladies in the Ballroom, for example, Southern Belles on account of wearing large dresses or the ghosts in the portraits southern Gents on account of being duelists? Both large dresses and duels were quite common in the United States during certain periods, in both the north and south.

Now it's worth unpacking a few vocabulary terms here to start getting to the root of all this.

Antebellum is Latin for "before the War" and is used practicially exclusively in the United States to refer to the culture, fashions, and architecture of pre-American Civil War South. This usually refers to the period from 1787 to 1860 when the southern states were primarily agrarian.

Now Victorian of course denotes the period of architecture and culture which prevaled during the time of Queen Victoria of England, who ruled from 1839 to 1901.


Now there is an overlap there, an overlap of about twenty years, where a mansion constructed in the south could be said to be both Victorian and Antebellum, and indeed many of the most famous and still surviving examples of Antebellum architecture were built in the 1840's, solidly in the reign of Victoria. However, many of these were built to resemble even earlier houses - the Orton Plantation house in North Carolina, for example, has been standing since 1735, well before the United States even existed as a separate entity.

But the important point is that the actual historically Antebellum houses are quite different in interior appearance from what we characterize as Victorian - they are quite bright and open, made for large entertaining, built to impress. Victorian styles - with their dark woods, wallpapers, dark corners, and excessive textures, patterns, and knickknacks - do not invite company. Americans tend to think of Victorian houses and styles when thinking of haunted houses and ghosts for reasons I have outlined above, and the interior of Disney's mansion was designed to shout "haunted" from the outset. As a result there is a historical discontinuity between the inside and he outside of the house, which to my eye suggests that the original Mansion was quite probably heavily renovated by the late owners to its' current state. Such renovations were quite common and it's easy to forget that even the Executive Mansion in Washington DC was renovated in the style by Chester Arthur and his contemporaries (right, photo by Matthew Brady)

Still, to this author's eye the Haunted Mansion belongs more comfortably in a northern setting, which is probably why the people who actually designed the ride (rather than the exterior which was executed by a different team) placed it in a specifically northern looking house just two years later. Early concept art for the Florida version shows a stately Georgian home, but Claude Coats' brilliant gothic facade significantly ups the ante by seeming to place the Haunted Mansion in a house where the ride within could actually take place. There is an exterior conservatory to house the famous "coffin escape" scene and a tall belfry for the Ghost Host to hang himself from.

Now the house looks very gothic, and there was indeed a big Gothic revival smack in the middle of the Victorian period, but the house has other traces to me. To begin with the Victorians did not build private residences in the Gothic Revival style, but the heavy brickwork and castlelike contours of some of the house does recall the European influence in the colonies. On page 37 of his Haunted Mansion book, as official a source from WDI as can be readily found, Jason Surrell pinpoints "lower Hudson River Valley" as the supposed place of origin of the house, and indeed there are many historic homes made of brick and stone to be found there. The estate of Lyndhurt, in Tarrytown, New York, is both geographically correct and even more gothic in appearance than the Haunted Mansion itself.

But the Gothic revival houses were meant to recall castles, and although the house itself as well as the crypts surrounding it match the house quite well, certain elements do seem to be later additions. The conservatory, for example, looks built on rather than "original", and the green metal which it is constructed out of also traces terraces and wrought iron works which seem to be a Victorian addition to a brick gothic mansion. There are too traces of a renovation here, and perhaps the implication isn't so fanciful as it may seem.. folklore, superstition and tradition strongly link ghostly activity to renovations of houses, which either perturb or placate spirits - bodies concealed in walls has been a gothic tradition for generations, and early scripts for the Disneyland Mansion even include a grisly detail of a Disney workman bricked up in a wall.

Now we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the Disney Haunted Mansion is a fanciful version of history, not an accurate one, and the 1440 date on one of the tombs outside the Florida version makes mince of all these efforts to nail down the house to a specific period. These likely reflect at best subconscious, unintended echoes of history and heritage in the Haunted Mansion, but they do point out the complex and beautiful web of influences and inferences and history and folklore which the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland are spun from, a real tapestry of American popular culture.

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One of the most charming aspects of the Disney Haunted Houses is that in addition to the experience of the show itself, Disney keeps alive aspects of the oral tradition which led to those old houses being labeled haunted in the first place. Everybody in their home town had a house that everyone "knew" was haunted, with tales of murders and romantic liasons to back it all up, and this is reflected on the Riverboat attractions - the most famous of that genre of Disney attraction which primarily serves to orient the viewer with and show off the main pedestrian space (Swiss Family Treehouses and Peoplemovers are other examples of this genre). In these prerecorded narrations the pilot invariably talks about the Mansion being haunted and being a place one should avoid, which does neatly acknowledge the way that such places "become" haunted houses in the real world.


An additional texture informs the Florida version, where the pilot of the boat confidentially informs us that the house was built on sacred indian burial ground and therefore cursed. This does seem to be an odd aside, until one does a bit of geographic investigation. There is indeed a show scene of an Indian burial ground along the riverboat, and it's actually the last scene of the left side of the boat before the Haunted Mansion. It may be a design coincidence, but the Haunted Mansion is located directly south of the Burial Ground show scene... they may be plains Indians alongside the river burying their dead, but there does seem to be a certain interior logic to this!

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"Rap on a table; it's time to respond!
Send us a message from somewhere beyond!"

And finally we return to where we came in, and I'm going to make good on my promise to revisit my old question of why the Haunted Mansion is in Liberty Square. But first let's take a peek at what I wrote over three years ago on the topic:

"A question which will probably haunt Walt Disney World for the duration of its existence is the rather baffling placement of the Haunted Mansion in Liberty Square. Frankly, it simply smacks of desperation. Here was WED Enterprises, fresh off a triple victory lap with the opening of Pirates of the Caribbean, New Tomorrowland, and The Haunted Mansion, stuck in a room and told to re-re-invent the wheel they had just spent the past 15 year perfecting. Liberty Square, or at least the idea of a Liberty Square, would rise from the dead and would be joined with the Rivers of America and Frontierland to create a vision of American progress and spirit. Wouldn’t it make sense to put The Haunted Mansion there? Yet the selection of Liberty Square seems almost arbitrary, after having ruled out Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Adventureland right off the bat. [...] And so Liberty Square it was. The building was shoved out onto the Rivers of America as far as it could go, to isolate it and make its’ appearance in colonial America less suspect. It could almost be a part of Fantasyland. Claude Coates designed a brilliant colonial-Gothic façade and it was all systems go. Let’s just hope they don’t think about it too hard."

I've come to believe, suffice to say, that there is a higher logic to the choice beyond "it didn't fit anywhere else", albeit one that requires a bit of unpacking and extension. Disney themselves make a very eloquent case for it in Walt Disney World: the First Decade:

"Not far from the Hall of Presidents is a residence designed to scare up some early American fantasy and folklore... [in a] ...architectural style perhaps best described as early Edgar Allan Poe. On nights when the moon in a ghostly galleon and the sky is a cloudy sea, one might well imagine Ichabod Crane riding this way on his fateful journey through Sleepy Hollow."

Now that's lovely prose but if we go back to all of my carbon dating of exterior and interiors in the sections above, we find a major shift in the American social and political scene which neatly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria and the War Between the States and which seems to have pointed echoes with the "text" of the Haunted Mansion itself: Spiritualism.

Spiritualism was an unorganized movement which straddled the line between faith and science and had great popular appeal in the mid-19th century. It had been in the air for a long time but the starting shot was fired in New York in 1848, when two sisters - Kate and Maggie Fox (left) - began to communicate with the spirit of a dead peddler buried in the cellar of their house using a series of coded knocks which seemed to emanate from different parts of the house. Very soon, the notion of being able to communicate with spirits spread throughout most of the Western world and parlor seances involving levitating and spinning tables and knocks and taps became fairly popular and commonplace.

Now I don't want to get too far afield from the Haunted Mansion here and I don't want to ignite a controversy about the Spiritualists either, but I do think that a few points here about Spiritualism are worth recounting.

First is the astonishing capacity of the Spiritualists themselves to seem to materialize spirits at will; as the practice continued the medium would often sit in a "spirit cabinet" from which the ghostly revenants would emerge. In his book Passing Strange, Joseph Citro (admittedly an author more concerned with a good story than with citations) recounts an increasingly bizarre investigation by lawyer and politician Henry Steel Olcott in rural Vermont of two brothers who managed, over the course of ten days, to materialize hundreds of visions, and Olcott was quite unable to determine how the uneducated brothers could possibly have been able to fake such a performance. Olcott later helped found Theosophy, so he clearly put very real stock in what he saw.

But it's also important to point out that the above case is a unique one in that much of Spiritualism has been debunked. The Fox sisters later recanted and confessed that their knocks were accomplished with the cracking of joints and apples tied on strings; an attempt to revoke the confession the next year failed, they were discredited both in Spiritualist and Scientific circles, and the sisters died in poverty as Spiritualism continued on without them. The most famous debunker of spiritualism was Harry Houdini, who traveled extensively and revealed the parlor seances as what they often were: well worn stage tricks.

So Spiritualism was a strange mix of the unexplainable strange and the verifiable banal, and it reached its' greatest popularity after the American Civil War, with so many recently dead in a war where 25,000 men may have lost their lives in a single day. It look place in the flickering gaslight of the Victorian era, and the shadow it casts over the Haunted Mansion is a long one, especially in the seance room, where doombuggies encircle the table and the spirits are summoned. Knocking is heard, tarot cards are spread, and instruments float through the room - all earmarks of a Spiritualist seance. Indeed, at Disneyland, Madame Leota is even given a spirit cabinet that sits quietly behind her chair, half open, as if to let all the ghosts out.

The spirit cabinet is in the background on the left. It was

originally installed to hide a projector.

But does the shadow of spiritualism slip past the Mansion itself? I believe it does, because possibly the most famous maybe-a-Spiritualist in the United States was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's actual faith is much contested - he never joined a church despite being one of the most eloquent men in history to regularly refer to God and the Bible, and many of his rivals made quite a bit of a show of Lincoln's lack of denominational commitment. What is known however is that following the death of his second son, Willie, Abraham and Mrs. Lincoln held at least one documented seance, and there is of course the famous story of Lincoln having foreseen his own death in a dream.

The strange interpolation of Lincoln and spiritualism continues to this day, with those famous stories of Lincoln's ghost in the White House. There is much speculation that Lincoln's son Robert destroyed or hid documents relating to his father's role in spiritual sittings and / or his assassination; one colorful story says he sealed the documents away in the monumental pillars of Washington's Pension Building during construction (currently the National Building Museum). It's not hard to find claims that Lincoln was psychic; on a whim I pulled a Hans Holzer book off my bookshelf and in it we can find: "...on the whole Lincoln apparently did not need any mediums, for he himself had the gift of clairvoyance, and this talent stayed with him all his life." (Ghosts, BD&L, page 100). At the right in a photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln supposedly with the ghost of her husband and son Willie taken in the 1880's.

And so there is the not so obvious Hall of Presidents connection, even moreso in the original show, which could be more easily interpreted as "Abe Lincoln and Friends". There is something strangely appropriate, after all, that Liberty Square's two attractions are based around the concept of seeing the dead come back to life, either to frighten or inspire, and both do elicit a similar hypnotic wonder. And there is something poetic there, a strange line that seems to run from the Haunted Mansion direct to the image of Lincoln, framed in a window, whispering "I know there is a God, and that he hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it." It's a line that traces along paths laid by folklore, legend, history and fantasy. It is the sort of poetic, not literal, connection that perhaps is best actualized in a three-dimensional setting.

I've long claimed that the metaland of Liberty Square-Frontierland at the Magic Kingdom is a perfect creation that packs as much about America as you can possibly desire into one compact district: history, entertainment, food, vaudeville, capital, water, land, agriculture, settlement, industry... it's all there somewhere. And maybe mysticism and religion and a strange point where they meet is too.

...And that's why the Haunted Mansion must be in Liberty Square.

Passport to Dreams Old & New Haunted Mansion Archive:
"Thoughts on the Haunted Mansion" - who is responsible for the ride's balance of tone?
"Two By Yale Gracey" - Gracey's cloud and fog effects used in Mansion and Pirates
"Park Mysteries #5" - the 'original' bride?
"In Doorless Chambers: Part One" - planning & original conception of the ride
"In Doorless Chambers: Part Two" - technical details, influences on the ride
"In Doorless Chambers: Part Three" - artistic value of the ride

A Retraction:

One of the things about trying to seriously study the parks is that, even after years and years of going to them, and going regularly, I'm still going through this material and these concepts by myself and thus much more slowly than other self-appointed "scholars" of other media: say, film or music. As such my relationships to things and ideas about them have no "check"; no external force with a differing opinion to show up and shove something I should've been seeing right up under my nose. Even now I look back at things I posted here a bit over a year ago and I'm embarrassed; I recently tried to pull something years old out of mothballs and I realized while proofing that it was literally impossible to make it meet even the low standards of blog publication.

Usually a concept comes to me with the writing out of an article; as such, I may have to write about something two or three times before I start to figure out its' intricacies. So here's my first full-on retraction on this blog.

Last December I posted the reasonably popular "Liberty Square: Successes and Failures", which I think is still a pretty good overview of what's wrong with Liberty Square. Back then I believed Adventureland to be the best land in the Magic Kingdom, and the essay reflects it. But over the past few months my relationship to Liberty Square has evolved and I'm starting to see more good than bad in it. But a few weeks ago I finally saw something that really tipped the scales for me. But first, here's the relevant passage of what I wrote in December:

There is furthermore no revised “weenie” at the end of the street; the location of Disneyland’s Riverboat landing has not been revised. But Orlando’s river is located several feet below pedestrian level. Since the riverboat unloads a full level lower than it loads for capacity purposes, it has lost a full ten feet of height from street level. Thus, it can’t loom over anything or impress anybody: it doesn’t look any larger than its’ loading platform!

Yeah, exactly.

Imagine my embarrassment when I realized that you're not supposed to see the Riverboat from Liberty Square proper - after all, the Hall of Presidents is dated 1787 and, per Magic Kingdom 'dated building rules', this is a pretty clear indication of the time period we're supposed to be in. Riverboats weren't really a big part of America until well into the 19th century, and so standing in front of an 18th or 17th century building and seeing a stern wheeler would be, if not intellectually, then emotionally false, regardless of its' value as a crowd draw. The Liberty Belle even has three levels, third decks not having been added to Riverboats in America until Texas joined the union. The third level is thus called the Texas Deck, and so the earliest possible date the Riverboat attraction may exist in is, historically, 1845.

And so the three level Riverboat is hidden by having the boat load on street level and unload well below street level. An appropriately sized building covers it from the Eastern side where it most needs it to be screened out, and a tall spire atop the landing structure integrates subtly to hide the smokestack protruding behind - and it hides it so well that when the boat is docked, it's pretty hard to tell the boat is there at a passing glance!

With and Without Riverboat.

This is pretty extensive effort just to hide a Riverboat in plain sight, but aside from the historical reasons noted, why bother to do it? The answer is in the buildings of Liberty Square herself. Liberty Square is foremost an area constructed of complex textures, and the tale it tells is one of America's westward expansion east of the Mississippi. Traveling from north to south, the first structure one encounters would be the Haunted Mansion, Columbia Harbor House and surrounding facilities, which are primarily stone and brick structures at ground level with above eye level wood embellishments and features.

Liberty Square: Stone with Wood Embellishments Left: Heritage House. Center: Sleepy Hollow Refreshments. Right: Columbia Harbour House.

But entering Liberty Square from Main Street the structures are very heavily stone and brick, with minor wood transitory facades interspersed to create a mild pattern of stone interrupted with wood. Once one gets near the Hall of Presidents, which is the tallest and most wholly brick building in the area, as was the custom of very old Eastern development, the back side of the old Silversmith shop gives way to a wood structure, and a definite pattern emerges: wood, stone, wood, stone, eventually becoming predominantly wood structures with minor linking stone embellishments by the time one gets around the front of the Liberty Tree Tavern.

Liberty Square: Wood with Stone Embellishments.
Left: From Silversmith to Liberty Tree Tavern: Stone, Wood, Stone, Wood
Center: Liberty Tree Tavern: Wood, Stone, Wood
Right: Liberty Tree Tavern to Diamond Horseshoe: Wood, Stone, Wood

So why is this crucial? Because by now spectators have moved downhill, the Riverboat landing has moved away from our perspective on the Riverboat, and the box hedges are starting to part to reveal the Liberty Belle and Aunt Polly's by the time we get to the Diamond Horseshoe area. This area is meant to recall a later time period, when St. Louis was the "gateway to the West", the Mississippi was a major line for Riverboats of all shapes and sizes, and it would no longer feel unnatural to have a Riverboat visible from this perspective. The boat even (intentionally?) covers the Haunted Mansion up until we're almost out of Liberty Square and into Frontierland, so prevalent have the clapboard structures become. Here, wood is the main element and stone foundations are little more than a minor architectural flourish. It is at this point that spectators leave behind St. Louis, cross a bridge over a little babbling brook tellingly called the Little Mississippi, and enter the predominantly timber structures of Frontierland's west.

The Mississippi Section

Even the fences have transformed from the austere wrought iron of the Haunted Mansion and Old World Antiques shops to the unpretentious, whitewashed beams which more accurately reflect the Midwest area this short stretch represents. In this sense we can posit that the half whitewashed fence and Harper's Mill on the far side of the river are the key transitional points to the old West narrative of Frontierland, just as the Liberty Tree Tavern with its' Old Virginny feel is on "our" side.

Furthermore the Riverboat and Keel Boats, which both originally loaded from Liberty Square, have always been Frontierland attractions in spirit. And so our view of them is being concealed until this very specific moment, the keelboats having been loaded from well below pedestrian level in northerly Liberty Square. You may have boarded them from Liberty Square proper, but they aren't even visible until you're into this "river traffic" part of the land.

Liberty Square from Frontierland.

I've spoken before of the idea of three dimensional montage, how moving from one area to the next creates a succession of linear impressions analogous to the succession of linear impressions achieved by complex montage. I've resisted the idea of this being applicable to non-attraction spaces such as Liberty Square due to the controlled interior space of something like Snow White's Adventures allowing for period of blackness, of "blank space", and thus increased control of the gaze.

But here is the one facet of something like this discipline I believe WED did perfect in open space: the reveal, just like the way the castle is first blocked by a railway station, then a tunnel, and then a Main Street USA. Here's a micro example to the castle's meta: examine closely the way that the offending Riverboat is screened out, examine carefully how it is only revealed to us at the exact moment it must be, and consider carefully the complex orchestration of elements of the Riverboat, the Haunted Mansion, and the Hall of Presidents, and only then will just one part of the staggering Walt Disney World design accomplishment crystallize.

The Long, Lonely March

So while the Columbia Harbour House in Liberty Square is an example of Disneys' ability to create compact space which feels totally separate from the outside world of the park in the form of the utilitarian shop or cafeteria, there is another theme design first at Walt Disney World which rejects the traditional wisdom as to what a functional space can be. It's the first immersion queue, the dark and haunting Castillo del Morro at Pirates of the Caribbean.

Some perspective must be used here. We must firstly remember that Caribbean Plaza, which still seems to me to be perfection itself, was an impromptu addition to the Walt Disney World lineup. As such the way it fits perfectly between the Enchanted Tiki Room and Pecos Bill is nothing but a feat of gargantuan brilliance by a team of belabored designers trekking uphill with an absurd timetable and budget lashed to their backs (it is said that Card Walker approved the whole of the area - attraction, shops and taco stand alike - for half of what it cost to build Pirates alone in 1966). Using every trick at their deploy is something of an understatement as to how labyrinthine layout and rhyming structural styles (Spanish colonial becoming Spanish Southwest? A Polynesian temple tower" rhyming" with a Caribbean clock tower? Brilliant!) were combined to turn a very small patch of land into a fully developed extension of its' key attraction. To drive home the enormity of the task one only needs to walk from the exit of Country Bear Jamboree to the far Western end of Pecos Bill and say to yourself "this is how much room you have to build Pirates of the Caribbean."

We must also remember that although we now throw the term "themed queue" around loosely to refer to anything like the experience of transversing the wait areas of Pirates of the Caribbean or Indiana Jones Adventure, that the idea of a themed queue has existed since 1955 - certainly Harper Goff's original Jungle Cruise boathouse qualified as a themed queue, much moreso than those elsewhere in Disneyland. But the innovation of the Castillo del Morro show scene is that it totally dispensed with switchbacks, turning those ropes, poles and chains into solid stone walls. This is the legacy of the design team in this attraction as this is generally our criteria for calling any queue themed or not - do you walk down a big corridor? - and based on this, we must regard latter generation queues, like Indiana Jones, not a progression or refinement - but an aesthetic extrapolation. Castillo del Morro established all the rules.

In the process of adapting the ride itself: much was lost, which we can see in hindsight as a crippling blow to the attraction, as much of the effectiveness of the brilliant original was the languorous pace and how slowly and seamlessly three realities seemed to submerge into one.

But this, again, requires some perspective because in 1973 it wasn't yet a proven thing that Pirates of the Caribbean had to be that way: WED was about to build the attraction which proved it. And so the rules were totally changed for the Orlando version. With the removal of the Blue Bayou leg of the attraction, the primary storytelling device which carries the bulk of the time travel conceit, the attraction would be set in the "present" and guests would enter the story just before the still-live Pirates begin their attack.

And so the time travel part of the equation was left up to the structures themselves to carry; just as spectators are swept from British Colonial outposts to Polynesian oasises in Adventureland, they could now be carried away into the romance of the old Caribbean simply by walking a handful of yards. I believe there is an implicit suggestion of time travel in the facade itself, which is as not as much of a significant time slip as the Disneyland versions, but is still significant.

Until recently, you may remember, the facade featured a pirate parrot 'neath the text "PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN" on the north-facing exterior wall who acted as a "barker" for the attraction. Outside a number of tattered, cannon blasted Jolly Roger flags were hung up, and atop the roof, the cannons were still firing. This clearly implicates that the buccaneers have already taken the fortress, a self fulfilling prophecy of the end of the attraction (remember, the only version where the Pirates actually win!). Passing through the entrance arches and towards the entrance of Castillo del Morro is, then, the time travel, resetting the narrative arc and making the journey from end to end of the building the same narrative "closed loop" which the Disneyland version conveys so successfully (and which so validates the form of the attraction itself - since it is a narrative which is closed on either end, we can ride it over and over again and endlessly experience the same events!).

Of course the firing cannons were lost in the 2006 refurbishment due to technical reasons, but they are a key element in the interior logic of the space and we must keep them in mind. In 2007 the Jolly Roger was replaced with a Spanish flag, which better suits the "there is no time travel" story Caribbean Plaza tells and completes the removal of the subtle element of time travel I have outlined above which was the net result of the removal of the Barker Bird parrot at the entrance.

And now, a more specific breakdown of elements of the first immersion queue.


1. Simulated Nightfall
Disneyland's Pirates entranceway has gotten a lot of flack since the opening of the version in question, despite the fact that it is a brilliant visual thesis statement on the entire formal mode of the attraction's disjunctions of space and time. But let it be said that one of the things Disneyland's Pirates accomplishes in its' entryway is a precise simulated sunset, where spectators are pushed farther and farther away from the bright California sunlight and emerge into the nighttime bayou. Since the essential aesthetic mode of Pirates of the Caribbean is unchanged at Walt Disney World, Castillo del Morro does this same feat in a much larger but still brilliant space, the extended plaza in front of the attraction entrance which gradually dims the sunlight, replacing its' bright glow with the simulated skylights casting false sunlight, which will again transform into the dim glow of incandescent lights and, finally, firelight.

Alongside this space is a "hidden" courtyard which used to spill vacationers out of the House of Treasure giftshop with its' own little forced perspective upper balconies - the most effective in Caribbean Plaza due to the extreme angle the courtyard forces you to look up at them, really tricking your sense of scale. This courtyard, and the one across the way between the old Princessa de Cristal and Golden Galleon gift shops, really are as good as anything New Orleans Square can offer. WED really learned from Herb Ryman's "pocket" concept - if there's vacant space between establishments in your area just make them out of the way transitional areas rather than yet more break rooms or offices. A well placed, quiet courtyard is worth a million of the more traditional false portals in expanding a limited space into infinity, creating a "stratified" visual experience.

But calling the court hidden is a kind of misnomer, because you're meant to see it, to look at it, even casually glance at it as you march onwards into the dark fortress. It is a setup, saying to the spectator in no uncertain terms, that space is tricky, that you will be expected to look not at one space but all those which abut it to get the full experience of the attraction. As a pocket, as a portal, and as a thesis statement about the attraction which it prefaces, the Castillo del Morro plaza is as key a movement towards the ultimate goal of the attraction as can be imagined.

2. Layout and Design
Once inside, the complexities of design really begin to pile up, so let us first preface this section with a bit of perspective on scale; please click below to expand a diagram.


As the scale diagram shows, the Pirates entrance plaza and facade does not take up significantly more space than the queue and double load area. Thus, there will be a dramatic narrowing of the potential for movement once the guest enters the Castillo proper. One way that the fortress queue feels massive, indeed endless, is how tightly the corridors and rooms twist around each other, yet none is visible from the other, giving a sense of progress but an extreme sense of misdirection. The tactile sensation of being lost is conveyed fully through having the spectator constantly navigate sharp turns and hairpins, but failing to make significant progress in covering ground.

This is why the queue for Indiana Jones Adventure is a very different kind of experience, because you endlessly are allowed to move forward, always moving towards the destination. Here, you feel as if you may have gotten yourself in trouble.

Increasing the sense of disorientation is the use of ramps. The Entrance Tunnel which leads to the first of three "inside outside" interior courtyards slopes up dramatically and is heavily crammed with arches, effectively restricting the spectators' view of the top of the ramp from the bottom of it. From here the queue splits into two different sides; one which will proceed through the military side of the fortification, with dungeons and cannon nests, and the second which will proceed through the side of the fortress the soldiers would likely have inhabited, with a banquet hall, peaceful interior courtyard, fountain, and gunpowder pit. While the inhabited portion of the queue remains level (increasing the sense that it is used for living space), only sloping down at the very end to bring guests down to the load point, the Dungeon side is trickier.

Once the top of the entrance ramp is reached, the queue immediately and dramatically slopes down to ground level again. This is done to reinforce the idea that guests are descending into a lower area of the fortress, although no net elevation change has actually been achieved! Since walls and doors block out any frame of reference for the actual height of the area, subconsciously the brain has been prepared to accept that it is now in a lower area of the fortress.

Then, the ground begins to ascend again, because guests are approaching the original, famous Chess scene, Marc Davis' brilliant gag of two skeletons forever locked in check in the dungeon. This being Florida, only so much space can be dug into the ground to give a proper dungeon, and so once again the floor rises to take advantage of what little vertical space can be exploited in the (already elevated!) queue.

At this point the ramps have brought us from ground level to a second level, then back to ground level, then back to the second level, all while convincing the brain that it is deep underground at this point. The rest of the queue on the Dungeon side is an ascent to a third, top level so that the boats can pass underneath the queue, then a quick slope back down to a ground level load area.

There are a number of fascinating repetitions of scenes and visual cues throughout: for example, although the Inhabited part of the fortress is replete with locked racks of guns and swords, it does not feel as imposing as the Defense part of the fortress, which features tall, vaulted ceilings and rough hewn rock, not the plastered walls of the soldier's side.

Both feature interior courtyard scenes, but while the Defense side of the queue is an ascent to a gun nest overlooking the load point and a ship under repair, the Soldier side is a beautiful courtyard with a staircase and a trickling fountain with a forced perspective scene above of a nighttime alcove with hanging plants. Both feature a music track of a lonely musician strumming his guitar, appearing in this peaceful little courtyard to suggest a bored night watchman. It appears in the Defense side emanating from one of the cells which rings the Chess scene, suggesting a prisoner spending his final days alone in the dungeon. Identical music, two diametrically opposed effects.

Rarely-seen views of the Chess scene.

3. Plot and Effect
For two complimentary sides of the same coin, each side of the queue has a totally different effect on the audience. In the Soliders' side of the Castillo, with its' signs of abandoned inhabitation everywhere, a feeling of loneliness takes effect. It is a long, lonely, confusing trek.

The Defense side however, with its' subconscious effects of going underground, the side which is placed nearest those firing cannons on the roof, the side meant to withstand an invasion, is scary. Both queues wrap around a little box of a room which features some supplies for the fort, in which is placed a speaker which plays the sounds of the Spanish preparing for an attack interspersed with a recording of the attraction's signature song "A Pirate's Life For Me". When the song plays it echoes down through those corridors just right to make you believe that the Pirates of the Caribbean could be around any of those innumerable blind corners, itself a brilliant setup for the attraction itself. But it is scary, and the skeleton imagery featured on the Dungeon side drives home the fact.


But both sides, with their stone walls, barrels of gunpowder, rifles and cannons are replete with constant reminders of impending violence, that the Pirates are indeed coming. Rather than the lively fortress the exterior gun battle and bright Plaza prepares us for, we get signs of inhabitants who have all suddenly run off somewhere, leaving behind only a night watchman and the dead and dying in the prison. In creates a tension between our desire to see the titular pirates and our apprehension at actually unexpectedly encountering them, which crystallizes in the load area, where we pass a torchlit cave and hear Pirates burying treasure, and our apprehension again deferred. As the boats scoot out of the load area and into the cavern they pass the open water and we see for the first time the reason we have been so strangely alone: there's the pirate ship out in the harbor, the pirate ship we'll encounter again in just a few minutes.

All of this is a significant reconstruction of the same narrative paces of the Disneyland version of the attraction by the original design team, so much so that although on the terms of its' predecessor it is not really a success, on its' own terms - the terms that really matter to the interior life of the attraction - it is a more radical reconstruction of Pirates of the Caribbean attraction than the later generation, much lauded Paris version.

What the Castillo del Morro queue is, is that it is a chronicle of the town which the pirates invade, an elaborate half-narrative setup through which we must pass in order to see the rest of the story. In this way it is arguable that the Plaza and Queue of Pirates Orlando is an admissible attempt to shift the storytelling techniques of the Anaheim Queue and Blue Bayou into practical space, which is a pretty brilliant way to do the same thing as the original on very little of the budget of the same. That the Castillo del Morro queue arose out of practical necessity is inarguable, but it changed the rules of the game forever and as such it must be considered the great queue, the original that was the enabler of one of WDI's most interesting narrative tools.

Adventures in Master Planning #3

Sometimes, you come across something in a theme park which strikes you as either exceedingly brilliant or exceedingly baffling. All of this is, of course, the domain of Master Planning, which (ostensibly) accounts for every angle, dimension and layout question which arises in a park. Master Planning can make a theme park revolutionary (Disneyland) or frustrating (Disney-MGM Studios). Even a company as large as WDI tries to keep everything in line, but sometimes they blunder…

Adventure Three: How to Hide a Castle

Cinderella Castle is big. Really Big. Like, 198 feet big. It can be seen from a mile away. And in the designing of Walt Disney World, WED had to deal with this new kind of visual center point in the initial master planning process for the first time. Sure, The Matterhorn was (and still is, after 45 years of foliage growth) equally huge, but that was built four years after Disneyland’s opening and there was no good way to account for being able to see a future mountain from, say, Frontierland.

So I guess this wasn't planned.

The Magic Kingdom’s solution was to choose its’ battles. The front areas of the lands are among the most important for allowing guests to slip into the fantasy of being in another place and time, as well as screening out lands which do not have a complimentary appearance (for example, seeing Space Mountain from Adventureland). This was achieved through actually not using forced perspective in the areas nearest the hub: buildings like The Adventureland Veranda and The Heritage House are, in fact, nearly 100% scale and restrict your view of the castle by hugging pedestrian space close to the buildings.

Further along, subtle architectural embellishments seek to harmonize with the spires of the castle: Liberty Square’s flagpoles and pointed cupolas, Tomorrowland’s old entrance spikes pointed skyward.

In Adventureland is a rather odd spire near the exit of the treehouse. This author had wondered about its’ significance for years and years. Invisible from Liberty Square and all angles save one, it serves no purpose. Yet find the right angle, and the most subtle and brilliant example of visual harmony you’ll find anywhere suddenly becomes clear.