Disney Springs and Invented Florida

"The truth of the matter is the only new towns of any significance built in America since World War II are Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Both are 'new', both are 'towns', and both are staggeringly successful." - Peter Blake, Animated Architecture, 1982

Authenticity: the Slippery Slope

Last time, we discussed the history of Disney's failed urban planning project, Lake Buena Vista. This week, we'll be looking at the newest effort to keep the area relevant, but first, a brief detour into semantics. I'd like to discuss what, exactly, makes a place or thing "authentic" versus an imitation.

This subject is central to the very concept of theme parks, but has hardly ever been discussed. It's been invoked by every cultural critic who's written on the subject - implying that being built by an elect group of people with a plan and goal as opposed to being built by unrelated people with no real plan makes a place any less real. But does it?

"Authenticity" is a slippery slope once you actually start sliding down it, and nowhere else is this more evident than in the realm of architecture - architecture being, after all, the main thing that theme parks are made up out of. Let's look at one example: the Philip Chapin house, in my hometown of New Hartford, CT:

Today, we fawn over this sort of thing as an authentic example of Victorian architecture. In its day, it would have been seen as the most ghastly form of nouveau-riche tastelessness. A ludicrous modern imitation of an Italian villa, what was seen in its own day as a sham and fake has become authentic with the passage of time.

Another example, closer to home: Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, or King Ludwig's Castle. It's commonly cited as the basis for Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland:

Yes, it's a real castle, but it's also a ludicrous fake, constructed by a wasteful king in the Victorian era to evoke romances of the holy grail and the operas of Richard Wagner. It was built with what then qualified as the most modern of amenities, including heated running water, toilets, an electric bell system, a modern oven, and including such suspect embellishments as reproduction tapestries and an indoor cave.

When we think of it this way, the space between Ludwig II's private theme park and Walt Disney's fiberglass castle becomes very narrow. They're both widely viewed and beloved by visitors who care not a lick for "authenticity" because both are designed to evoke powerful symbolic associations in the minds of their visitors.

So what makes something authentic? Once enough time passes, will Disney's fiberglass castles be suddenly, magically conferred respectability? Or is it a slipperier thing - is it belief? Does something become "Authentic" because its viewers believe it to be so?

Of course the sort of people who are eager to confer upon theme parks and their like - shopping centers, planned communities, restaurants - the label of "Fake" are those who have the most to lose by failing to control such labels: those who need their opinions to carry the weight of authority. Sometimes the label can be extended to "appropriation", i.e. theft of something held to be integral elsewhere. But even trying to establish what's "real" and what's "fake" is often an exercise in futility, as we shall shortly see.

I think that's good. Theme parks may be manufactured according to strict aesthetic guidelines, but to me that's a crucial distinction, because that is what makes them compelling. What one person sees as "fake" can just as easily be labeled "artistic". And in the case of something like Disney Springs, where the distinctions have broken down to an extent that the distinctions become meaningless anyway, there is a fascinating case study.

Inventing Space

Even if the notion of authenticity is a slippery slope, there is already a built in resistance to confer the blessings of cultural approval on Disney. One way this manifests is a resistance - supported by Disney - to deem the parks objects of historical interest. so far there has been no general acceptance of the idea that a theme park is certainly related and in some ways basically analogous to the traditionally approved manufactured settings - fine dining establishments, museums, theaters, or national parks.

I've thought long and hard on this subject and to me the only workable definition of a "themed" enviroment is one which has been subject to the act of curation - in which certain aspects have been enhanced, or removed, to obtain a specific aesthetic, often symbolic effect. Museums build narratives out of the mess of history; theme parks build narratives out of the harmonization of imaginary spaces. National parks, so often sold as representing an "untouched" area in a specific state of historical preservation, are also subject to the act of curation - by removing or demolishing any aspects of the protected area which would break the illusion of being "unspoiled" (for more on this see Terence Young, Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations).

And yet, I would argue that ideologically and historically speaking, Disneyland, EPCOT, and Magic Kingdom are as central to the American identity as Yellowstone or the National Mall. If they weren't, then there would be no implied threat in Disney co-opting American history in things like The American Adventure and Disney's America. Through sheer popularity, citizens have conferred importance and historical relevance on Disney theme parks, bypassing the gatekeepers of culture.

The minute that we open our minds to the possibility that non-sanctified history is still basically historical, the more the complexities of Disney's manufacture of history become compelling. Disney Springs is a key place to see this at work. Here, real and imagined history weave into a tight web. Let's dip back into our historical narrative of Lake Buena Vista from last week and pick up some threads.

Faux History

By the time Downtown Disney had added its West Side addition, it was a patched-together thing, laid out as three distinct units that made sense on their own but made no sense together. Traffic flow between the three areas was already best described as impractical, and the opening of Pleasure Island to foot traffic only made the situation worse.

Something would need to be done, but what? And how could all three distinct areas be tied together cohesively? In the past, the solution to improving themed areas which were lacking in appeal came down to two options: re-skinning, or demolition. Tomorrowland 1994 re-skinned the offending area, isolating the problem in its aesthetics. New Fantasyland and Disney California Adventure demolished, preferring to start over in a more traditionally appealing aesthetic mode.

At Disney Springs, the approach was, uniquely, to lean in to the mess of conflicting styles and agendas. Areas which already were aesthetically appealing, such as the Marketplace, only received minor facelifts and foot traffic improvements. Pleasure Island's industrial aesthetic could stay. The largest offenders at West Side could be covered up with industrial details or slated for later demolition. Tying the whole thing together is a new "Downtown" area and central water feature.

In other words, by refusing to paper over or demolish the inconsistencies of Downtown Disney, Disney Springs embraces them as the whole darn point. By my count there's at least seven aesthetics at work in the area, and they have been used to signify, rather than try to remove, the pains and competing ideologies of the growth of its imagined community:

Pre-Modern Cracker Houses and Ranches

Industrial Revolution tin sheds

Industrial Revolution "old brick"

Early 20th century Spanish Revival

Mid-Century Craftsman/Chalet

Post-Mid Century Modern

Post-Modern "Whimsical"

And here's where the story begins to become almost perverseley convoluted. Lake Buena Vista represents an abandoned attempt at a "Planned Community". The downtown of this planned Community - the Village - was actually constructed. As a result, even before the notion was legitimized by this new expansion, Downtown Disney already represented the problems of real cities - namely, having a well planned downtown with a bunch of suburbs stuck onto it more or less randomly, causing no end of traffic problems and infrastructure strain.

This new expansion seeks to resolve the problem by building a new, sleeker, more attractive downtown away from the original urban center. Wait, hold on -- where have we heard this before? Oh, that's right, we've heard it in real life - it's the story of every mall that has ever been built.

It even basically looks and sounds like these new "Town Center" outdoor malls which have sprouted like mushrooms in major urban centers. Below is one not far from Disney Springs - "The Grove" at Winter Garden Village. The Grove even contains faux-historical landmarks, a hotel sign above empty space, and signs honoring "local" Winter Garden residents. It is a manufactured downtown, but treated and used as a legitimate one by local shoppers. and what did we say about authenticity up top?

"Inside" the story of Disney Springs, are are supposed to understand that the new Town Center represents the "original" downtown area and the original Village is now a later suburb, yet the mind spins. We've now got a mall built next to a downtown that is pretending to be an yet older downtown - inside a huge mall.

Where Downtown Disney more or less tried to keep pace with whatever the current conception of "cool" is, Disney Springs instead aligns itself with the mode of representation traditionally most successful to Disney - the past. Instead of a murky Florida lake, the area is now centered around a "natural spring" - really a pretty, and pretty elaborate, swimming pool. Surrounding the Spring is brand new - but supposed to be old - Florida vernacular architecture. 35 years ago, this area was a swamp outside the Village. 3 years ago, it was a pile of dirt, yet here now stands "The Oldest Building In Disney Springs."

Yet it's just this sort of absurd, working backwards, built up layers of signification that gives Disneyland and Magic Kingdom their great sense of history. And while perhaps there's nothing deeper to the historical approach of Disney Springs than the generational shift towards all things "retro chic", the new style at least will have the benefit of aging gracefully instead of constantly trying to chase whatever is "cool" in this decade.

Yet for the committed Disney historian, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Throughout the new area, there are numerous small call-outs and references to Disney history, in this case usually tied up with both the real history and imagined history of this part of WDW property, such as this brand new building intended to be an early 20th century converted vegetable market, built by "Buena Vista Steel":

One could easily write off these details as the product of an unimaginative design team dipping into Disney's rich heritage to insert yet more meaningless tributes to past glories. But, in Downtown Disney, probably the number one area in WDW where master planning failed, the authentic history of poor legacy designs becomes disguised as the artificial history of the spreading of a town.

"Buena Vista Steel"

In other words, Disney Springs is the only part of Disney property which has grown to become something of a real life example of the kind of urban space it was designed to evoke. Real life cities do have huge traffic problems, real life cities are putting up parking decks to service their downtowns, real life cities are trying to attract popular and prestigious companies to fill their new malls. At what point does Disney Springs cross a line into fiction? At what point do real life cities more and more resemble Disneyland? If people believe that the fiberglass castle is real, does it become real?

In this sense, Disney Springs opens up a feedback loop akin to the ironic mutation of history seen on Buena Vista Street at California Adventure. There, shops and facilities named after old school Disney characters are said to have inspired a young Walt Disney to create... those same old school Disney characters. It's become an absurd IP game of musical chairs where history and fantasy have melded seamlessly into a mobius strip of influence.

I can see an average visitor being genuinely bewildered by this. Disney has replaced real history with slightly different artificial history and left audiences to sort it out. They've messed with similar elisions before - in the original development cycle of the Haunted Mansion, the ride was said to be a real haunted house transplanted to Disneyland. And since 1955, this plaque at Disneyland has been quietly bewildering readers, assigning great historical import to a random bit of metal:

But as far as I know Disney has never quite created an idea that requires this many layers of fiction piled up on each other, and if the result is aesthetically underwhelming, it's conceptually dizzying. It's like taking everything one step further and claiming the Walt Disney actually grew up on Main Street USA and built the rest of Disneyland around it. Both versions of the area are fiction, but there's a crucial distinction left unsaid.

Then again it's only worth fussing over conceptual distinctions like that if people are actually legitimately fooled, and I have little concern about that happening. Still, the resulting product, with its intermeshed history, fantasy, fact and fiction is truly evocative and conceptually bizarre.

The Fake Real Fake City

Going in another direction, let's return to the Town Center. Around the Town Center are a number of buildings designed to resemble converted houses. There's a few Cracker houses, an old ranch house (D-Luxe Burger), a Googie house (Blaze Pizza), and what is said to be some kind of ice house (Sprinkles) (the owners, presumably, having long ago fled to the suburbs). But most of the Town Center is built to recall Spanish Revival architecture - tilework, whitewashed stucco, wrought iron, and red tile roofs.

Any seasoned Orlandoite will recognize immediately what this is an imitation of: Rollins College in Winter Park.

Okay, so let's talk about Winter Park.

Winter Park, a suburb north of Orlando, has become for many the cultural center of Orlando, with brick lined streets, high end dining, winding canals, and the famous and expensive Park Avenue. Despite all of this, it is in some ways a fake city.

Winter Park was begun as a suburban development in 1885 to take advantage of one of Florida's many land rushes and a new rail line. With strict limits on housing style, varieties, roads, and walking paths, it was one of America's earliest planned communities. It was Celebration 110 years ahead of schedule.

So yes, Rollins College may be old - 1885 - but its beautiful architecture is not authentic old Spanish. Strictly speaking, it's artificial. Of course, in architecture circles, they have a word for this - Spanish Revival, which sits neatly alongside Gothic Revival, Italiante, Renaisance Revival, Queen Anne, Second Empire, Romanesque, and other styles of American architecture built to resemble something they are not. But it's just as correct to say that Rollins College was built themed to Spanish Florida, with its conquistadors, fountains of youth, and romantic tilework.

The fact is that maybe the most distinctive single thing about American architecture is that we have always and forever loved building themed to other things. That's why we were the country that created Coney Island and Disneyland. These places weren't some kind of perversion of a pure cultural legacy, but simply the logical outgrowth of what we've always done.

Don't believe me? Let's go back - back to when the United States was brand new, and take a look at Federalist architecture:

Those cool little pavilions around the front doors, the white columns, the emphasis on symmetry, the mullioned gables, and half-rounded fan lights? We didn't invent that - we stole it from the ancient Greeks and Romans, and stuck it onto our little saltbox houses in the nationalist frenzy of the post-Revolutionary War. The borrowing from ancient Greece was no accident - they were a famous Democracy, just like America.

Thomas Jefferson caught onto the fad and took a trip to Greece to check out what was left of their architecture, and when he came back he applied the Grecian "golden ratio" to American houses and created Jeffersonian Architecture:

See those white columns? The weirdly out of place pediment? The five-part structure of the house? The relentless symmetry? Yeah, Jefferson stole that from the Greeks. You can see it at Monticello, of course, but the symbology of ancient world Democracy is the reason why Americans have always enjoyed slapping neoclassical embellishments onto our nationalist architecture:

It's theming by just another name. And once you accept that something in the American national character just compels us to build stuff that looks like other stuff:

...the distinction between Main Street USA and real Victorian architecture begins to look like nothing but a blip. Less time passed between the era depicted on Main Street and the opening of Disneyland than passed between the construction of Rollins and the new Town Center. The Town Center, for those who only know Florida from Walt Disney World, may not scream "old Florida", but it's as legitimate a copy of the original fake as the fake itself was legitimate.

Town Center is a mall that pretends to be the original downtown of an artificial community, built beside the real downtown of an abandoned planned community, built to resemble a successful planned community just a few miles away.

Reused Reuse

Or, we could talk about Pleasure Island. "Inside" the story of Pleasure Island, it was a manufacturing center for the Pleasure family in the first part of the 20th century, which was wiped out by a hurricane (the same one which destroyed Typhoon Lagoon, in a likely coincidence). The island was re-claimed by Disney and renovated into a nightclub district, all of this to flatter Michael Eisner and his love of 80's style "Urban Reuse".

As far as I know, Pleasure Island was the very first time Disney built structures in which their signifying facades were intentionally at odds with their contents. Even the monumental abstraction of something like Future World's The Land was intended to signify what could be found inside; haunted houses contained haunted houses, pirate forts contained pirate rides.

Pleasure Island asked you to separate form and content in a way that nothing else at Walt Disney World does. Mannequins was a purpose-built facility housing a nightclub, disguised as a reclaimed tin shed-style industrial manufacturing building. Today, "Inside" the story of Disney Springs, it's a reclaimed bottling plant which just so happens to contain Morimoto Asia, a high end pan-Asian restaurant.

In this way, the building now housing Morimoto Asia even more strongly resembles its obvious inspiration: The Cannery Restaurant in Newport Beach, CA, which revolutionized restaurant design in the 80s by reclaiming a disused cannery and leaving its industrial equipment in place around the dining rooms as pieces of sculpture.

Yet this invented history paints over the real history of the building - as a nightclub called Mannequins, one of the few Pleasure Island nightclubs to run from opening to closing day. Nearby, Jock Lindsay's claims to be a converted airplane hangar from the 1940s, and it's tough to tell them apart, despite Jock Lindsay being new construction. It's pretty tough to recognize most of Pleasure Island, honestly, unless one is very up on her Pleasure Island history. Nearly everything there was knocked down and rebuilt, leaving only minor traces behind.

For about ten years, seemingly everything Disney built was rooted in some kind of meta history of abandonment and reuse - to Pleasure Island we may add Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon, parts of Animal Kingdom, and much of California Adventure. Inside the parks, at least, much of this didn't jibe well with Disney's audience and so has been stripped out, especially at California Adventure.

Disney Springs is one of the few places left where this sort of thematic games playing is still in evidence, and it has fakes upon fakes upon fakes all reflecting back at one another, like a hall of mirrors. For just one example: a brand new building on "The Landing" aka Pleasure Island, housing a new upscale restaurant STK Orlando, has a distinctive, seemingly arbitrary shape:

Yet for those who know Orlando well, if it seems strangely familiar, it's because it's built as a reference to this 1889 train station in Downtown Orlando:

Imagineers didn't have to look at old photos to get that idea, because that structure still stands today, on Church Street in Orlando. That's right, it's Church Street Station, and through the 70s and 80s it was a nuisance to Disney management as the entrance to a famous pay-one-price, gated nightclub attraction. To compete with Church Street Station, Disney built....... Pleasure Island, the current location of this reproduction. History doesn't simply repeat; it devours itself whole. Good luck not getting lost in all that.

This is why Disney Springs seems to collapse in on itself conceptually, forever pulling to some center point where fantasy and fact collide, like the house at the end of Poltergeist. There are so many layers of real, but obscured, and invented, but promoted history floating through that place that it's impossible to keep track of.

What I do know is that there are things in Disney Springs, Lake Buena Vista, and Downtown Disney that are beautifully present simply for their own sake - in the end, the only reason that matters. There's the way the afternoon Florida light filters in through the artfully arranged clutter in Jock Lindsay's Hangar Bar, who for some reason knew Indiana Jones, but whose bar feels authentically old in that moment in a way you usually have to go to Key West to enjoy. There's the Empress Lilly, impressive for her own sake, who is shortly getting her smokestacks and paddle wheel back, a real bit of history being returned to us. There's even an honesty in D-Luxe Burger, that brand spanking new old ranch house, in that it quietly and casually reminds Disney guests that once upon a time a long time before a certain theme park was built there wasn't much to Central Florida besides cattle pasture.

It may be fake, and not look very much like the real thing, but there's a honesty in the spring inside Disney Springs too. It's the first time in the 50 year history of Walt Disney World that Disney has seemed to say to its visitors: "Hey, you know, there's stuff in Florida, too, and it's good enough for us to build a fake version here for you.". It's the first time that Disney's home state has been warranting of the sort of representation extended to, say, Canada.

And there's the catch, and why the theme seems to maddeningly fold in on itself, bigger on the inside than the outside. It isn't themed to some other place, but to right here. Disney's mess of a planned community in Florida has embraced its identity as... a mess of a planned community, in Florida.

It's Floridian, and maybe part of being Floridian means being an an elaborate fake, like Charlie Kane's Xanadu deep in the tropical jungle of the imagination. Imagined, fantasized, pre-planned, corporate, artificial, deeply weird - that's Florida, and it's true inside Disney's bubble... and true outside it, too.

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The Branch Beyond the Window and Other Details

The experience of a theme park is pretty similar to that of a well-made film, isn't it?

Well, yes it is. But even if we move beyond the convenient fact that this idea is the main crux of most of my writing, it's an comparison worth making because most of the people who created the Disneyland classics were film people. Marvin Davis, Dorthea Redmond, and Harper Goff were brought in from film design to work on Magic Kingdom and Disneyland. And those who came from the Disney Studio's animation department were already working for an organization revered as the most perfectionist and artistically significant of Hollywood's golden age. Film language is coded deep into the DNA of good themed design.

It may be interesting, then, to get outside Disney and think about the subject from the perspectives of filmmakers not imbued with the Disney culture. In this spirit, allow me to introduce Carl Theodore Dreyer.

Now, for those who aren't cinema buffs, it's worth noting that Dreyer is amongst the very few thoroughly, universally canonized film directors; his name is uttered in the same breath as names like Bresson, Ozu, Renoir, and Eisenstein. Practically every film he made from 1928 to 1962 is considered a top-tier masterpiece (even if there were only five!). But the Dreyer whom supplies our upcoming quote is not the grand old man of cinema; these are the words of an up-and-coming director, making an atmospheric drama in Germany in 1924 called Michael.

Michael is fairly obscure, although its status has grown in recent years due to prominent home video releases. Still, of all the great things Dreyer has said about film making over the years, one little comment has kept rolling around in my head for nearly a decade. This is Dreyer speaking to a Journalist about Michael in 1924:

"Isn't it particularly difficult to make a film where atmosphere is decisive while the narrative takes second place?"

"Yes it is. The pictures must be arranged according to the rules of art. It is necessary that the director have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, for instance, a drawing room, must be genuine. And even objects that are not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." [Emphasis mine]

Now, when I first heard this, the idea struck me as absurd. After all, cinema artists from Méliès on have understood the power of cinema's limited frame; it implies an endless space and continuous action much like reality but can significantly exclude anything undesirable. This is why we can still make films set in vintage periods like the Gay Nineties or old west: if you don't point your motion picture camera at those telephone lines off to screen left, then they don't exist. The motion picture frame includes by exclusion. Similarly, anything off-frame that's "seen but only sensed" doesn't exist.

Méliès' set for A Trip to the Moon, 1902

But in another sense, the more I thought about this quote the more sense it made. After all, we all know what it's like to see actors laboring for reality inside a bad or unconvincing set, and so in many ways the cinema set is as much to set the proper atmosphere for creativity as it is to capture on celluloid the apparent image of an imaginary space. In the 1910's, D. W. Griffith broke precedents by insisting on placing real glass panes inside the windows of his sets; they had previously been empty. Why include something the camera or audience won't see?

Yes, the camera won't know that the glass is real, Griffith reasoned, but the actors will, and will adjust their performances accordingly. In 1922's Foolish Wives, Griffith admirer Erich von Stroheim used real glass in windows, real bullets in guns, real water in lakes, and most famously real champagne and caviar in dining scenes - as much as he wanted, for as many takes as it took. Decried by Universal as another frivolous expenditure, we can see here Stroheim leveraging the difference between things seen and things sensed.

But this train of reasoning really began to come together for me last year in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. The ride was stopped and we were all gathered in the portrait corridor waiting for operation to resume. As you probably know, in this scene there are four windows on your left. The first two have the famous "rainy night" effect diorama outside them, but the last two windows have their exterior shutters closed. Lightning still flashes through these, but there's no cool effects to see outside them.

But, but.... if you crouch down next to the second to last window and wait for a lightning flash, you can, in fact, for that split second, see some branches outside the window.... just as you would expect. Why bother with these at all? Hardly any guests would ever notice them, and I bet you'd never bother to look for them if I hadn't just bothered to point them out to you. to the right you can see my most successful attempt to photograph them, and even then they're kinda tough to make out.

I think the main reason those branches are there isn't because they're an "Easter Egg" or some kind a testament to Disney's "attention to detail". I think they're there because they're needed. The first two windows set an expectation for a pattern: trees outside the windows, some spooky fog, lightning. And although the human eye may not be wired to decode on sight what fake lightning flashing outside a fake window may look like, we do know what light passing through branches looks like, and the first two windows set us up to expect some branches outside that window. In other words, almost nobody will see it because it's there, but everybody would sense it if it wasn't. The branches are insurance against a break in the illusion (by the way, yes there are not branches outside the fourth window, but nobody looks at it anyway because the line turns right and there's the busts there to distract you).

User "dland_lover" on MiceChat

The more I thought of it, the more the "branch outside the window factor" seemed to speak less to every-detail perfectionism or foolish consistency as it did to Dreyer's insistence that things "not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." After all, there are few cinematic "magic spaces" where atmosphere is more decisive than in the stylized film world of a theme park.

Take the example of Big Thunder Mountain: the rocks are fake, but the attraction is littered with authentic antique mining equipment. The equipment isn't just about being authentic, however, and it isn't just about it being difficult to successfully build fake mining equipment. The equipment not only validates the stuff that WED did build for the ride - just a bit salted through makes everything look more real - but it validates the mining operation as a real thing, and because the mine is real, the mountain becomes real. If you think you're too clever to be mentally tricked by this, just consider that Big Thunder Mountain is, in fact, almost totally hollow. It's hard to visualize that, isn't it? that's what the value of things sensed rather than seen can add.

For whatever reason, Claude Coats was amazing at knowing exactly how much of the illusory world is needed to carry the illusion and where a few corners can be cut. More than Haunted Mansion, consider his terrific Caribbean seaport in Pirates of the Caribbean, which unlike Mansion's collection of flats and walls really is mostly there. The success of this ride is largely due to Coats' atmospheric direction in both the cavern and town sections.

But have you ever noticed how fully integrated Coats' town is with the action of the pillage narrative? His staging solutions are so simple that it takes a moment to stop and realize that somebody had to sit down and figure out how the whole thing should hang together. His sea-port is designed but it feels organic. Take note of how the location of each action is mirrored by the content of the scene. For example, the town's mayors and magistrates have been rounded up to be interrogated at the town well. The well is in an impressive public space with a central gathering point. This spectacle of indecency to public officials is being performed in the most public area seen in the attraction's fictional town, immediately implying that the Pirates represent not just a physical but an ideological threat. They are upending social structures.

Consider how easy it would've been to change this idea a little bit and lessen the impact. There's no reason why the well has to be in front of Carlos' house; it could've been a bit off to the left and his wife could've popped out of a window to the right. But it wouldn't be as funny or memorable. Would you have made this same exactly right decision if you were forced to design Pirates of the Caribbean from scratch?

Which brings us to my favorite instance of Coats' staging in the ride. Following his dictate of design following narrative, we move to the public market where the village maidens are being auctioned. This is happening directly in front of a huge building labeled "MERCADO". That's probably obvious, you've no doubt noticed it before. But have you ever noticed that you can actually see inside the market?

Yes, we can write this off as just more detail, but why is the detail there? Well, it's because this allows Coats to visually juxtapose the chain of brides with the market of produce behind them: these women are being treated like wares to be quickly consumed by the highest bidder.

But more than that this detail is the sort of thing that make Pirates of the Caribbean a true picture; in Dreyer's words, a unity. It's easy to throw a lot of detail into theme parks and end up with overkill because what's more important than having details is meaningful details. Everything we expect must be present, but nothing we don't expect or don't need to see is needed.

This, I feel, is what contributes to the sense of peace and relaxation experienced at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland, while parks of more recent vintage can feel cluttered, chaotic and unpleasant. There's just enough detail to allow us to suspend our disbelief, but not so much that the parks lose their sense of pastoral simplicity and beauty. Everything looks carefully vetted, designed, and built, compared to the visual chaos of a typical urban "strip".

We associate careful detail with the classic WED period of 1964-1984, but it's been there since the start. How many of you, for however long you've been going to Disneyland, have ever noticed that Sleeping Beauty Castle thoughtfully includes a chapel?

 (detail enlargement of a 1957 photo posted at Gorillas Don't Blog)

You may have noticed this before; it's one the right side facing Main Street. This is a common enough feature of genuine historical castles to not be noteworthy in and of itself, but due to its placement on the east side of the castle, which is an uncommonly photographed angle, and a half-century of tree growth on the Tomorrowland side, it can be downright tricky to spot it.

But once you do spot it, the real trick is to come back and see the chapel at night. All of the windows on the castle are lit up bright, welcoming yellow... except the chapel, which is lit internally by candlelight.

That's a detail which, to me, moves beyond the traditional "wide, medium, and close shot" methods used by Imagineers, which more lay out guidelines for consistency. To me, the marketplace behind the Auction, the tree branch outside the window, and the candles in the chapel are some kind of as-of-yet unnamed kind of themed design detail, which is the detail inside the detail, the sort of thing that you half don't expect to see but you go looking for anyway and there it is, waiting for you. It creates a satisfaction that goes beyond the normal level of detail presented by, say, a themed door knob. It's the discovery inside the discovery and it makes the false theme park world seem real, and lived in.

It's always been an ongoing project to make theme parks seem more convincingly realistic, especially in the hollow areas of themed facades which all too easily can appear to be the hollow or functional spaces they are. The tradition goes back to the start: this July 18, 1955 photograph from Daveland shows what the earliest WED designers probably thought of as "set dressing":

The "stuff-on-balconies" school reached its apotheosis in New Orleans Square in 1967, of course, but the Magic Kingdom in 1971 included balconies in as many niches as possible, sometimes to great effect. The simple balcony above Aloha Isle in Adventureland, stuffed with wicker chairs and faux foliage, has been firing the imaginations of observers for decades.

Stuff-on-balconies can only go so far, however, and Disneyland's other main method of creating imagined extended space is the "light in the attic" method: lamps in upper windows. There are fewer examples of this in Disneyland than expected, and most of them look pretty much like this:

(excerpt of a larger photo by rocket9 on flickr)

In 1971, the expanded scale of Magic Kingdom allowed Disneyland's designers to experiment with some of these techniques in a larger scale, and the result is very interesting. Instead of simply placing lanterns behind lace curtains. Magic Kingdom's Main Street has actual rooms in the upper level of its facades.

The rooms, of course, are nothing more than a few feet deep. It's actually a wall which encloses the upper level of the Magic Kingdom's office areas, but some well chosen wallpaper and props and the effect is very beguiling. It's also nearly impossible to photograph; the human eye can very easily distinguish between the various surfaces involved in the depth illusion - a richly patterned wallpaper viewed through an elaborate lace curtain - in ways that the camera eye cannot, but I tried very hard:

In person, this effect is nearly subliminal. I've only noticed it in the last few years, but the illusion that there really are Victorian parlors and drawing-rooms behind those windows is remarkably convincing and only fails from certain angles, which is certainly more than should be expected from details within details within details.

To avoid foolish consistency, however, some of the windows do use the simple Disneyland-style lamp, curtain and cloth, as in this handsome tribute window for Yale Gracey:

Or the beautiful dim pink light overlooking Town Square:

This one doesn't have any light inside it but it does have a full-sized chair and table and very intricate "back wall", which can only be seen by those looking very closely during the day:

The curtains hanging in the windows act as diffusion screens to make the textured rear walls - really only a few feet away from the windows - appear more distant than they are, and the illusion holds so long as the floor and ceiling remain hidden and the wallpaper chosen has small, intricate patterns. It's one of the most successful forced perspective illusions in the park. Elsewhere, in Liberty Square, the space above Liberty Tree Tavern is enlivened very simply but effectively in a window only visible from the courtyard behind the Christmas shop:

A chandelier is hung inside an unfinished attic. From the perspective of the street, the unfinished interior visually translates as the rough beams we expect inside of a colonial tavern, and a whole interior is implied for those who bother to find it:

There are other, less specular uses of lights and props throughout Magic Kingdom, although most do manifest in the traditional "light in the attic" rather than 'implied interior" seen above. However, in 1982 in World Showcase, WED Enterprises took another stab at the illusion and ended up with some interesting effects.

The "lighted windows" are applied with less regularity than throughout Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom is about nostalgia and exploration and so a warm feeling is created through elaborate displays of lights (except in the "dangerous" area of Adventureland). World Showcase is more about culture and its treatment of lighted second floor windows varies more widely: while Germany wants to create a feeling of warmth and gemütlichkeit and so uses many lit windows, the small British village of the United Kingdom pavilion feels almost sleepy at night due to its mostly darkened interiors. Until you get around the back towards the London flats, there's just a lonely lantern burning in one darkened upper window, one of EPCOT Center's most haunting details:

Contrast the United Kingdom with France, represented by Paris. EPCOT's facsimile doesn't just evoke the city of light through use of a boldly lit fountain; the France pavilion works overtime to imply a busting cultural metropolis just behind and beyond those windows and doors. Elaborate, half-glimpsed lights hang in the windows above the entrance to the Impressions de France attraction:

Diffusing curtains make these very hard to make out, but this fictional "upstairs" space is validated by the nearby second floor restaurant facing the water and, facing the United Kingdom pavilion, the upstairs art gallery, sadly long since closed.

 But the best touch, for me, is around the corner down the "provincial" side street. Many of you, no doubt, have noticed the glass-enclosed artist's loft in this area...

photo by Al Huffman

...but how many of you have seen the artist who lives there? If you return at night you can see him painting:

Yes, it's just a little cutout, but to me this is the ultimate example of the "Branch Outside the Window" effect. If you just so happened to see this one detail early in the day, wondered if it was supposed to be an artist loft, then just happened to walk back that way later and had your suspicions confirmed? How many have done that? A few dozen a year?

To me, this is what makes the difference between the sort of detail we've been discussing today and the run of the mill sort of detail which Imagineering can now do with their eyes closed. Very few may notice these sorts of things, but the cumulative effect cannot be undervalued: the impression of an organic world where there is none.

To me this sense of inevitability of these sorts of details is the mark of a great, assured artistic creation. To paraphrase Dreyer, the theme park designer must have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, a theme park, must seem genuine. And even objects that may not be seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the park character.

That's the difference that a great designer makes. The branch behind the window, rarely seen, but always sensed.