To What Extent do Amusement Parks Manifest the Notion of the Ideal Urbanism?
Azmah Arzmi Cultural Context AR802 Master of Architecture University of Kent Autumn 2012
Over the course of the 20th century, amusement parks have become a jovial playground for adults and children alike where they can partake in thrilling rides, be entertained by people in costumes, chow down on concession hot dogs or engage in a fantasy adventure of their choice.
While
the
function
of
amusement parks is to entertain and provide a cheap thrill, they can be said to be manifestations of utopian visions where a harmonious sense of community and order is built around Figure 1 Royal pleasure gardens of Versaille are the earliest form of amusement parks
a highly theatrical setting. It began with the pleasure gardens in the
European cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Vauxhall Gardens in London to Versaille in Paris. Further on, expositions set a precedent for amusement parks, among them were the London‟s Great Exhibition of 1851 and Paris‟s Exposition Universalle of 1889. The artefacts and machinery on display portray the lifestyles of the colonised exotic countries that were otherwise inaccessible to the public and what the future would look like. This is followed by the Barcelona‟s World Exposition of 1888 and Chicago World‟s Fair of 1893. The Coney Island amusement parks came at the end of the nineteenth century with technological innovations of its time. Other amusement parks and consequently, theme parks followed suit, including the Disney franchises. Author of The 100 Mile City, Deyan Sudjic , wrote that not only has the amusement park become a lucrative outlet to gratify sensory pleasures within a controlled environment, it also “…functions as if all the public life of a city were concentrated into one hysterical compound like so much cake icing, beyond which is the private world of suburbia…Inside
as if to compensate, there is nothing but spectacle. Monumental architecture which has been abolished on the outside is permissible here only on licence.” (1993, p. 214) The following paragraphs will demonstrate how visitors experienced Coney Island amusement parks in the late 19th to early 20th century and how they experienced Disneyland in the 1950s onwards. This essay will also explore how amusement parks came to define and reflect upon the notion of the ideal city of its time. Merchandising on Future Predictions and Historic Memories Coney
Island
became
an
emerging
popular
entertainment ground at the end of the 19th century when technological advancements made it possible for developers and innovators to “turn machines of industry into instruments of play” (Coney Island, Figure 2 Loop-the-Loop, which inspired the first rollercoaster made its mark in Coney Island.
1991). It hosts the first three amusement parks, in which they became the laboratory for all the
possibilities of machinery before it was exported to the outside world. With the invention of electric lights, railroad tracks and the telephone, the purveyors of pleasure took the principles of gravity, torque and rectilinear motion and adapted them in a way that would create mass exhilaration. In 1883, the public was enchanted by the Loop-the-Loop, the first amusement ride that seemed defy gravity. Rem Koolhaas in his book Delirious New York described it as the “railroad that loops around itself so that a small vehicle will cling to an upside-down surface, provided it travels at a certain speed” (1994, p. 34). Its direct descendent is the Switchback Gravity Railway which appeared the next season in 1884, the first world‟s rollercoaster. Other examples were the steam-powered carousel housed in a pagoda and
Shoot-the-Chutes. As electricity became a common feature, towards 1890 bright lights were placed at regular intervals along the surf line, so that the people at the beach could enjoy an extended daytime, or „Electric Bathing.‟ This system, the basis for the 24-hour metropolis proved popular and was transplanted onto Manhattan as city streetlights (Koolhaas, 1994). Henceforth, the use of technology to explore human experiences and pleasure that appeared in Coney Island inspired the masses and gave a good indication of the future in the 20th century. Another aspect was the architecture that emerged, as it was a different kind that appealed to the fantasy of the public.
Figure 3 (Left) Luna Park at night, bringing forth bright lights and the architectural wonder if offers (right)
Coney Island boasts several architectural attractions that astonished visitors in its heyday, a groundwork for the ostentatious architecture that would define Modernism. As Michael Immerso wrote in Coney Island: The People's Playground, when Frederic Thompson opened Luna Park in May 1903, “two hundred thousand electric lights shown forth from the towers” with “fretted domes, and minarets rising above the new amusement concession touted as New York‟s World‟s Fair” (Immerso, 2002, p. 60). The prominent aspect was the towers, which were Thompson‟s pride.
“Thompson‟s genius is to let these needles proliferate at random, to create an architectural spectacle out of the drama of their frenzied scramble for individuality and to identify this battle of the spires as the definitive sign of otherworldliness, the mark of another condition.” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 41) Luna Park became the first City of Towers, an analogy used to imply to the growing urban form of Manhattan with its first skyscrapers punctuating the skyline. This skyward utopia began in 1902 with the Flatiron Building that subsequently progressed to well-known structures such as Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931). Subsequently, future predictions became the main theme in America‟s World‟s Fairs from 1933 to 1940, which propelled Modernism. Robert W. Rydell and Laura Bird Schiavo‟s Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s paint a vivid picture of the power that these fairs have by imprinting on people‟s minds a vision of a future America that looked bright and optimistic as the United States was pulling itself out of the Great Depression. The
Figure 4 A poster for 1939 New York World Fair by Federal Group featuring modern architecture
government wanted to instil a sense of patriotism and promote economic growth by exposing the
possibilities for America not only in terms of architecture but in lifestyle and transportation. Thus there was blind faith in technology and the trend of consumer capitalism. Architects, manufacturers and industrial designers took
Figure 4 Futurama exhibit displays a city of skyscrapers and intersecting highways
part and influenced the way in which Americans prepared food, dressed, drive to work or spend their leisure time. More importantly, the fairs feature the urban models of the future. The Futurama and Democracity exhibits in the 1939-1940 New York World‟s Fairs both featured neo-Corbusian solutions to the reconstruction of American cities based on rational urban planning.
Robert Bennett points out that with Ebenezer Howard‟s Garden City
movement in late 1800s and Le Corbusier‟s Plan Voisin, the decentralisation of the future American cities reflects upon the adaptation of European modernism to the American preference for open spaces (Rydell & Schiavo, 2010). The broad architectural principles that the fairs promoted were implemented post-World War II American cities through modern suburbs like Levittown and corporate skyscrapers in Manhattan. However, the sprawling suburbs, disintegration of towns into zoning districts, skyscrapers and vast highways have failed in meeting their larger social objectives of community and
Figure 6 Aerial view of Levittown in 1947
place-making. The modern planning drew ire from critics such as Jane Jacobs who criticized it in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities for its “dullness” and “monotony, sterility and vulgarity” (1961, pp. 4, 7). In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi also remarked upon modernism‟s “bland architecture” and “blatant simplifications” ( 1966, pp. 22, 25). While modernism brought public outcry, the
Disney
theme
Parks
start
to
commercialise themselves by exploiting the nostalgic appeal of the past. The intention of Main Street USA was to Figure 5 Elevation for the Main Street USA, showing traditional architectural styles
evoke fond memories of a traditional small town. Speaker David Maxwell in his lecture The Happiest History on Earth: The Disneyland Story said that the architecture of the buildings was loosely modelled after Walt Disney‟s hometown of Marceline in Missouri although its buildings were an extremely idealised version. It can be said that they may also be modelled after Fort Collins in Colorado, the hometown of one of his art directors during that period. In the postmodernist world, there is a trend to capitalise on the history of the bygone era as it represented the „ideal‟ lifestyle or system of values that became extinct. M. Christine Boyer described referred to this as the “historical tableau” in her essay Cities for Sale that “Everyone knows the meaning of Main Street, USA: the small business community of practical, law-abiding citizens devoted to “free-enterprise” and “social-mobility”....These stylized historical tableaux, on one level, are self-conscious attempts to regain a centred world, to re-establish a mythical base on which American moral, political, and social traditions might stand.” (ed. Sorkin, 1992, 190) Walt Disney also wanted to educate the public on the history of America, so he narrated it through Frontierland, with Tom Sawyer‟s Island that included a Red Indian village populated by „real‟ Native Americans. There was Fort Wilderness, depicting the Civil War and the Rivers of America with large emphasis on the Mississippi river.
Figure 6 Study drawings of canoe ride in Disney World Florida's Frontierland (Left) and the Wild West in Disneyland (Right)
Reyner Banham in his critical book Los Angeles:The Architecture of Four Ecologies remarked that apparently, when “traditional cultural and social restraints have been overthrown and replaced by the preferences of a mobile, affluent, consumer-oriented society, the „cultural values‟ and ancient symbols are handled primarily as methods of claiming or establishing status” (1971, p. 106). The polarisation between Coney Island‟s futuristic dreams and Disney parks‟ historic nostalgia can be reflected upon contrast between Umberto Eco‟s comparison of modernism‟s „preferences of the shock of the new‟ and postmodernism‟s “new aesthetics of seriality” (1985, p. 161). The historic tableau became fashionable as city developers realise their appeal as tourist attractions and the “economic development experts now turn every small town thoroughfare into Main Street...City after city discovers that its abandoned industrial waterfront or outmoded city centre contains enormous tourist potential and refurbishes it as a leisure-time spectacle and sightseeing promenade” (Sorkin: Boyer, 1992, 189). A good example of this would be the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, a rehabilitated historic tableau that attracts spectators.
Figure 7 Historic tableau of South Street Seaport amidst the high-rise setting of Manhattan attracts tourists
The Consumption of Leisure In 1885, the Saturday “half-holiday” movement was initiated so the vast American labour force which included increasing numbers of young women began to take leisure time. This in turn created more demand for cheap, mass entertainment. For the people of Manhattan, Coney Island offered that escape. It was not long after that the idea of generating money from people who came seeking pleasure came to the fore. George Tilyou seized this idea by gathering his “widely scattered rides and inventions into a single amusement concession” (Immerso, 2002, p.56). Steeplechase Park was the first enclosed amusement park in 1897 and for that single admission visitors could enjoy various attractions on display, from the Barrel of Love, the Earthquake Floor, the Aerial Slide and the Steeplechase Gravity Ride. The democratising process of leisure was advanced by the institutionalisation of the amusement industry, by creating a “self-enclosed, easily replicable commercial enterprise that could deliver cheap amusement to the masses in a manner that was enormously profitable” (Immerso, 2002, p.59). This marks the beginnings for which consumption would turn culture, leisure, sex and politics into commodities. By that time department stores began to play a bigger role in the growing city of New York by replacing the single-purpose outlets and moving into the new high-rise buildings, served by the rapid transit lines. “Indirect commodification,” as Margaret Crawford put it in her essay The World in a Shopping Mal,‟ is a process in which “nonsalable objects, activities, and images are purposely placed in a commodified world” (ed. Sorkin, 1992, p.14). “Adjacent attraction” is when “ the most dissimilar objects lend each other mutual support when they are placed next to each other” (Sennett, 1976, pp. 144-45). For instance, in Luna Park, the dazzling array of rides and stimulation such as A Trip to the Moon and War of the Worlds further enhanced each other, along with the existence of hot dog stands, kiosks, the ostentatious architecture along the Court of Honor and the reproduction of the Piazza San Marco.
This commodification of leisure accelerated in the early 1900s with the introduction of motion pictures. Disneyland‟s success owes much to television and popular culture of Disney movies that emerged in that period. Walt Disney, being observant of the current fairs and exhibitions of his time, perfected the art of indirect commodification by the time Disneyland opened in 1952. He incorporated “fantasy, juxtaposing shopping with an Figure 8 The pleasure of shopping along Main Street USA is accentuated by the interesting urban fabric
intense spectacle of accumulated images and themes that entertain and stimulate and in
turn encourage more shopping” (ed. Sorkin: Crawford, 1992, p.16). The layout of Disney parks promote consumerism by getting people to walk through Main Street before and after their visit for which they will be enticed by several souvenir shops that offer goods that remind them of that magical experience. The vibrant public realm of Main Street further enhances the atmosphere. Eating, shopping and interaction are mutually reinforcing and can all happen along the Main Street. The pedestrian experience is uninterrupted; thanks to the continuous urban fabric of the buildings that faces the street with doors and windows. Furthermore, hotels and museums are also thrown in the mix to further fuel the spending and prolong the visitor‟s stay. Consequently, amusement parks can be comparable to shopping malls, as both take advantage of consumers by offering a variety of commodities and services in a single location. “Both offer controlled and carefully packaged public public spaces and pedestrian experiences to auto-dependent suburban families already primed for passive consumption by television…While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and
weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geographic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer‟s Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment.” (ed. Sorkin: Crawford, 1992, p.16) The shopping mall does not only replace the traditional downtown, but its growing scale has also allowed it to function independently as a city. In the 1980s, West Edmonton Mall in Alberta was the biggest mall in the world, consisting of indoor pools, a golf course, hotel and an ice rink. Hence customers could reside in the mall without going outside as it meets all their daily needs.
Figure 9 A view within West Edmonton Mall was the biggest mall in 1980s and could function independently as a city
Putting the World on Display The amusement parks‟ common ancestors, the World Expos were known to import artefacts from all over the world and serve them up on a platter for visitors to enjoy without ever setting foot abroad. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, though not the first, was a
larger event than London‟s Great Exhibition of 1851. Besides the extravagant national pavilions and the ingenuity of the Eiffel Tower, “it is the fantastical aspects of the exposition, the replicas of the pagodas of Angkor Wat, Senegalese villages and Indochinese palaces, which could be seen incongruously silhouetted against the dome of Les Invalides, that were to have much of an impact as Eiffel‟s engineering brilliance” (Sudjic, 1993, pp. 215-16) The United States did not have a vast empire as the European countries, so the appeal for foreign anything that was deemed „exotic‟ was taken advantage of in Coney Island where environments and historical events were recreated and people from other locations were invited to come over to entertain the public. In Dreamland, one could either witness The Fall of Pompeii or Figure 10 Among the foreigners brought over to entertain at Coney Island
enjoy Coasting through Switzerland. In the former, one
could
experience
the
electrical
and
mechanical effects of Mount Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii or ride in red sleighs through a miniature Swiss valley for the latter. At Luna Park in 1904 Fred Thompson had lined the Court of Honor and lagoon with a promenade of the Japanese tea gardens, and included Durbar of Delhi pageant complete with sixty elephants and a large number of Eastern people (Immerso, 2002). While it was popular to showcase international artefacts in one place, for Disneyland, Walt Disney had put more emphasis on America. As his successors took over the work of EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) in Florida, after his death, it would later became the Walt Disney World Resort in 1971 which
“….became an international version of the old Disneyland “fun” map, arranged in concentric circles with Fantasyland make-believe at the heart of the matter, ringed by a series of standard tourist fantasies at the boundaries. Going to Hawaii. Vacationing in Venice. Sending back postcards from some impossibly distant capital in the Orient. Living a life of glamour, luxury, and sophistication, like the people in magazines did. It was a map of real places in the world that had already been transformed into quasi-fantasy by Hollywood, paperback books, and the collective imagination.” (Marling, 1997, p. 159) Thanks to globalisation, world cities have become more ageographical. Advances in telecommunications, trade, knowledge and immigration have dissolved boundaries and allowed people to experience and assimilate other cultures. Lifestyles and traditions can be experienced without venturing too far. Following this trend, the Disney company has expanded its franchise by opening up theme parks in Paris, Japan and Hong Kong. On the other hand, to allow foreign tourism at home, Japan has developed ethnic theme parks; among them are The German Happiness Kingdom, Venice of Japan, Holland Village and Niigata Russian Village. Outside Mobility versus Internal Circulation If we refer to the Plan of Dreamland, Reynolds had arranged fifteen facilities in a horseshoe plan that faces out onto the ocean. At the centre was a “lagoon with a massive tower and a sunken garden, surrounded by a balustrade and crossed by footbridges” (Immerso, 2002, p.68). A completely even supersurface that connects from one facility to another flows “without a single step,
Figure 11 Plan of Dreamland
threshold
or
other
articulation
-
an
architectural
approximation of the stream of consciousnessâ€? (Koolhaas, 1994, p.46). The walks were leveled and the park was laid out in a way to minimise the possibility of crowd congestion, so that 250,000 people were able to move around and see everything with ease. The need to ease congestion had long been addressed as it was a prime problem in Coney Islandâ€&#x;s
beaches and with the opening of the previous two amusement parks, Steeplechase and Luna Park.
Figure 12 Bridges and modern rail transit at the end of 19th century links Manhattan with Brooklyn and Coney Island
The problem of masses started long before, as the Manhattanites wanted to fulfil the need for pleasure, the demand for easier accessibility led to bridges being built linking Coney Island to the main land between 1832 and 1870, and the construction of a railroad in 1865 that reached the middle of the island (Koolhaas, 1994). The 1870s saw a rapid development of urban rail transit in New York which greatly facilitated how people commute from one place to another. Urban life at the time for the masses of New York was dependent on public transit and the development, along with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, helped to strengthen connections between the New York boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Coney Island. Modernism saw the popularity of cars and a rise in private automobile ownership. The car manufacturers promoted continuous driving as the ultimate freedom and democracy by offering driving experiences at the 1930s World Fairs. At the Road of Tomorrow in the 1939 New York Worldâ€&#x;s Fair sponsored by Ford, visitors were invited to test-drive cars along a spiral ramp built into the pavilion. Once inside the pavilion, they were shown images of maps showing the proposed highways for the coming decades. From then on in the 1950s, post-
World War II planning emerged at an unchartered pace to accommodate the increasing uses of the private automobile (Rydell & Schiavo, 2010). In the less densely built urban form of Los Angeles, strategies to facilitate the car have culminated in parking-lots, freeways and drive-ins. The car represented both democracy and alienation and a “repressor of pedestrianism and its happy random encounters” (Sorkin, 1992, p. 218). Figure 13 Ford's sponsored driving experience at Road of Tomorrow at 1939 New York World's Fair
As driving became popular and the car becomes the average
means of getting around in the sprawl of Los Angeles, Walt Disney became motivated to design Disneyland in a way that encourages getting around on foot. In a televised press conference in November 1965 with the governor of Florida, Walt Disney confirmed his stance, saying that “I‟m not against the automobile, but I just feel that the automobile has moved into communities too much. I feel that you can design so that the automobile is there, but still put people back as pedestrians again.” Disneyland sets out to promote walking with a vengeance by banishing cars to parking spaces at the periphery. “The act of entry was a rite of passage telling the stranger to shake off the customs of that other place – the formless sprawl of Los Angeles out beyond the parking lot….Here, on this spot, the day started afresh, with a new set of rules. And the first of the admonitions built into the fabric of Disneyland was this: Arise and walk! Walk, all together now, straight down Main Street from the train.” (Marling, 1997, p. 87)
The key element in Walt Disney‟s planning was „The Wienie,‟ a visual attraction to guide people. Disneyland is divided into five themed areas, every one of which contains its own wienie; Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Fantasyland and Main Street USA. The main „Wienie‟ is the Sleeping Beauty castle on Main Street. Since the 1940s Walt Disney had envisioned a central hub, where all the different parts of the park could be assessed from a single point. This came about after studying existing amusement parks at the time such as Coney Island, where he noted the difficulty of getting from one place to another. He wanted to avoid having amusement parks at the piers as it was the norm then, where there was no control in over where people came or where they exit. With that in mind, his hypothetical theme park was to have one entrance and one exit, so he would know the number of people at any given time (The Happiest History on Earth: The Disneyland Story, 2012).
Figure 14 Map of Disneyland, where circulation is aided by 'Wienies'
Not only did he promote pedestrianism, Disney was also an advocate of public transit. Along with trains, there were boats and stagecoaches. Reyner Banham described the contrast between the reality of Los Angeles and the fantasy mobility of Disneyland aptly, saying that “Ensconed in a sea of giant parking-lots in a city devoted to the automobile, it provides transportation that does not exist outside – steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tramtrains, travelators, ropeways, not to mention pure transport fantasies such as simulated space-trips and submarine rides. Under-age children, too young for driver‟s licences, enjoy the licence of driving on their own freeway system and adults can step off the pavement and mingle with the buses and trams on Main Street in a manner that would lead to sudden death or prosecution outside.” (1971, pp. 109-110)
Figure 15 The streetcar is one of the many transport modes in Walt Disney World
Monitoring Sociability and Atmosphere within Amusement Parks Much can be said about the social aspects of Coney Island. There was no call of duty, no moral judgement, although there are said to be dark forces that exist within the vast possibility of a large democratic culture. Giuseppe Cautella famously said; “When you bathe in Coney, you bathe in the American Jordan. It is holy water. Nowhere else in the United States will you see so many races mingle in a common purpose for a common good. Democracy meets here and has its first interview, skin to skin. Here you find the real interpretation of the Declaration of Independence – the most good for the greatest number, tolerance, freedom.� (Coney Island, 1991) The rapid industrialization of American northeast states in the late 1800s brought mass immigration from rural areas and abroad that contributed to the work force. From then onwards New York city became a large melting pot of culture with the Jewish, Asian and European immigrants coming in from the harbour.
Furthermore, it became increasingly
common for women to partake in the labour force, particularly young and unmarried women. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, there were already three million people living in New York City, with half of them in slums, which became more crowded than the cities of Calcutta or Bombay (Coney Island, 1991).
Figure 16 Bathers at Steeplechase Park in early 1900s
To escape the drudgery of life and the congested streets of New York, the residents would escape to the “spit of land at the foot of Brooklyn…It is a summer safety valve for the most explosively packed metropolis on earth” (Coney Island, 1991). Coney Island became a haven where there were no inhibitions to mingle among one another regardless of gender and race. In 1893, the New York Times declared it as „Sodom by the Sea,‟ a place where prostitution and gambling took place. Attempts have been made to control indecency; among them were the police raid of the Turkish Theater amidst prostitution allegations and George Tilyou‟s introduction of a single amusement concession for all his rides. Tilyou was the first to present the idea of „clean fun‟ without “.....sacrificing the festive, free-spirited, and sensual contours of the carnival that sought to turn normal everyday life on its head. By enclosing his park he was able to exert a greater degree of control, barring those who might disrupt or abuse the environment he had sculpted while at the same time guaranteeing a manic, topsy-turvy, sanity-splitting experience to those respectable folk who paid their way into his park.” (Immerso, 2002, p. 59)
With the Disney theme parks, Walt Disney presented a more sanitised, family friendly version by paying more attention to the details that would contribute to the ambience of joy and pleasure. For Disneyland in Anaheim, he was rigorous in providing for his customers. Deyan Sudjic elaborated that, “The targets in the shooting galleries are repainted every night, cleaning teams scrub the gum off the walkways with putty scrapers ….and 800,000 plants are replaced each year because organisation doesn‟t believe in putting up „keep off‟ sign.” Even more crucial is the relentless cheerfulness of the employees, and their dress code. Even in the 1950s, „bright
nail polish, bouffants, heavy perfume, jewellery and unshined shoes‟ were prohibited. The personnel manager called for „no low spirits, no corny raffishness, and the ability to call the boss by his first name, without flinching. That‟s a natural look that doesn‟t grow quite as naturally as everybody thinks. “ (1992, p. 224)
Figure 17 Sleeping Beauty Castle transforms the bustling atmosphere at Main Street USA into a magical setting. The average worker at Disneyland must adhere to strict dress codes and project a cheerful attitude.
Referring to the latter part about the dress code, Stephen Colbert, an American political satirist and comedian sneeringly said, “When you work at Disney World, you‟re not just an employee, you‟re a cast member and you don‟t wear a uniform, you wear a costume…Disney has such a rigid dress code that it makes you wonder how Winnie the Pooh slipped in without his pants.” (Colbert Report, 2010)
Besides the strict regulations of cleanliness and workers‟ conduct, there are the physical settings that contribute to the joyous atmosphere. The architecture at today‟s Disney Parks were intended to awe and inspire, mostly based on themes from movie scenes, with emphasis on the fantastical. In Disneyland, the main attraction is the Sleeping Beauty castle on Main Street, its architecture based on Ludwig of Bavaria‟s Neuschwanstein (Sudjic, 1993). With the addition of the castle, the Main Street was no longer Marceline, Missouri or Fort Collins, Colarado. It transforms the place into something magical, and from this Castle several paths emerge that lead to other magical places, like Fantasyland, Tomorrowland or Frontierland (Marling, 1997). In addition, according to Chris Whitaker‟s Architecture and the American Dream, the „back doors‟ of Disneyland - pipes, garages, storages and employee locker rooms - have seemingly vanished, as they are hidden from view. The architectural layout of Main Street USA is cohesively stitched so that they are not visible to intrude upon the fantasy. Therefore, the restaurants, rides and the souvenir shops are serviced from behind. Meanwhile, the Walt Disney World in Florida uses another advanced method by installing tunnels throughout the park for food, merchandise, rubbish and workers to move about to their respective destinations (1996). Of course, the Disney parks would not have been a happy place were it not for the cast of characters from Mickey, Goofy to Snow White. Although there are elements of horrors such as witches, ogres, pirates and skeletons, there is always this exterior of brightness and cheerfulness. Thus Disney parks constantly promotes the belief that good triumphs over evil, and that “the little fellow, through a combination of luck, courage, and cunning, can always overcome in the end the big bad person in his or her numerous guises, all of which signify Power and its abuse” (ed. Marling: Tuan, 1997, p.198).
Erika Doss explained that for the 1950s Americans, the appeal of Main Street was that it represented what they wished small-town America could have been instead of the banal reality of the suburban strip-mall. “Similarly, Fantasyland rewarded its audiences with exciting and enclosed physical spaces, and odd and eccentric characters, which could be experienced on a safe and entirely temporal basis...Fantasyland, of course, also made clear demarcations between forces of good and evil…thereby heightening, perhaps, American desires for (or expectations of) moralistic simplicity in an age of increasing sociocultural and political complexity.” (ed. Marling, 1997, p.182) The Great Influence of Amusement Parks The measure of the ideal urbanism in amusement parks is not just about pleasant architecture but also the sense of community, integrated diversity and the public realm presented on a pedestrian scale. While the Coney Island amusement parks cannot be said to be ideal, they are the pioneers that inspired their successors, most notably the Disney World franchise to refine their parks. The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida is not just a fantasy world. It has great economic power, with 23,000 permanent jobs and attracts 20 million visitors a year (Sudjic, 1993). It is the result of Walt Disney‟s vision, as he saw himself as Ebenezer Howard and harboured dreams about creating the utopian city. The opportunity to build his ideal city arose when, after the success of Disneyland in Anaheim, he was granted parcels of land by Robert Moses in Orlando to develop into Disneyland East. The project, dubbed as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), was not only intended as a place for people to visit, but a settlement in which people actually reside. Disney‟s vision,
“....was a city with 20,000 residents and a fifty-acre central hub, enclosed in a glass dome that would keep the weather out. Skyscrapers would pierce the dome, along with the monorail, vacuum-tube trash disposal and central computer, all the futurist bric-a-brac.” (Sudjic, 1993, p. 225) However despite Disney‟s rigorous work on EPCOT, after his death, the city of the future did not come to fruition as he would have wanted. Nevertheless, many years on, in the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company commissioned famous architects to create a planned community of Celebration in Florida, founded in 1994 and connected to the Walt Disney World Resort. It was designed as a legacy of Walt Disney‟s vision of EPCOT with the likes of Phillip Johnson, Cesar Pelli and Michael Graves helping to create the master plan and design the buildings. The town borrows the same concept and was developed to give a sense of the traditional neighbourhood of a walkable and safe community. Walt Disney‟s theme parks have won praises and inspired other urban planners. Charles Moore, the American architect wrote about Disneyland in his essay, You Have to Pay for Public Life. He commended Disneyland for creating a public environment which encourages participation, which Los Angeles lacks (2001). In the early 1980s the New Urbanism movement was conceived, to promote walkable, sustainable neighbourhoods to counteract against the current US town-planning policies that encourage sprawl. Its members consist of architects and town planners Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The New Urbanism relies heavily on the concepts of traditional town-planning and advocates integrated mixed-use planning for towns that would allow them to flourish into vital communities.
Figure 18 Plan of the coastal town of Seaside in Florida
The plan in Figure 20 shows their most famous work, the coastal town of Seaside in Walton County, Florida which can be compared with the plan of Disneyland. Both feature a compact layout in which people could walk to their needs and promote social encounters. While Disneyland is known for its „Wienieâ€&#x;, Seaside maintains that axial relationship between its special structures and public spaces. In addition, the beach pavilions are used to mark beach entrances and terminate views from the streets (Katz, 1994).
Figure 19 The East Ruskin Street beach pavilion (left) and the Tupelo Circle (right) serve as visual landmarks, similar to the Wienies of Disneyland
In a Nutshell The members of the New Urbanists explained the phenomena of Disney World well in their book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream; “Why do so many people go there- for the rides? According to one Disney architect, the average visitor spends only 3 percent of his time on rides or at shows. The remaining time is spent enjoying the precise commodity that people so sorely lack in their suburban hometowns: pleasant, pedestrian-friendly, public space and the sociability it engenders.� (Duany et al. 2001, p. 63) The popularity and influence of amusement parks cannot be underestimated. People are gravitated towards them not because of the entertainment factor, but the fact that these parks literally provide that urban environment that fulfils their needs. That environment is depicted through renderings of the future or past, accommodating places for consumption, decontextualizing the world, integrating pedestrian friendly and mass transit networks as well as allowing for sociability that fosters a lively atmosphere.
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Illustrations Cover Illustration Miyuki Iga, Color reference chart for Cinderella’s Castle, from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.36 Figure 1 Unknown Artist, Fireworks anjd Illuminations at Versailles in Honour of the Marriage of the Count of Provence (later Louis XVIII) to Louise-Mari-Joseph de Savoie from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.194 Figure 2 Michael Immerso’s Collection, The Loop the Loop at Coney Island from Coney Island: The People's Playground, by Michael Immerso, p.98 Figure 3a Library of Congress, The Tower at Luna Park from Coney Island: The People's Playground, by Michael Immerso, p.65 Figure 3b Adolph Wittemann, Luna Park, Circa 1905, Museum of the City of New York, the Leonard Hassam Bogart Collection, from Coney Island: The People's Playground, by Michael Immerso, p.63 Figure 4 W.L. Stensgaard and Associates Inc., Federal Group: Century of Progress, 1934, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, from Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo. Figure 5 Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, from Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, p.137 Figure 6 Levitt and Sons, Culver Pictures, Inc., from Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, p.186 Figure 7 Ernie Prinzhorn, Borden Main Street Ice Cream Parlor from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.102 Figure 8a Art Riley from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.110
Figure 8b Sam McKim from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.110 Figure 9a and 9b Hetty 51, shot on September 13 2011, South Street Seaport, photograph, accessed on 13 January 2013 on http://www.flickr.com/photos/hetty_51/6222123435/ Figure 10 Dan Gooze, proposal for Main Street Motors showroom, southeast block, Main Street, Disneyland Paris, 1988, from The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, editor Karal Ann Marling, p.88 Figure 11 Bhasker Garudadri, shot on 23 January 2010, West Edmonton Mall, photograph, accessed on 13 January 2013 on http://www.flickr.com/photos/bhasker_garudadri/4301128593/ Figure 12 Michael Immerso’s Collection, Spieler at Coney Island Slideshow, from Coney Island: The People's Playground by Michael Immerso, p.138 Figure 13 Unknown author, Plan of Dreamland, from Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, p.47 Figure 14 Unknown author, Location of Coney Island vis a vis Manhattan, from Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, p.47 Figure 15 Collection of The Henry Ford, from Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo, p.137 Figure 16 Matt Hunter Ross, shot on May 1 2012, Disneyland (1961), photograph of illustration by Sam McKim, courtesy of Disney History Institute, accessed on 13 January 2012 on http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthunterross/6985973568/ Figure 17 Steve Burns, shot on 15 June 2012, Morning on Main Street USA, photograph, accessed on 13 January 2013 on http://www.flickr.com/photos/burnsland/8169400797/ Figure 18 Fried Collection, Bathers at Steeplechase Park, from Coney Island: The People's Playground, by Michael Immerso, p.143 Figure 19 Adam Hansen, shot on 15 September 2011, The start of another day on Main Street USA(Explored) photograph, accessed on 13 January 2013 on http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamhansen/6219798161/ Figure 20 Peter Katz from The New Urbanism by Peter Katz, p.3 Figure 21a and b Michael Moran from The New Urbanism by Peter Katz, p.10 and p.13