Blogs - Disney's America series on SamLand's Disney Adventures

SamLand's Disney Adventures has finished the Disney's America series with Part 9. The final post provides an index of sorts to the previous 8 segments.

I found it to be an interesting, well-researched article on a topic that captures my fancy - the making of a Disney-quality park in a cold weather climate. Interestingly, the article points out that experts at Disney believed that the park would only be able to be open 8 months out of the year and that Disney would be hard-pressed to operate profitably under those conditions.

There is a link at the end of SamLand's series to an article about what has happened in the area since Disney pulled the plug, along with a lot of insight into the objections in the area to such a project. This was a great "perspective" piece that shows the proverbial "other side".

I've often wondered (sometimes on the entries in this blog) how Disney would have approached the challenges that building in a relatively cold weather climate would have entailed. Ex-Imagineer Eddie Sotto mentioned in a long exchange on the WDWMagic discussion forum that while he didn't work on Disney's America, they did face some similar issues in Paris, and they dealt with some of them by incorporating "Arcades", enclosed walkways on either side of Main Street USA.

I think, however, that the only way to manage the challenging issue of the weather is to enclose the entire park. Of course, this limits size. At one point, Disney was considering building "Riverboat Square" in St. Louis, and according to D23 magazine and other sources, the development would have been a one square city block area (which I figure is a little more than 9 acres), in a four story building. Would this be enough room for a theme park? I suppose it would be if you know what you want to put into it, and there is always the possibility of expansion in the future, adding outlying buildings with neat transportation systems to get to them, much like a large airport works.

Anyway, bop on over to SamLand's Disney Adventures if you're interested in the history of this project.

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