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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Disney's America

Disney's America was going to be a theme park in Virginia, and had as an important part of its mission raising awareness of our country's history, located as it would have been in close proximity to the nation's capital and to important civil war battlefields and historical sites. The version of history that was to be presented in the park is something that we'll never quite know - about all we can be sure of is that it would have had a Disney spin on it.

I've been interested in this park and its imagineering because it would have been located not in the temperate areas like other Disney theme parks in the U.S., but in a region that has seasons (and those seasons last for months!). The way they would have handled the cold weather months interests me a great deal. I blogged about it back here and wondered aloud (so to speak) about some of the issues that would face Disney as they tried to run a theme park in all different climates.

I had intended to wait until all the parts were written, but the SamLand blog has been publishing a nine part series on this park. He's through part 7 now, and all the other parts are indexed at the beginning of this post. Here's the link to SamLand's Disney's America post. I'll be posting a link again when the series is complete.

Go one over there and give it a read. It's worth your time, I think.

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Disney's America

Any Disney buff probably knows more than I do about this project - a park near Washington, D.C., located in Virginia that almost came into being in the mid-1990's but then was killed by resistance from locals and historians and such. The resistance was framed as opposition to Disney's potential sullying of historical sites, not to mention problems with Disney's telling of national history. (But one article I saw suggests that what it really was, was a bunch of wealthy influential people not wanting Disney in their back yards.)

There is a lot of concept art in various places on the web: I found a bunch on the blog Disney and More, a discussion hosted by Alain Littaye, a frequent contributor to Mice Age, often on Disneyland Paris subjects. A Google search for Disney America concept art will bring up plenty of choices.

It looked like an exciting park, though it would have been immensely interesting to find out what the Imagineers could have come up with for the "entertainment" part of their "edu-tainment" experience. Would the entertainment experience have differed markedly from what is available at so many other parks around the country?

Also of interest to me is, how would Disney have handled the climate at this park? Could coasters and water rides be an important part of the experience when the climate is somewhat unpredictable? In my searching the internet for articles about this park, I didn't find any that focused on how Disney was going to cope with this challenge. Most of the articles focused on the art, the plans for the park, and the reasons that it didn't come to be.

It seems to me that those challenges would have been hard to meet. Snow removal can be accomplished by mechanical means, and by heated walkways. (I believe that University of Illinois in Chicago uses some form of heated sidewalks to keep them clean in the winter snows. It didn't seem that complicated of a system...) But what about when it is snowing cats and dogs? The rides that are not indoors have to be shut down. Would they have operated the park year-round but shut down some of the attractions seasonally? Do they then charge different admission prices seasonally?

This is a topic I'm somewhat interested in, so I'll probably continue to write about it in the future - hopefully in a little less general sense.