D23 magazine and cold weather parks

My 3rd issue (well, 2nd for me - I bought the first at the Disney store) of D23 came a couple of days ago and I finished a fairly thorough read of it last night. Some good articles, including a nice on on the Blue Bayou and its genesis, and one on the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco's Presidio.

I really enjoyed the cover story on the Haunted Mansion, which told bunches of interesting stories gathered from interviews from Imagineers involved in the building of it. One of the neat tales was about Wally Boag (the star of the review in Frontierland) suggesting that they put a phone booth out front, have it ring periodically, and when someone answered it, have the "caller" make a scary phone call from "inside" the Mansion, which hadn't opened yet.

Another tidbit, almost sort of buried in the article except for the fact that there was an illustration of the blueprint of a portion of the project, was that a Haunted Mansion would have been the "weenie" of the imagined indoor theme park in St. Louis. Of course, this park never got past the imagineering stages as the "Florida Project" became Walt's and the company's focus, and we all know what happened there.

I was interested in the details: the park would have been a totally enclosed, one city block structure, 4 stories high, and would have contained representations of New Orleans and St. Louis Squares. It was not detailed much further than this, and on the map that they pictured, there was an allusion to a "basement attraction" but no others besides the Haunted Mansion were discussed. It was also to have a Blue Bayou-type ceiling.

Far as I know, there is STILL nothing like this in the world. But perhaps there should be.

Port Disney - blog post from Progress City

FutureProbe pointed out this very interesting post at the Progress City blog, on the never built West Coast park originally known as Port Disney, which would have been built in Long Beach California.

Instead of building this gate, Disney focused on building Westcot, which morphed into Disney's California Adventure. When you look at this article, you can't help but pine over what might have been. Well, I couldn't help but do that, anyway.

Thanks to Futureprobe for pointing me to this post.

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.

Disney and St. Louis

Before Walt Disney World was built in Florida, it was reported that Disney had an interest in St. Louis as the site of their next development. Walt was, after all, from Missouri, and he was interested in city planning. The idea was to build the park along the Mississippi riverfront, in the area, I believe, that today is home to the entertainment district known as "The Landing".

I'm sure this isn't news to anyone knowledgeable about the history of Disney. But it is interesting to me, in that the company was willing to take the chance on building in, while not exactly the frozen north, a city where the climate is not always favorable to such an attraction. "Imagineering" a cold weather park interests me a great deal. (I may "think out loud" in future entries about the subject...or not...)

Here's links to a couple articles I found:

THE LEDGER - St. Louis Original Home to Disney

"Piece of Shep" blog

Jim Hill Media - Why Western River Went South

St. Louis Construction News and Real Estate - Put on Your Ears

If I find more articles I'll add more links.