By the co-author of The easy Guide to Your Walt Disney World Visit 2020, the best-reviewed Disney World guidebook series ever.

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A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Your Disney Library (4)



By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

YOUR DISNEY LIBRARY: WALT AND THE PROMISE OF PROGRESS CITY

By Jim Korkis

Today, Walt Disney World immediately conjures up an image of the Magic Kingdom and Cinderella Castle, but Walt Disney’s vision of WDW was of an international community of the future that showcased new technology and was to be a living laboratory of change.

Of course, there would be an entertainment venue similar to Disneyland, which became Magic Kingdom, but that was just to be a minor element of the overall plan and in fact, was shoved to the very top of the map on the very worst piece of land on the property.

Many books and articles have been written about how Walt’s original concept evolved into the familiar vacation destination that was focused on theme parks and resorts. One of the best is Sam Gennawey’s Walt and the Promise of Progress City .

It begins with the design of the Disney Studio and continues through everything from Walt’s backyard to Disneyland to CalArts to the Winter Olympics to World’s Fairs and more before even discussing the Florida Project.

In fact, half the book is devoted to those projects before exploring the idea of WDW. Sam approaches WDW not as a brief final vision of Walt Disney but as a natural outcome from decades of previous experiences in urban planning, so those early chapters serve as a fascinating roadmap to get to the final destination.

Sam’s writing is not only accessible to an average reader but also deeply researched, and provides a new perspective to familiar material.

Sam is also the author of two other books I recommend: Universal vs. Disney: The Unofficial Guide to American Theme Parks’ Greatest Rivalry and The Disneyland Story: The Unofficial Guide to the Evolution of Walt Disney’s Dream.

His professional training is as an urban planner where he has collaborated with California communities on more than a hundred different projects over the years. He brings that point of view to his writing about theme parks.

He is a senior associate at the planning firm of Katherine Padilla and Associates, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving municipal, county, and private sector planning documents from throughout Los Angeles County.

So his approach at looking at Disney architecture and design is much different than the typical Disney writer looking at the same material, and is peppered with insights and quotes from urban planners like Christopher Alexander and architects and shows how those theories connect directly to Disney’s work.

One of the most intriguing chapters is a speculative visit to what Walt Disney World might have looked like if it had followed Walt’s initial planning. Of course, like any Disney project, it would have changed during the process but this is a nice glimpse of what Walt saw when he first proposed it.

He even interviewed Disney Legend Buzz Price who assures Sam that Walt’s vision of Epcot without hesitation would have worked but it would have taken a Walt Disney to make it happen. “Epcot would have been more famous than Walt Disney World,” Price tells Sam and explains why.

As Sam writes, “So the thirty story Cosmopolitan hotel in the center would have worked. The themed environment was basically Disneyland. The distance from the transportation center to the outer edge of the dome was less than 1,500 feet, which is two to three large city blocks – an easy, easy walk.

“Along the outer edges, he was going to create a critical mass of offices, and companies would have bellied up and put offices there just to be close to the Disney magic. Surrounded by that was apartments. So on a three-block walk was the critical mass of tourists in the center, full-time residents on the side and they all have to pass through each other. It is exactly what one wants when you want to build a city.”

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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Call Me Walt, and his Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.

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