THE CELEBRATION CHRONICLES:
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town
By Andrew Ross
Ballantine, 340 pages, $25.95
CELEBRATION, U.S.A.:
Living in Disney’s Brave New Town
By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins
Holt, 342 pages, $25
If, indeed, it takes a village to raise a child, does it now take a corporation like Walt Disney Co. to raise a village?
That seems to be the opinion of Andrew Ross, a professor of American studies at New York University who, in September 1997, moved to Disney’s developing showcase town of Celebration, Fla., to see if he might gain some insight into the direction of public life at the end of the 20th Century. He also planned to write a book about it.
But Ross wasn’t the first person–or even the second–to make such a move. Several months earlier, New York Times national correspondent Douglas Frantz and his wife, freelance writer Catherine Collins (both former Tribune reporters), had moved to Celebration with the same goals in mind.
Now Ross, who gave up his New York City co-op and, apparently, a romantic relationship to live in Celebration for a year, and Frantz and Collins, who planned to stay a year longer than Ross before moving back north, have written those books. While both of them–“The Celebration Chronicles,” by Ross, and “Celebration, U.S.A.,” by Frantz and Collins–are informative and offer thoughtful analyses on a variety of topics, Ross’ engages the reader more with its fluid, well-written story.
When it is finished in 2020, Celebration is expected to be home to 20,000 people living on about 5,000 acres south of the sprawling Walt Disney World amusement park and resort in central Florida. The master-planned community already has a school, a post office, a town hall, a 100-acre business park, a downtown business area with shops and restaurants, parks, wetlands, walking trails, a golf course, apartments, townhouses and single-family homes–in short, most of the makings of a real, 20th Century American town.
But when Frantz and Collins moved in, in June 1997, there were only about 1,500 residents, and the first phase of housing construction still wasn’t complete. Because Celebration was so new and still relatively small by the time all three authors had gotten there, their books tell the same basic story about the town, its much-loved and much-hated corporate parent, and its residents.
Celebration, Ross tells us, was designed “as a corrective to (urban) sprawl” and is “a stepchild of New Urbanism, a zealous new movement in town planning that had declared war on auto-driven development and vowed to reintroduce suburban Americans to the civic virtues of active community involvement.” The movement’s basic design concept is “a mixed-housing, mixed-use, walkable town with small lots, interconnected streets and an identifiable center and edge.” The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to meet and mingle, talk and play, and join together in conducting their common public business.
Celebration would further reflect its pre-mall, small-town America roots with variations on an architectural style, neotraditional, that harks back to a picture-perfect past that many people experienced–or wish they had experienced–growing up: houses built in a half-dozen traditional styles (including Victorian, Colonial Revival and Mediterranean), set far forward on their lots, many with front porches, all aimed at creating not just a certain look but an environment that, again, makes it easier for neighbors to engage each other. (Ross uses the term “New Urbanism” to refer to the planning movement and “neotraditional” for the architectural style it has generally adopted, while Frantz and Collins use the latter to describe the movement and the architecture.)
But Celebration was not intended to be simply a collection of “Back to the Future”-style homes and public buildings. Celebration is the product of, among other things, “market research that showed how much prospective homebuyers would be prepared to pay for re-creating the past while preserving their modernity,” Ross says. The town’s early advertising brochures had promised “a state-of-the-art package of progressive education, high technology . . . and quality homes.”
Instead, what many of its pioneering residents got were poorly built homes that cost almost 35 percent more than their equivalents in nearby developments with similar amenities, a “buggy” computer intranet for the town that was nowhere near as sophisticated as what had been promoted, and a K-12 school so progressive in its methods and facilities that many of its students and parents–and even some teachers–were unable to handle it.
Celebration School was a major drawing point for many early residents who thought their children would benefit from attending an institution that had been, as Ross describes it, “frontloaded with every last bell and whistle from two and a half decades of progressive educational reform.” But, as is clear from accounts in both books, not all the residents or their children really understood the nature or extent of that reform.
What they saw–and what many of them had a hard time coming to grips with–were huge, multi-age, multi-grade classrooms (called neighborhoods) led by as many as four teachers (purportedly working as a team) directing (or not directing) as many as 100 students who were working (or not working) on a variety of multi-disciplinary tasks at a number of locations around the room with few (if any) textbooks, few (if any) tests and no letter or number grades to mark their progress. As Frantz and Collins note: “Though none of the concepts was necessarily radical on its own, combining all of them in a single new school represented a radical break with normal practices that would require adjustments on all sides, from parents and students as well as from teachers and administrators.”
But not everyone was prepared to adjust. Tensions rose as some parents–feeling they were sacrificing their children’s education for the sake of experimentation–demanded changes in the school’s teaching methods and curriculum. Both books provide interesting accounts of the effects this issue had on parents, students and educators in the first few years of the school’s existence.
Because Celebration meant so many things to so many people, and because it was the offspring of one of the world’s largest, best-known and most-controversial entertainment conglomerates, it and its residents received intense media exposure. And it came under scrutiny from other quarters, including urban planners, architects, sociologists, politicians, educators, businessmen and the public in general. As Frantz and Collins note, Disney’s involvement put Celebration “in the spotlight and under the microscope.”
Because Celebration tried to be so many things to so many people, it sometimes failed. That was unthinkable to many early Celebration residents, who had a problem understanding that Disney could have problems. “After all,” Frantz and Collins write, “this was not just another development; this was Disney’s town and there was no margin for error or omission.”
The three authors were in Celebration at the same time for the same reasons. But their varied backgrounds, interests and circumstances–Ross was a twice-married, childless, bachelor educator living alone in an apartment he rented in downtown Celebration; Frantz and Collins were married journalists living with their two school-age children in a house they bought in a residential neighborhood–led them to see and write about their experiences from different perspectives and with different degrees of emphasis.
The biggest differences have to do with how they viewed, and describe, the battles over Celebration School. Ross approaches the changes to more-traditional approaches in the school’s curriculum and operation with the perspective, and sadness, of a progressive educator. Frantz and Collins, while they share some of Ross’ liberal philosophical leanings, are more practical-minded in their concern for their children’s education.
Also, Ross, who rented, emphasizes how important it was to Celebration homeowners that their property values be maintained, and he says that made many of them reluctant to rock too many boats or let the media get a whiff of troubles in paradise. Frantz and Collins, who owned their home, spend much less time on the issue of property values.
Ross is far more adept at weaving into his narrative the many threads that make up the story of Celebration: the history of Florida real-estate development (including Walt Disney’s infamous “land grab” of the 1960s), U.S. urban development and housing policy, architectural theory, educational philosophy and practices, and other background elements.
Of course the main thread, the one that Frantz and Collins note early on makes up “the real story of Celebration,” are the people who live and work there, and both books offer a number of interesting stories about them, including:
– Brent Herrington, Celebration’s community services manager and “pseudomayor,” who had to balance his pro-Disney boosterism with his seemingly genuine concern for seeing that the company did right by the town’s residents (of which he was one).
– Bobbi Vogel, the first principal of Celebration School, and Dot Davis, her successor after just one year, both of whom acted as lightning rods during the storms that raged around the school.
– Rev. Patrick Wrisley, a Presbyterian minister, who worked long and hard before he and national church leaders realized they needed to scale back plans for the high-tech, showcase ” `church of the next millennium’ ” he had been assigned to build in Celebration.
Here again, Frantz and Collins’ book suffers for their presentation. The first chapter, which tells of their move to Celebration and introduces a few of its residents, is followed by two dry chapters on urban planning in America, land development in Florida, Disney’s dealings with Osceola County officials over plans for the town, and the architectural design competition for Celebration, subjects that Ross works into his book a few pages, or a few paragraphs, at a time. Even when they manage to get rolling, Frantz and Collins tend to slow themselves down with superfluous details and descriptions, ranging from a few sentences to a half-dozen pages.
Besides citing problems with and complaints about the town (others include the lack of racial and economic diversity among residents, the high cost of living and housing, a bad retail mix in the downtown shopping district, destructive internal criticisms and rumors, and gawking tourists who often thought residents were really paid actors), the books also point out Celebration’s successes.
The town’s design did promote social interaction–to the extent, Ross says, that “it was virtually impossible not to get to know your neighbors.” New Urbanism’s “(s)ocial engineering through sticks and bricks,” as Frantz and Collins call it, did help foster a sense of community. This sense was further aided by Disney’s hiring competent, enthusiastic managers to run Town Hall, and the fact that the earliest Celebration residents were community builders who had no intention of seeing their new town fail.
While Ross maintains that some of the strongest bonds were fashioned by negative events–battles over such things as construction problems and Celebration School–he also acknowledges that those events often had positive consequences in that they “jumpstarted the engine of civil debate among townsfolk.”
Why, one might ask, has so much attention been focused on what is just another planned community? The answer is as simple and as complex as this: Celebration is not just another planned community. As Frantz and Collins point out, “So vast and complex is Disney’s cultural reach that its every action is–and should be–scrutinized for broader implications.” Celebration, they write, is “an experiment executed on a scale ambitious enough for a serious evaluation of whether some of (the) tenets of neotraditional planning can help resurrect the lost sense of community and place in America today.”
The scale of that experiment is what leads Ross to believe that only a large corporation or landowner like Disney can make it succeed. That’s because he thinks “public planners long ago lost the power or the will” needed to coordinate the elements of residence, workplace, traffic and recreation in such a way as to keep development from becoming sprawl. But as Frantz and Collins point out, while a company like Disney can provide the physical setting, “a real community depends on the people who have packed up their belongings and come to it.”
In their book, Frantz and Collins quote behaviorist B.F. Skinner as pointing out that while ” `perfectionist societies and other utopian ventures have failed, we must remember that unplanned . . . and unperfected cultures have failed, too. A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.’ ” Disney, Frantz and Collins say, was trying to address “a critical social ill by offering an alternative to fifty years of suburban growth that had been draining America of the sense of community and intimacy.” Even if it were to fail, they say, “at least the effort had been made in earnest.”
