Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ Pleasantville

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - September 6, 1999

Pleasantville

Can Disney reinvent the burbs?

by Kurt andersen

AT THE END OF HIS LIFE,Walt Disney decided he wanted to create a perfect late-twentieth-century town from scratch in the middle of Florida—a real town with real citizens which he called, in mid-sixties Strangelovian fashion, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. After Disney died, in 1966, his company, in its tapped-out post-visionary slough, did build something called EPCOT, as part of Disney World, but when it finally appeared, in the early eighties, it turned out to be nothing like Walt’s utopian dream. It’s not experimental, not a prototype, not a community. Rather, it’s just another theme park, an unending world’s fair even thicker with product placement and more depressingly ersatz than the Magic Kingdom. EPCOT is the apotheosis of middle-period Bad Disney.

Not long after EPCOT opened, new management took over the company, and revived Disney’s old sense of giddy expansiveness. The new Smart Disney commissioned famous architects to build interesting buildings, produced animated features that were as good as the ones the studio used to make, acquired the film company Miramax, and helped redevelop Times Square.

Smart Disney has also created Celebration, a three-year-old town near Disney World that has been in development for nearly fourteen years. Celebration is the real EPCOT—the quasi-democratic, postmodern fulfillment of Walt’s totalitarian, late-modern vision. Instead of monorails and a transparent dome, Celebration is being built according to the folk wisdom of American towns from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Instead of an acronym, the new town has a real name, absurdly upbeat and hyper-American. (“Celebration” is different from New Hope, Pennsylvania, or Magic City, Texas, or Niceville, Florida, only in the sense that those older place-names weren’t trademarked.)

According to high-end conventional wisdom, still committed to the idea of Bad Disney, nearly anything that the company concocts is inherently suspect— sure to be just another shiny, treacly, relentlessly mass-marketed piece of dreck, part of a commercial culture that is already so Disneyfied that it makes you feel short of breath. So when, on top of its movies and theme parks and home videos and toys and sitcoms and books and magazines and TV news programs and Web sites and cruise ships, the company dares to fabricate a whole new town, the thinking person’s unthinking instinct has been to fear and loathe.

And yet Celebration (pop. 2,500) is vastly superior, aesthetically and probably spiritually, to ninety-nine per cent of the new housing developments in America. It has an architecturally ambitious town center, which Disney built long before there were enough residents to justify the shops. The old-fashionedlooking clapboard houses, available in a sensibly limited number of pattern-book styles and colors, have simple, classic exteriors; most have porches. Even the largest lots are less than a third of an acre, so houses are close together and a tendency to neighborliness is built in.

These are the basics of the New Urbanism, an influential architectural and town-planning movement of the past decade, which looks to the vernacular forms of old American towns as a guide for contemporary development. Of course, a place like Savannah (one of the models for Celebration and other New Urbanist places even before John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” made it an icon) wasn’t designed to be charming and funky; it just ended up that way. A pair of new books with an identical premise—babyboomer New York authors move to Celebration for a year in order to write about it—bear the same relation to “Midnight in the Garden” that Celebration itself does to Savannah: whereas Berendt stumbled onto his rich Savannah characters and stories, and took most of a decade to write his book about them, both “The Celebration Chronicles” (Ballantine; $25.95), by the New York University professor Andrew Ross, and “Celebration, U.S.A.” (Holt; $25), by the Times reporter Douglas Frantz and his wife, Catherine Collins, have a deadline-driven determination to simulate the languid, accidental beauty of the real thing.

Both books take the struggle over the Celebration School as their narrative focus, since their authors were all living in the town during the 1997-98 school year, when a founding group of hippie-progressive teachers and administrators were besieged by an uprising of dissatisfied parents. Both books read like oversized news-magazine stories, larded with historical and sociological clichés; sometimes the perceptions and the language are almost indistinguishably trite. “Route 192,” Ross writes of the highway just outside Celebration, “plays host to every species of franchise eatery, T-shirt shack, and factory discount outlet known to the modern consumer.” Frantz and Collins write of the same strip, “The bad-tempered congestion on the four-lane road passes multiple outlets of every fast-food chain known to mankind [and] countless T-shirt shops.” (The authors, it seems, hardly met during the year that both spent there doing the same things in the same little town in the middle of Florida. According to Ross, when he tried to hook up with Frantz and Collins, they told him that their editor at Henry Holt had forbidden them to fraternize with their rival. And, unless I missed it, they don’t mention him at all in “Celebration, U.S.A.”)

INSTALLING Andrew Ross in Celebration was the more arresting of the authorial concepts, given his personal and professional profile. He is an unmarried, dark, dashing, irreverent Scottish hipster who runs the American Studies Program at N.Y.U. He has published strenuously cutting-edge books such as “No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture” and “Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice.” He wears earrings. Surely Ross’s publisher—and maybe even Ross himself—expected a cosmopolite’s entertaining, sharply observed fish-out-of-water story. Immediately upon arriving in Florida, he buys a 1985 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which seems like a sign of ironic high spirits to come—when in Middle America he will do as the Middle Americans do, but with a big, knowing wink. After one page of fun at the expense of some fauxsophisticated interior decorators, however, the culture clash disappears. Ross plunges into the whole-wheat Wonder Bread communitarianism of the place— befriending retired military men, ministering to (and smoking cigarettes with) alienated local teen-agers, and becoming a volunteer fixture at the school. Instead of “The Truman Show,” we get “Dangerous Minds.”

Ross is a likable and an intermittently entertaining observer of the social ecology. Among the many homosexual employees of Disney World, he discovers, the butch gays tend to be stationed in Tomorrowland and the swishier ones at Space Mountain. He plausibly asserts (but unfortunately doesn’t depict) the existence of a sort of Hawthorne effect in Celebration: in an experimental prototype community of tomorrow, children feel undue pressure to perform well in school, and adults “had perfected the art of soundbiting” for visiting reporters.

For someone who spent a whole year living in Celebration, and conducted “six or seven hundred hours of interviews,” Ross has produced a book surprisingly devoid of vivid scenes. He quotes people, sometimes acutely (“What we need are a few drunks around this town,” one man remarks), but the lines are almost all free-floating, cited in isolation to illustrate some point. He mentions a mixer for Celebration’s gay residents, for instance, but then, astonishingly, barely describes it. His architectural history is muddled, both in the details and in the big picture. He refers to the conical section of Robert A. M. Stern’s building for the Disney animation department in Burbank as a giant “Mad Hatter’s hat”; the model, of course, was Mickey Mouse’s cap from “Fantasia.” “If the postmodernists set out to return the profession of design to a more democratic plane,” Ross writes, “the doors they intended to open were not exactly rushed by the masses. Their populist aims were largely thwarted by the 1970s recession.” In fact, the rise of postmodern architecture came during the ten years after the 1973-75 recession, and iterations of the style dominated architecture—from downtown skyscrapers to suburban shopping malls—for much of the last two decades.

According to Frantz and Collins, who bought a house in Celebration (Ross, the bohemian, rented an apartment), a majority of the families there had school-age children, and the promise of an excellent education had been a major draw. What most of those parents evidently didn’t realize before they arrived was that the school that Disney and its Harvard and Johns Hopkins consultants invented was “alternative” in the extreme. There were no course grades and virtually no books.Ten-yearolds shared classrooms with five-yearolds. Each child was essentially responsible for his or her own curriculum. Students and teachers were called “learners” and “learning leaders,” a classroom was a “nurturing neighborhood,” and a student assembly a “grand kiva.” In lieu of grades, children received gloppy P.C. assessments—“knows the rewards of giving one’s energies for a larger good” and “respects human diversity as part of our multicultural society and world.” Frantz and Collins’s twelveyear- old son even felt obliged to slowdown his reading to the level of his classmates.

As the year proceeded, the pedagogical conservatives finally could not contain their unhappiness; they organized grievance committees and threatened to withdraw their children from Celebration School. A sense of crisis settled in, like the late sixties in reverse. Although Ross approves of the town and the New Urbanist idea in general, it was the school in which he invested his most passionate utopian hopes. As an academic avant-gardist from Greenwich Village, he was a defender of the touchy-feely Disney progressives to the end. The popular uprising against them amounted in his view to an ignorant reactionary spasm.

Unlike Ross, Frantz and Collins were sympathetic to the conservative backlash. They see the year of fights over the school, and over the shoddy construction of many of the houses, as a hopeful process of grassroots democracy in action. The angry meetings of parents were proof that Celebration was evolving from a cozy, corporate nanny state peopled by starry-eyed, infantilized Disney true believers into a real community of engaged citizens, which defines its own ideals and copes with its own problems.When popular will finally triumphed over top-down corporate tyranny, however, the result was a conservative remaking of the school. Last fall, according to Ross, “an air of mute discipline prevailed.” In Celebration, progress occurred, but the “progressives” lost.

Frantz and Collins’s assessment of the town’s democratic dialectic seems correct, but their clunky yuppie earnestness can make your teeth hurt. “Like many in our generation,” they write, “we were always on the lookout for the next great place to live.” And while the official philosophical “cornerstones” of Celebration “were developed as marketing devices . . . that does not make the ideas any less valid as a blueprint for a civil society akin to the imagined prescriptions of Thomas More.”

One would probably rather hang out with Andrew Ross, but Frantz and Collins, both professional journalists, have produced the more useful book. They sketch the backgrounds of residents in illuminating detail, and report lucidly on the nuts and bolts of the place—giving a rundown of Celebration’s wife-beaters, for instance, and explaining how county and state officials allowed Disney, for just three hundred thousand dollars, to buy its way out of a statutory obligation to build subsidized housing. Frantz and Collins are also bracingly candid, always naming names. They describe their falling out with a new neighbor who suggested that their daughter “deserves to be smacked,” and their fallings out with old friends who visit Celebration but fail to love it. They diss Frantz’s Times colleague Maureen Dowd as an élitist for dissing the town as “just too creepy.”

AMERICA started as a string of commercial enterprises (from Columbus to the Dutch in New Netherland) and utopian ventures (from Plymouth Bay to Philadelphia) with variously strict behavioral and aesthetic codes (Puritanism, Quakerism), and it has ever since produced lots of simultaneously creepy and admirable ideological enclaves (the Shakers, Brook Farm, Oneida, New Harmony, Reston) that combine elements of both. Celebration is just the latest bloom of a venerable hybrid strain, both odd and familiar: a free-market experiment in enforced niceness, a radical modern reproduction of conservative styles—and, moreover, a case study in the ongoing American contradictions between community and freedom. How much order and consistency are necessary for civility, and when do they become cultish and stifling? Both Disney and the Celebration pioneers, it’s clear, have been confused about all these questions as they’ve created their new town. Private corporate entities, which prize efficiency and predictability above all, tend to be a little fascistic. Disney’s success in entertainment—especially the theme parks—has been derived from a relentless and unapologetically micromanaged pursuit of its cheerful vision. Before it created Disney World, the company set up an autonomous governmental jurisdiction, Reedy Creek Improvement District, so that it could escape the exasperating inefficiencies of local democracy. But as Disney began developing Celebration, in the mideighties, it decided to loosen its grip. Osceola County was granted authority over land-use questions. In the summer of 1997, a year after the first residents settled in, the company removed itself from above the title—Disney’s Town of Celebration became simply Celebration. Perhaps most significantly, Disney had decided not to build or sell Celebration’s houses itself and instead to subcontract that job to companies in Texas and Illinois. Yet, when porches were misplaced and cabinetry cracked and roofs leaked, it was Disney that the residents of the town blamed, because Disney’s had been the glorious brand reputation that had persuaded them to pay a large premium to live there.

“Those who seemed to be most disappointed that everything was not perfect,” Frantz and Collins write, “were the ones who had believed most strongly in Disney.” When the halfbaked progressive school failed to deliver a first-class education, Ross writes, “many parents expected brisk consumer satisfaction.” But Celebration School is a public institution: for better or worse, Disney doesn’t run it. As for the shoddy construction, the Disney company got the blame, yet, as the result of management decisions made years earlier, it had no legal obligation or real authority to fix the problems. And, regarding the school, there was wild disagreement about what the fixes should be.

The great question posed by Celebration— one for which neither Disney nor the residents had an easy answer— was how “real” the town should be. The company considered but then decided against creating a make-believe inspirational local history—one back story would have pretended that survivors of a Spanish shipwreck founded Celebration, and another had it that the town was built on the rubble of Sherman’s March. Disney managers originally installed loudspeakers in the streets through which Christmas carols and Disney songs were played, but Michael Eisner, Disney’s chairman and C.E.O., and Robert Stern, who was one of the town’s master planners and a Disney board member, ordered the canned music stopped after Collins and other residents objected to it. Even so, during the most recent Christmas season in Celebration, according to Andrew Ross, a crowd gathered downtown each night to watch fake Disney snow fall.During the town’s Founders’ Day ceremony last November, according to Frantz and Collins, Disney officials stupidly and scarily had the local Presbyterian minister remove one sentence from the invocation he delivered: “We pray,” the Reverend Patrick Wrisley had wanted to say, “we are not remembered as being a town living in Disney’s Tomorrowland nor a town that’s all façade and no depth.” On the other hand, when one reads about a dispute between Celebration’s Presbyterians (who wanted to build an eleven-million-dollar multipurpose religious compound of four modern buildings) and the Disney town planners (who had in mind a nice little oldfashioned church, of white clapboard, and with a steeple and pews for two hundred), the picturesque fakery seems preferable, even if the clapboards in Celebration are of fibre-reinforced concrete.

After all, isn’t the obligatory American lawn a form of fakery? Isn’t airconditioning a fake? Aren’t the crazy architectural mongrels built every day in every city in America—all the tarty Mediterranean-Colonial-Norman- Palladian raised ranches—thoroughly (and wretchedly) fake? And don’t tens of thousands of suburban homeowner associations enforce conformity to much stricter stylistic rules than Celebration’s? When intellectuals disparage New Urbanist developments like Celebration as “fake,” what really seems to bother them is that talented, energetic members of their taste and educational caste are no longer abstaining from taking their part in the great postwar American architectural project, the building of suburbs, and have instead created a movement to reform suburbs, to make them more like old American towns where people walk and mingle. Celebration’s “fakery”— its small scale, its density, its hidden garages, its pre-mall commercial core—is in the service of a coherent vision, as opposed to the accumulation of developers’ cost-efficient shortcuts and aesthetic bad habits that produce the random, sprawling, ghastly “real” suburbs of the late twentieth century.

The architect and planner Andrés Duany, who, with his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, is responsible for many of the New Urbanist developments under construction across the country, believes that Celebration will prove to be a more important prototype than Seaside, the pretty Florida resort town that he and Plater-Zyberk designed almost two decades ago. “Celebration is so damn visible,” Duany said when I called to ask him about references to him and to Seaside which appear in the two new books. “I see its effect on developers. It’s affecting the vernacular.” In the same way that “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” helped make feminists out of millions of girls and women who don’t call themselves feminists, Disney’s new town may incline people who would never call themselves New Urbanists to build and buy houses and settle in neighborhoods that resemble Celebration’s. It’s possible that Disney’s town, a century from now, will have earned its preposterous name. ©