Disneyland Urban Design: Critter Country

CRITTER COUNTRY

The area we now know as Critter Country has a long, storied past. The biggest problem has been the location. While there is cross traffic virtually everywhere else at Disneyland, this area has always been a dead-end. How do you keep getting people back this way has been the design challenge.

This part of the park started out as the Indian Village and featured 17 different tribes doing traditional dances. You could also board a war canoe powered by “real” Indians. The Briar Patch hat store is the only holdover from the early days.

In 1972, a bunch of happy singing bears replaced the Native Americans. Maybe this would bring in the crowds? Country Bear Jamboree was originally intended to be part of the entertainment for Walt’s vision of a ski resort at Mineral King in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains but that project was not to be. So instead, the bears migrated to Florida and their show became one of the opening day attractions. It was a huge hit and plans were quickly made to duplicate the attraction at Disneyland.

To make sure that Disneyland could handle the giant crowds they were seeing at Walt Disney World, a decision was made to build two identical theaters. Unfortunately, the local Southern California audience was not as enamored with the bears like the visitors in Florida. So much of the time one theater was closed and the other one was half-empty.

So how do you drive traffic into the back of the park? You build the ultimate “E” ticket attraction. A Pirates of the Caribbean-type dark ride filled with Audio-Animatronics characters plus a big thrill at the end. Disney did not have to look much further than Buena Park to see how successful the Timber Mountain Log Ride was at Knott’s Berry Farm. The park was about to dismantle Marc Davis’s America Sings in Tomorrowland and that provided a whole bunch of Audio-Animatronics that were about to be orphaned. That is how Splash Mountain was born.

If you thought the attraction was named for the drop at the end, you would be wrong. When then CEO Michael Eisner decided to green light the attraction, he asked his Imagineers to cross promote his new film Splash starring Darryl Hannah and Tom Hanks. The Imagineers declined but they liked the name.

Splash Mountain was a hit but the Country Bear Jamboree was starting to fade. What to do? The marketing executives took a look at the bottom line and determine that the problem wasn’t bears, just the wrong bears. Enter Winnie the Pooh.

To make Bear/Critter Country stand out from Frontierland, much of the architecture and landscaping was designed to give a more Northwest feel. With the addition of Pooh, iconic images such as honey pots were scattered about in an overlay. Splash Mountain was designed to have the feel of a cartoon background. As Imagineer Tony Baxter explains, “In a cartoon, you paint to blend everything together. The backgrounds are painted and then you add painted characters on top of those backgrounds. We’ve tried to do the same thing here.”

The Toontown Urban Transect Revisited

What City Planning is:

1. An aide to the man in the street to visualize his city properly planned;

2. A practical, sensible way of providing a place for everything with everything in its place;

3. An instrument for uniting citizens to work for the city’s future; and

4. An efficient means of avoiding duplication and waste in public improvements.

­- John Nolen, Comprehensive Plan for San Diego 1926

Back in the early 1950s, Walt Disney was looking for a location to put his theme park. Now, there is one story about a man named Harrison “Buzz” Price and how he found the 160-acres. But that story is for another time. This story is about Walt working with his most trusted partner. No, I am not talking about his brother Roy. I am talking about Mickey Mouse.

Mickey told Walt about a small city down in a rural part of Orange County. It was called Toontown and this is where the cartoons characters went to escape the tensions of Hollywood. Walt and Mickey agreed to build a huge earthen berm to shield Disneyland from the outside world. The same berm would shield Toontown from the theme park guests. In 1993, the Toons decided to welcome visitors so they tunneled under the berm right next to it’s a small world, and the rest is history.

Okay, forgive me but I am going to geek out in an urban planner kind of way. You bought the ticket. Hold on for the ride.

In the real world, architects and planners look at certain qualities that contribute to creating place. They look at such elements as: aesthetics, size of streets, lot sizes, infrastructure, transit options, materials, activity, uses, scale, and density. More importantly, they consider where these elements are located with respect to each other.

In the book Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, the Imagineers recognized that the Toontown project “was an effort to rethink the relationship between architecture and fantasy, between animation and the theme park.”

You can only manage what you can measure. With regards to the built environment, I am going to use an assessment tool called the Urban Transect. In The Lexicon of the New Urbanism, the Transect is defined as “a system of classification deploying the conceptual range rural-to-urban to arrange in useful order the typical elements of urbanism. The Transect is a natural ordering system, as every urban element easily finds a place within its continuum.”

Andre Duany, one of the founders of the New Urbanist movement and the person central to the development of the Transect said, “certain forms belong in certain environments.” As an example, he suggests, “An apartment building fits in an urban setting and a ranch house belongs in a rural setting. A ranch house would undermine the immersive quality of a downtown district, whereas an apartment building is appropriate. Place either structure in the wrong environment and it just does not feel right.”

The SmartCode, a model zoning ordinance also developed by Duany, says the Transect “organizes the natural, rural, suburban, and urban landscape into categories of density, complexity, and intensity in the same way the countryside relates to the traditional towns and villages we admire.”

The Transect is derived from ecological analysis where it is applied to present the sequence of natural habitat from shore-dune-upland or wetland-woodland-prairie. The original idea for taking a geographical cross-section of a region and used to reveal a sequence of environments goes back to Von Humboldt in 1790.

Only recently has this concept been applied to the built environment. When using this methodology, it is easier to organize the components of city building. You can regulate buildings, lot size, land use, street configurations, the public realm, and everything else necessary to create beautiful, functional places.

Duany created a gradient that is divided into six zones. At one end is the T6 Urban Core zone. This is the densest, most intense development form and use. At the other end is the T1 Natural zone. This is land preserved as open space.

There is also a seventh zone called Special Districts. Special districts consist of areas with buildings that by their function, disposition, or configuration cannot conform to one of the six normative Transect Zones. For a traditional city, typical special districts include “large parks, institutional campuses, refinery sites, airports, etc.”

Since the Urban Transect is meant to be a regulatory device, precise measurements are required. Within each zone, all the elements that make up a place – the infrastructure, buildings, landscaping, public furniture, building materials and building uses – can be utilized to characterize which transect zone that particular area belongs. For example, areas with no curbs or gutters and landscapes filled with asymmetrical tree planting can be considered a rural zone; those areas that are primarily residential in use and have storm water infrastructure (curbs and gutters) and regimented landscaping can be considered suburban.

There are all sorts of reasons why one would use this tool to understand a community. It can be calibrated for each city and it is a great way to help regulate urban form and community design.

So let’s look at Disneyland’s Toontown and identify its DNA – a Detailed Neighborhood Analysis.

SPECIAL DISTRICT

Imagine that you are crossing under the Disneyland Railroad track at the back of the park with it’s a small world on your right and the Toontown Railroad station to your left. Once past the Toontown gates and up the ramp, turn right toward the Roger Rabbit fountain. According to the Transect, you have entered Toontown’s Special District.

Now the fountain may be out of place in an industrial area but this is Toontown after all. Then again, many modern industrial parks include some form of public art.

Some Special Districts are urbanized areas devoted to a single activity such as industry. In Toontown’s Special District, you have typical industrial uses such as a trolley barn (a mass transit maintenance and operations yard), a power plant, glassworks, and whatever is going on inside of Roger Rabbit’s Cartoon Spin. Having the Insurance Company in the District makes sense considering how many Toons get whacked with anvils and falling pianos. The little island of buildings with the post office, jail, and the fireworks factory are also included.

T6 URBAN CORE

The T6 Urban Core Zone is the most urban setting and is usually identified as the Central Business District (CBD) or historic downtown in other cities. The T6 Urban Core exhibits the most intense urban character and the greatest density.

The Toontown T6 Urban Core Zone is adjacent to the Special District. It is anchored by the Five and Dime and continues with the buildings (the facades) on the east side of Toontown Square until you get to the edge of City Hall. The reason I believe this area represents an Urban Core Zone is due to the intensity and density of the development behind the buildings you can touch. When I talk about density, I am talking about the theoretical capacity of a lot to accommodate quantities of certain building uses. Skyscrapers add a lot of capacity as well as high-rise residential units. If you step back, you will notice flat grayed out high-rise buildings that demonstrate a higher degree of intensity. Compare these backdrops to the hillsides behind City Hall. There, you see hillsides not tall buildings. The Urban Core Zone is more urban.

T5 URBAN CENTER ZONES

T5 Urban Center Zones are focal points of activity. A city may have several Urban Center Zones but those will always be secondary to the one T6 Urban Core Zone. The Urban Center Zone is we find commercial buildings and major shopping centers. Smaller strip malls are in our next zone.

Building frontages typically come up to the property line. The zone is interspersed with public spaces, which mimic the environment of a well-established city district. In Toontown, this would be Toontown Square. Toontown Square includes the Civic Center Plaza, the bandshell, Toontown Park, the DVC sales cart disguised as a train depot, and all the buildings that frame City Hall. The Gas Station is part of the next zone.

There is constant activity and prominent civic uses surrounding the plaza. My favorite is the Planning Commission.

T4 GENERAL URBAN

The T4 General Urban Zone is still relatively urban in character but with less emphasis on pedestrian connections between uses. Usually, you would find auto-oriented shopping centers also known as strip malls. The shopping centers are smaller then those in the Urban Center Zone and they are generally set back far from the street with large surface parking lots.

The Toontown General Urban zone is tiny. My take is it includes the gas station (auto-oriented use and parking out front) and the adjacent bathrooms. Boy, I miss those interactive phones. The zone continues to the gate that leads backstage.

In most cities you might find mid-density multi-family attached residential in a General Urban zone but I have found no evidence of this type of development. I have knocked on City Hall’s door but I have had no luck. Therefore, I am unable to identify a specific zoning ordinance that prevents this type of housing. Most housing advocates would assume that there is some sort of bias against apartments.

T3 SUBURBAN

The T3 Suburban Zone is sometimes referred to as the “neighborhood edge.” It is typical of urban sprawl suburban development found throughout America. The suburbs are the most residential of the zones. Detached single-family residences predominantly characterize these zones and limited neighborhood commercial uses.

In Toontown, the Suburban Zone is huge and includes the cul-de-sac with the fountain in the middles plus the surrounding buildings. The exceptions are Gadget’s Go Coaster and Chip ‘n Dale Tree House, which are in the next zone.

These areas have regimented lot sizes, large setbacks, and are bounded by collector streets that you to the General Urban and Urban Core shopping malls and other destinations. If you don’t have a car in the Suburban zone you are very limited. Public outdoor space is usually limited to parks or private lots. Thankfully, Goofy has created a place for the kids to play.

Mickey and Minnie’s houses are typical of the California Bungalow style. Note the wide porch that separates the public realm from the private space. New Urbanists think porches are really cool.

T2 RURAL

The T2 Rural Zone is usually the area beyond the suburbs. The zone primarily consists of open lands with sparse development. Land within this zone could transition to other Transect zones or remain in this form. When this does happen some blame it on urban sprawl. When Walt did it, he was visionary and we all spend a lot of money to worship at his wisdom. Even the Toons. I mean really. They gave up their privacy and now you hardly see one in the flesh walking around. That is a heavy price to pay.

Gadget’s Go Coaster and Chip ‘n Dale Tree House are in the Rural zone. The two main structures are set back very far from the fountain. Look down and you will notice the ground materials are more natural. The trees are random. Landscaping is more arbitrary and less regimented. Frequently, people keep large animals like human sized chipmunks. And people put a lot of stuff in their front yards. The lots lack finished curb and gutters for storm water control.

T1 NATURAL

The T1 Natural Zone represents the most undeveloped land use state. This zone is defined by land designated as open space or protected from development. The zone can consist of parklands, wilderness, and areas of high environmental value, such as reserves or designated habitats.

You will notice that Toontown is surrounded by hillsides. With the exception of the Toontown sign way back on the hill there is no evidence of development. Whether this is due to market conditions, development constraints or by code, I have not been able to determine.

Disneyland Monorail: Front

Not long ago I took you on a ride from the rear of the Disneyland Monorail. Now it is time to turn things around and try it going forward.

Disney Design on TouringPlans.com

Just a reminder that one of the most useful Disney theme park sites in existence is now featuring material that came out of the Samland factory. TouringPlans.com is the website for the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World. They have the most accurate crowd calendar and up to the minute line information on the web. Now, with the Disneyland Design by Sam Gennawey essays, they have some other great material for you to read! Before you go to the parks on either coast, you owe it to yourself to visit and download a copy of the Lines app. I am just saying....

Disneyland Urban Design: Toontown

TOONTOWN

Now for a little story. Once upon a time, Walt Disney decided he wanted to build a theme park but he did not know what would be the best location. So he turned to his most trusted partner, no not his brother Roy, but Mickey Mouse. You see, Mickey founded Toontown as a secret getaway for him and his Toon friends back in the 1930s. This would be where the Toons could sneak away from the Hollywood limelight, let down their hair (or whatever), and just be normal (for a Toon). The only human to know where Toontown was located was Walt.

Mickey suggested to Walt that Disneyland would be the perfect neighbor to his growing community set in a rural area of Orange County. The two of them worked out a deal where Walt would build a large earthen berm to shield the Toons from Disneyland visitors and the berm would also shield the visitors from the rest of Orange County. In 1993, the Toons decided that the visitors were okay so they tunneled under the berm right next to it’s a small world, opened the gates and the rest is history.

In the book Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, the Imagineers realized that the Toontown project “was an effort to rethink the relationship between architecture and fantasy, between animation and the theme park.”

Toontown is divided into three sub-areas: Downtown (the Industrial area where the Roger Rabbit attraction is located), Toontown Square (the food court area), and a residential area called Mickey’s Neighborhood.

The architecture doesn’t seem to contain any straight edges. When the Imagineers looked at the world that Toons lived in, they noticed that the architecture had a familiarity to it but did not mimic real physics. To reproduce this effect in three-dimensions, they borrowed an animation trick called Squash and Stretch.

Squash and Stretch is the effect that keeps the volume of a structure constant while it is "squashed and stretched" in seemingly unnatural ways. Or as former Disney animator Preston Blair explains, "When a sandbag moves through the air, it will "stretch" in the direction of the movement. Then when its progress is arrested, it will "squash" out." Blair adds, "If it were alive (anything can happen in a cartoon!), it would also squash from anticipating the action in which it stretches. The proper use of Squash and Stretch will strengthen an action. It is essential in creating a feeling of weight in characters." No one had ever built buildings that look fat and inflated with air with no right angles before.

One of the great strengths is the gags of Toontown. Throughout the land there are interactive items such a talking mailbox, manhole cover or water fountains. Try opening doors and boxes and you will always be surprised. This is a very playful environment for young and old.

Walt's Mountain Village - The Mineral King Resort

Walt was frequently inspired by his trips abroad and brought back ideas that would be integrated into Disneyland and his other projects.

Walt took advantage of visiting the sets of his live action films when the production was on location. He seemed to enjoy his visits and it gave him a chance to travel, to observe, and to think. His imagination would be sparked on these trips and sometimes he would return with projects in mind. On one such trip, Walt was so inspired that he would bring back two incredible concepts for his Imagineers. One idea would become a scale model of the famous Matterhorn Mountain and the other was a concept to reinvent the mountain tourist retreat.

In 1958, Walt went to Switzerland to see the progress on the film Third Man on the Mountain. The film crew was working in Zermatt, a ski town where automobiles were banned and you entered via a train. The resort had both winter and summer activities, are feat for most ski resorts at that time.

The operation folks at Disneyland thought a thrill ride would be a good addition to the park and they tried to convince Walt that it was a good idea. Originally, the Casey Jr. Circus Train was going to be the first rollercoaster at Disneyland but that did not work out.

When the park opened, there was a big mountain of dirt next to Sleeping Beauty Castle called Holiday Hill. The hill was created by fill when they dug out the moat in front of the castle. By 1956, the tower for the Skyway gondola attraction would be built on this location. After his trip to Switzerland, he thought about how to use the space and wondered if he could reproduce a scale model version of the famous mountain and install a bobsled ride inside.

So his team went to work and built a 1/100^th scale model of the Matterhorn right next to Sleeping Beauty Castle. At the time of construction, the mountain was the largest structure in Orange County at 147 feet. Winding inside was the world’s first steel tube rollercoaster. This technology would change the amusement park business forever.

Walt’s trip to Switzerland reignited an interest in winter sports and he began to wonder how to make this activity more accessible.

Walt’s interest in winter sports lead to his role as Chairman of Pageantry for the 1960 VIII Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley. He would be responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies. The ceremonies where a huge hit and Walt got to experience how to present the best entertainment experience in a winter weather conditions. He decided he wanted to build a mountain village that had all of the positive qualities of Zermatt but even better. As always, he turned to Buzz Price to look for possible locations.

The search for the perfect location for an all season mountain village began.

One of the first areas to get a serious look was on the north slope of Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California. The mountain topped out at over 11,000 feet. It had a gigantic north face bowl. It was near Palm Springs and Walt’s vacation home at the Smoke Tree Ranch. However, the mountain was also a prime hiking location for the Boy Scouts of America. It would be a struggle so Walt decided to look elsewhere.

Walt was very close to a deal with the owners of the ski resort at Mammoth Mountain. Negotiations started with the Andrew Hurley who owned the resort and the McCoy family who managed the ski slopes. All of the parties were close to signing a deal when, at the last minute, the Mammoth Mountain people pulled out due to a lack of equity in the project.

Deep with the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California is a sliver of land surrounded on threes sides by the Sequoia National Park. That area is known as Mineral King. It began as a mining area in 1873 bit went bust by 1882.

Over time, with the lack of activity, nature took its course and started to reclaim the valley. Mineral King was not included in the boundaries for Sequoia National Park in 1890. In 1908, the area was put under the jurisdiction of the United States Forest Service. The Sequoia National Park boundaries were expanded in 1926 but Mineral King was left out due to the previous development activities. Instead, it became part of the Sequoia Game Refuge. Becoming part of the refuge would become an important detail later in this story.

The Mineral King area is about 15,000 acres. The resort area is located in an alpine terrain and at high altitude. The Sierra Club was the first organization to recommend the area as suitable for a ski resort. The conditions were ideal. It had three huge bowls, five-mile runs, and a five-thousand-foot drop.

The area provided the State of California an opportunity to partner with the Federal Government to create a new winter recreational area. When Walt heard about this, he recognized that this was the type of challenge that he was looking for. He could apply what he had learned at Disneyland with his experiences at Zermatt and create a new type of mountain retreat. He saw this as a way to redefine our relationship to the wilderness and the project was very near to his heart.

Once again, Walt asked Buzz Price to study the opportunities presented by the Mineral King site.

In 1965, Economic Research Associates (ERA), Buzz Price’s firm, was tasked with multiple studies to determine the Mineral King project’s viability. The project would have been a joint project between Disney and the United States Forest Service. The Federal government planned on leasing the land to Walt Disney Productions. The government’s expectation was development something along the lines of nearby Mammoth Mountain, Aspen, Colorado, Vail, Colorado, and Sun Valley, Idaho.

Walt Disney Productions was determined to design the Mineral King Resort as a family friendly destination with ice-skating, tobogganing, sleigh and dogsled rides. By targeting families, the resort would be set apart from other ski areas in California. The goals was to become a ski resort where skiing was not necessarily the primary activity for many visitors.

Attracting overnight family visitors was a high priority. One study showed that Mineral King was expected to have higher spending per capita than other ski resorts because of this orientation. Many years later, the Walt Disney Company would use this same strategy to enter the cruise line business. That arm of Disney has proven to be very successful.

Forecasters expected the population growth would remain incredibly high in the Southern California region and the demand for locally accessible recreational areas would be also remain high. Camping and skiing were recognized as growing recreational activities and since California had a lot of forests that held snow, this was considered a good thing for the State.

Mineral King was located in an area that would be very attractive to residents of Southern California. Although there are ski resorts in the San Bernardino Mountains near Los Angeles, Mineral King would really be a magnet for Southern California skiers since it had more reliable snowfall.

Initial projections claimed that the Disney resort would become as popular as Yosemite. Just like the theme parks, the resort could be closed to visitors if it got overcrowded.

Forecasters also thought the property would be attractive to out-of-state guests. Research has shown that a principal draw to California for out-of-state visitors is the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which are described as “a topographic feature not duplicated in mountain ranges east of the Rockies.” That is one reason why so many visitors are drawn to Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Walt’s vision for the Mineral King resort would have created a unique development that would be unlike anything else that came before.

Ladd & Kelsey were selected as architects with Marvin Davis providing direction. The designer for the ski facilities was Willie Schaeffler who worked on the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics. He had proposed a trail system that used fourteen ski lifts.

Although the development of Mineral King was originally meant to address winter recreational needs, Walt’s vision would also have a full plate of activities to attract summer visitors. In fact, it was anticipated that 60 percent of visitors would come during the summer months and the resort would make more money during the summer than winter, which was unusual for a skiing destination.

The approach was to design a summer resort that had winter uses. For example, the ski lifts would operate in the summer and take people to trails and fishing lakes. Activities would be at all price points and would include cave exploring and wilderness lectures by Donald Duck.

There would be a showcase restaurant at the top of the lift where dances and entertainment would be held. Other attractions would include a conference center as well as Disneyland type attractions such as the Country Bear Jamboree, which was originally designed for the resort.

In a brochure, Walt said, “When we go into a new project, we believe in it all the way. That’s the way we feel about Mineral King. We have every faith that our plans will provide recreational opportunities for everyone. All of us promise that our effort now and in the future will be dedicated to making Mineral King grow to meet the ever-increasing public need. I guess you might say that it won’t ever be finished.”

All of these activities would be contained in a high density, compact, pedestrian oriented village. The site plan was designed to minimize the impact on the surrounding valley. The three to four story buildings would be heavily themed and integrated into the environment. Guests would have felt like they have stepped into an Alpine village. The building would have been arranged to form a “Main Street” with protected plaza between the buildings.

The proposed resort would have two hotels, one deluxe and the other a moderate plus a dormitory. The original plans called for accommodations for 7,200 people, which would include Cast Member housing. There would be 2,400 beds within permanent structures with an additional 4,800 beds in temporary structures.

Throughout the village, the architecture would resemble a Swiss chalet. There would be lots of pitched roofs; buildings with wide balconies, and all of the structures would be facing the “Main Street” at the zero lot line. This would have created a very intimate and welcoming space similar to Main Street USA at Disneyland.

To support all of these guests, the resort would feature up to ten restaurants that covered the entire price spectrum. There would be a wide variety of activities including horseback riding, tennis, and swimming. Other facilities included a hospital, a gas station, a chapel, a power station, and an ice skating rink.

Access to the resort would become an attraction in itself. The automobile would become secondary to the village experience the same way it took a backseat at Disneyland.

The proposal featured a unique way to access the resort as well. Automobile access would be limited and most guests would take a train from a large parking structure down in the valley. The train would crawl around the side of the mountain to a central station at the heart of the Mineral King resort. Once again, Walt was heavily influenced by his trip to Zermatt, Switzerland and how they dealt with automobile traffic.

Access to the resort was a big concern and ultimately one of the things that made the project unravel. Walt had ERA study the viability of a train. The methodology meant looking at attendance patterns at other National Parks. They considered a fee to enter the park by automobile as well as paying for a ticket to ride a train. Ideally, Walt preferred the train, which limited automobile access. The train would provide the highest revenues and have the least impact on the resort facilities. The train had other benefits. It would enhance the goal of more overnight visitors, as they tend to spend more money. Something like an old-fashioned Cog stream train would become an attraction in its own right. There was even talk about installing a Monorail system.

Much of the analysis regarding access was driven by the low capacity of the existing all season highway. The study looked at keeping the highway as an alternative way to enter the resort but it was determined that this would threaten the viability of the fixed rail system and cause other problems for the project.

The highway was annexed into Caltrans system, the state’s transportation agency, and a $30 million upgrade program was approved by the state legislature in 1965. The next step in the process would be to widen and straighten the access road. Approvals for the project and the roadway were in place by December 1967.

As the project moved along, Disney hoped to have the first phase of the resort open by 1973 and fully up to speed by 1976. The initial estimate for the project was $35 million. Beyond the transportation network and the construction of the village, other infrastructure costs included the construction of dams on the mountainside to prevent debris from washing down into the valley as well as a ten-story underground garage capable of holding 3,600 cars. The design for the project was considered so innovative that Walt and his team won an American Forestry Association award for “Outstanding Service in Conservation of American Resources” award in 1966.

The Sierra Club first identified Mineral King as a potential location for a ski resort but they would come out strongly against the Disney project.

Although it was the Sierra Club who first suggested that Mineral King would be an excellent place to put a ski resort, they did not favor the Disney project. They decided to come out against the project and sue the federal government. The Sierra Club attorneys argued that United States Forest Service did not follow its own rules with regards to lease terms. They reminded the court that roadways within National Parks and Forests were meant to be limited in size and not meant to be access roads from one destination to another. Since the access road had to cross through the National Park property before entering Mineral King, it technically did not fit within the rules.

The Sierra Club argued that the size and scope of the Disney proposal was not compatible with the goals of a national game refuge. Remember; back in 1926 the United States Forest Service annexed the Mineral King area into the Sequoia Game Refuge instead of the National Park.

When challenged, the Sierra Club argued it had standing before the court and asked, “then who speaks for the future generations for whose benefit Congress intended the fragile Sierra bowls and valleys to be preserved?” At first, that argument did not work and the Sierra Club lost on appeal. However, the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court determined that the Sierra Club did not have standing before the court on this issue but the ruling also kept the door open to amend the lawsuit. So that is what the Sierra Club did. As the case dragged on, additional environmental studies were required and the project was scaled back by half.

As the two sides prepared to go to court, Disney claimed it would not pay for the roadway improvements and the state decided they would not pay for it either. After all of this effort, it was determined that the economics for Disney did not pencil out and Mineral King was annexed into the National Park in 1978.

Others we also critical of the Mineral King project and pleased to see its demise.

In The Animated Man, Michael Barrier was also critical of the Mineral King project. He called it “a highly dubious use of a fragile valley.” Barrier cites comments from Peter Browning who felt that the project’s fatal flaw would be visitors who, “will make the trip simply because it is there to be made; it will be a nice-day jaunt.” Browning adds, “Many would not make the drive if there was nothing at the end of the road. He suggests that the major attraction was not the Mineral King Valley but that it was a Disney resort and that resort “could just as well be located in the Mojave Desert or Los Angeles.”

Buzz Price would disagree with Barrier and Browning’s assessment. Price said, “Like everyone who had worked on this stunning project, we believed that Mineral King would have been the greatest winter resort in the world bar none.”

Some key concepts from the Mineral King project would resurface many years later in an update to the National Park Service’s draft Yosemite Valley master plan released in November 2000. Walt wanted to reduce automobile traffic, encourage walking and bicycling opportunities, and minimize the impacts on sensitive natural habitats. The Yosemite Valley plan called for the construction of three new parking lots outside the Valley and a system of shuttle buses to bring in day guests. Overnight guests would still be able to drive to their accommodations but the amount of land dedicated to parking would be reduced from 1,600 parking stalls to 550. The plans also proposed the removal of a 3.2-mile section of Northside Drive, a major thoroughfare through the valley floor and replace it with a paved foot and bike trail. All in all, more than 180 acres would be restored to a natural state. Much of the 2000 plan has yet to be implemented due to significant reductions in the National Park’s operating budget.

Book Review: In Service To The Mouse by Jack Lindquist

IN SERVICE TO THE MOUSE

My Unexpected Journey to Becoming Disneyland’s First President

A Memoir by Jack Lindquist with Melinda J. Combs

Imagine you had the opportunity to sit with a Disney Legend and let him tell you stories about the old days. The way things really happened. Pretty much unfiltered. Imagine sitting and hearing a bunch of short stories that add up to one incredible life. The book is 240-pages and contains 62 chapters. As an ad man, he knew how to get to the point. Jack and Melinda have written a terrific book. Well worth it if you are a collector of early Disneyland stories. But it is so much more then just Disneyland as we shall see.

Jack was appointed the first President of Disneyland in 1988. However his career in the park goes way back. He was there even before the park had opened. The story of how he got his job is says a lot about his life and the forthright comments throughout the book.

He tells a touching story of the early years when a family was walking through Town Square and he overheard how there would be no Christmas presents under the tree but the visit to Disneyland more then made up for that.

He felt his greatest strength was ignorance. Since they did not know what they were doing since it had never been done before, they just experimented and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not work.

Jack invented or inspired a number of events that we associate with Disneyland. This is the guy who thought up Date Nite, the Magic Kingdom Club, Dixieland at Disneyland and Grad Nite.

Date Nite was a way to keep people around past the original 8pm closing time in the summer. The Magic Kingdom Club provided discounts to its members and at one time had 5.5 million members. Dixieland at Disneyland brought some of the finest musicians to the banks of the Rivers of America including Louis Armstrong. The inspiration for Grad Nite came from a call from a group of PTA ladies. As Jack describes, “They called because the year before some students celebrating at a grad party in Southern California were involved in a tragic automobile accident.”

He touched on historic events such as the Yippie invasion, the 30^th Anniversary Gift Giver Extraordinaire, and the “We’re going to Disneyland/Walt Disney World” ad campaign.

During the Yippie invasion, about 150 protestors took over the fort on Tom Sawyer Island. Jack just stopped running the rafts and they were stuck there all day with no place to go.

The Gift Giver Extraordinaire contest gave away a prize to every 30^th guests with the 30,000^th person winning a car. Jack bet his career on the promotion and it drove traffic from 9.4 million to 12.5 million in year. For the famous line now utter at the end of major sporting events, it was Jack who worked hard to make it happen under impossible circumstances.

We learn about things that never seem to pop up in any other book such as the proposed Philippine and Iranian Pavilions for Epcot Center, Disney’s ownership of the Queen Mary, and how he created the Disney Dollars monetary system.

We learn the old school attitude toward park admission and prices. Boy, have things changed. For me, one story touches home. When asked where did I get this passion for Disneyland, I try and tell them about growing up in nearby Whittier. He said, “In the early days of the park, there were a lot of people, particularly women with small children from six to ten years of age who drove up in the morning during the summertime and bought general admission tickets for about $2.50 a day. We started seeing the same people doing this day after day: Buying tickets and dropping off their children.” I was one of those kids.

Jack is not shy with his opinions. He tells us why he opposed having characters in Epcot Center and still thinks it is a bad idea, why building California Adventure was a mistake, and how he would fundamentally change Main Street.

I purchased this book from the author at the MiceChat 6^th Anniversary celebration (great event) for $26.95. I did not get a discount but I did get my book signed by the authors and the current President of Disneyland, George Kalogridis. That was pretty cool.