Sunday, May 11, 2008
Reviled, praised and mercilessly scrutinized, Celebration is a town that even its journalist residents don't understand.
Sep 9, 1999 | Billed as an antidote to suburban sprawl and a return to traditional small-town America, Celebration, Fla., a 5,000-acre experiment in town planning undertaken by the Walt Disney Co., has quite possibly received more scrutiny than the whole of American urbanism combined. Before even a single brick had been laid, journalists, architects, social scientists, urbanists and tourists were flying into town to ponder the meaning of the "town that Disney built."
And who could blame them? The angles seemed nearly infinite. By naming their model village in the venerable tradition of utopian American towns like New Hope, New Jerusalem and New Harmony, Disney was proffering a crystal ball in which our tribal seers could read the future of communal life in this country. But it was also painting a giant bull's-eye on its chest. Fully aware of this fact, the Mouse hired big-name planners and architects and embraced "new urbanism," a nearly 2-decade-old movement in town planning that embraces higher-density building and downtown centers as key ingredients of good living. Still, Disney was going into the idea business -- the traditional domain of academic urbanists, architects, intellectuals and religious visionaries -- and how could any self-respecting cultural pundit pass up the opportunity to simultaneously diagnose the soul of American town planning and crow over every Disney misstep?
In addition to having instant historical significance, Celebration tapped into the primeval American myths of the frontier. It promised to be a real-time saga of hope, sacrifice and redemption, and what could be more American than that? The cast of characters, when complete, would be unusually rich: a company equally feted and reviled for its unwavering dedication to maudlin sentiment and artifice; progressive urbanists looking for real alternatives to suburban sprawl; high-profile architects looking for high-profile projects; idealistic educators who saw an opportunity to realize their ideas. Finally, the true stars of the drama would be "real" people: families, couples starting anew, lost souls, Disneyphiles and retirees lured by the shining ideal of a community founded by the organization that built "The Happiest Place on Earth." What could have more narrative crackle, more human drama, more prescience for the future of our republic?
This archetypal stew of dreams and dollars has produced two book-length accounts. The first is by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, a husband-and-wife team of journalists. The second is by Andrew Ross, a professor of American studies at New York University, who spent his sabbatical year living in the town. Obviously seeking an "authentic" experience, the authors of both books also take great pains to declare their desire to be "fair" and sympathetic, particularly to Disney. Frantz and Collins actually purchased a moderate-sized home and enrolled their two youngest children in the school. For his part, Ross rented an apartment downtown, but coyly describes buying a Cadillac in order to better fit in.
Mostly, however, Ross seems to have played the flbneur. He did, however, volunteer at the school, a position that gave him an inside view of what would become the most controversial part of life in Celebration -- the education of its children.
For reasons unique to each, neither book captures the epic dimensions of Celebration as a town and as an experiment in living, although Frantz and Collins make a brave attempt. And neither manages to successfully blend a sustained narrative with the elements that make Celebration newsworthy. It's one thing to write about the issues that cause a war; it's another thing to discuss those issues from the front line. Both books, for better and for worse, want to do both.
The big story that frames both accounts is that Disney marketed Celebration by appealing both to Americans' nostalgia for an idealized small-town lifestyle and their infatuation with high-tech perks, but in the end the company was unable to deliver the goods. When the first residents started arriving in 1996, not only were many homes still unfinished, but the school was not ready to receive its first students.
The houses that were completed, it turned out, often had serious flaws in design and construction. Frantz and Collins, for instance, arrived to find their neighbor's porch sitting on their property because it had been installed on the wrong side of the house. Others had similar problems. One person could only get scalding hot water. Another's second floor threatened to collapse because the porch columns were bowing and couldn't support the weight resting on them. One woman got so upset about the shoddy workmanship on her marble floors that she covered her Volvo with lemons and parked it in the middle of downtown with a sign that announced the name of the builder who'd done the work.
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