TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052791/0527140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 30KB | 579 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 52

COVER STORY

Fantasy's Reality


Orlando, the boomtown of the South, is growing on the model of
Disney World: a community that imitates an imitation of a
community

By PRISCILLA PAINTON/ORLANDO -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/
Orlando


    It takes people a while to get used to living in Orlando.
This is a city where they vacuum the streets at night and
disinfect the public telephones with Lysol, where the airport
has a moat with live alligators in it, where you can buy your
hubcaps at Hubcap World. "At first Orlando weirded me out," says
Bob Simonds, 28, a producer from Los Angeles who filmed a movie
there. "I saw it as a big Disney production. It seemed like a
fraud, a city on overload. Now I love this place. It's like
Norman Rockwell's America or Dennis the Menace on acid."

    If Simonds seems to be groping for a figure of speech, so
is everyone else who passes through Orlando. Yet in one sense,
what is happening in central Florida is as old as the nation.
Americans have always built new communities in the image of
earlier ones -- from New Amsterdam to San Francisco's Chinatown
to Miami's Little Havana. In another sense, the phenomenon of
Orlando is something new. Orlando, the boomtown of the South, is
growing at a staggering pace on the model of Disney World: it
is a community that imitates an imitation of a community.

    Orlando's destiny was sealed on Disney Day, Oct. 1, 1971,
when Disney World opened wide its gates. Since then, the swamp,
once called Mosquito County, has become the top commercial
tourist destination in the world. Currently it draws 13.3
million people a year, up from 4.6 million in 1980. As a shrine,
it is surpassed only by Kyoto, Mecca and the Vatican. The
2,558-sq.-mi. metro area has the largest concentration of hotel
rooms in the country (76,300), with the highest occupancy rate
(79%). More than 18 million passengers arrive at Orlando
International Airport every year, three times the number
entering 10 years ago -- and, if the planners are right, half
the number who will alight three years from now. Cities from Rio
to Frankfurt have direct flights to the Disney doorstep, and
airport officials are already preparing for a day in the next
century when tourists from San Francisco will hop across the
continent in 39 commuting minutes.

    Disney World lures them, but Disney World can't keep them.
So people who are enthused about Disney's meticulous vision of
social order are moving next door to Orlando -- in droves. In
the past decade the population of Seminole, Osceola and Orange
counties (which cradle Orlando) has swelled by 102 people a day,
to slightly more than 1 million, which is as if the entire
population of Tulsa had pulled up stakes and moved there. In the
same period, the region led the nation in creating new factory
jobs -- nearly 2,500 a year -- while employment in the service
sector increased 137.9%. Tupperware and Martin Marietta have
been in Orlando for 40 years, but they have recently been
joined by other bedrock institutions like Westinghouse, the
American Automobile Association and AT&T.

    High-tech businesses were attracted decades ago to Cape
Canaveral, 40 miles away, and they are still coming. Today they
are creating jobs in Orlando at a rate three times the national
average. Patriot missiles, infrared sights for night warfare and
other inventions of the Star Wars era are assembled only a few
miles from the site where tourists board fantasy rocket rides
based on George Lucas' Star Wars. Disney World has the Space
Mountain roller coaster; Orlando has FreeFlight Zephyrhills, a
firm that is experimenting with wind-tunnel technology to
simulate a skydiving experience on the ground. Disney's Epcot
Center has Michael Jackson in 3-D as Captain Eo; Orlando created
the simulators on which allied pilots learned to aim their smart
bombs.

    The movie industry too has moved in. Both Universal and
Disney have built studios hard by Disney World, helping to give
Orlando the nickname "Hollywood East." Universal has constructed
six sound stages and the largest back lot outside Hollywood. In
the past two years, as many as 12 feature films, 500 television
episodes and dozens of commercials have been made there.

    In the spirit of the place, Universal and Disney studios
also double as playgrounds where tourists can experience "real"
versions of screen phantasms. Universal offers a bumpy encounter
with a robotic King Kong, whose breath is banana scented. Not
to be outdone, Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park has created
participation shows like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt
Spectacular, where visitors pretend to be extras along with
actors who pretend to be extras on sets that pretend to be sets.

    Orlando's rococo industry of make-believe has put some zip
into local gossip columns. Hollywood celebrities pop up
regularly. Some, like Steven Spielberg and Robert Earl, the
British mastermind behind the international chain of Hard Rock
Cafes, have even bought homes in Orlando. The area, says Earl,
is "full of millionaires driving trucks and wearing jeans."

    Millionaires in jeans is the stuff of ordinary boomtowns.
But not every boomtown has the Mouse as its Medici. When the
$5.8 billion Walt Disney organization established itself near
Orlando, it settled on a 43-sq.-mi. property (twice the area of
Manhattan) and won from the Florida legislature a sovereignty
often compared to the Vatican's. Above all, it brought to
Orlando the power of the Disney ethos, which can never be
overstated. Executives have traveled to the park to learn about
the Disney style of management, which trains employees to
cherish Walt, despise stray gum wrappers, follow a manual that
sets the hem length of costumes to the exact inch and put on a
smile all day every day. KGB agents have visited the park to
line up for photographs with Mickey Mouse. Cultural
anthropologist Umberto Eco has studied the Disney iconography.
Novelists like Max Apple have produced mythical tales about the
park's genesis in Orlando. And so many terminally ill children
have made a trip to Disney World their last wish that a
foundation has established a permanent village nearby to
accommodate them.

    But even Walt, ambitious social engineer that he was,
might have been taken aback by the adoption of his commercial
vision as Orlando's urban-planning model. Many new arrivals
value the place because it offers the virtues of an escape: it
is a suburban sprawl that strives to eliminate every kind of
vexatious complexity. "People come here because they know it's
going to be safe," says Thomas Williams, head of Universal
Studios Florida. "They don't have to worry about the weather.
They don't have to worry about the car getting broken into. They
don't even have to worry about whether they are going to be
entertained." Says William F. Duane, a lawyer who moved there
in 1974: "It's like a voluntary conformity. You kind of feel
seduced away from reality. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe this is
reality." Charles Givens, an Orlando resident whose book Wealth
Without Risk has been on the best-seller list for more than two
years, puts it another way: "The best place to live is where
everybody wants to vacation."

    But about 20 miles away at Disney World, many tourists
hold just the opposite: the best place to vacation is the place
where you can only dream of living. "It brings you back to a
moral, clean time that today we've lost," says Shirley Schwartz,
44, of Wayne, N.J. Praise of Disney World by its patrons often
turns into condemnation of the disorder and unsightliness in the
rest of America. "Do you see anybody here lying on the street
or begging for money? Do you see anyone jumping on your car and
wanting to clean your windshield -- and when you say no, they
get abusive?" asks Linda Staretz, 48, of Livingston, N.J. "Look
at the quality of the people. Doesn't that say anything?"

    What it says is that Disney World is predominantly white
and middle class -- and so is Orlando. The city, like Disney
World, offers relief not just from the pressures of geography
(it is flat and still undeveloped) and of history (more than
half the area's population arrived during the past 20 years)
but, most of all, from contending ethnicity. In that sense,
Orlando is a new psychological frontier, a jumping-off place for
a society that revels in the surface of things, even if deeper
problems remain unaddressed.

    Orlando spends tax money, for example, to have workers
pick cigarettes out of tree planters, but the Florida Symphony
Orchestra, one of Orlando's major cultural adornments, almost
folded four months ago for lack of community support. Orlando
faces all the pressing burdens of a boomtown, from lengthening
traffic lines on its highways to pollution in its lakes, but the
region will not raise taxes to deal with them. (Orange County
has lowered its property-tax rate almost annually since 1969.)
In the post-Disney real estate explosion, bureaucrats, farmers
and tire salesmen have become instant millionaires, but so
little money has been spent on the overcrowded regional school
system that some classes have been taught in gym storage rooms.
About 15,000 people pack the Orlando Arena for every game of the
Orlando Magic, the two-year-old National Basketball Association
team; but residents and civic leaders in Orange and Osceola
counties complain that the area lacks a sense of community
responsibility. "It's a lot easier to pull for the hometown team
than to volunteer at a hospital," says Linda Chapin, chairman
of Orange County. Says her counterpart in Osceola, Jim Swan:
"It's hard to govern when you have no clear idea what kind of
place a place wants to be."

    If Orlando does not know what it wants to be, it knows at
least how it wants to behave: cheerfully, at all cost.
Boosterism is almost a civic duty, with a Disneyesque tinge. The
city's pitch for a National League baseball team included a
promise to build not just a concrete mega-ballpark but an
old-time, intimate "field." Orlando hopes to embrace mass
transit, but an old-fashioned trolley line is getting priority
over a modern elevated rail system. Orlando basketball games are
not games but "theatrical productions," in the words of Magic
manager Pat Williams. He spent more than a year searching for
the fabric and color of the team's uniform. "Disney sets the
tone for everything in Orlando," he says.

    Before Disney World, Orlando's attractions were the
Tupperware Museum and Gatorland, where visitors could watch
alligators lunging for chicken carcasses. Gatorland is still
there, but now there are Sea World and Reptile World, Wet 'n
Wild and the Mystery Fun House, Xanadu and Cypress Gardens. In
Orlando, restaurants, hotels, shops and golf courses all want
to be theme parks, or at least themes. A store selling Christmas
trinkets is called Christmas World. There are Bargain World,
Flea World, Bedroom Land and Waterbedroom Land. At the Medieval
Times restaurant, patrons can eat roast meat with their hands
and watch knights in armor joust on horseback. At the Arabian
Nights, sheiks steal gossamer-clad princesses during dinner
shows. Orange County's most famous golf course, the Grand
Cypress resort, has reconstructed the layout of the hallowed Old
Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. The Florida Peabody Hotel
copies a ritual of the original Peabody in Memphis: every day
at the appointed hour, mallard ducks waddle off the elevator to
wade in the lobby's marble fountain.

    Orlando's residential subdivisions have the same
dreamed-in feel: strung along narrow county roads, many are
pastel ag glomerations of arbitrary architecture, all behind
secure walls. "When you drive around Orlando," says John
Rothchild, author of Up for Grabs, a cultural anthropology of
Florida, "it's not clear where Disney World begins and ends."

    That's because the city and the park are looking more like
each other every day. The heart of Disney World is Main Street
U.S.A. -- constructed, at the creator's specifications, so that
the buildings are subtly miniaturized. "This costs more," Walt
Disney said, "but made the street a toy, and the imagination can
play more freely with a toy. Besides, people like to think
their world is somehow more grown up than Papa's was." Now
architect Andres Duany wants to bring a residential equivalent
of Main Street to eastern Orange County. His proposal is named
Avalon Park, a 9,400-acre community made up of compact
neighborhoods with convivial squares. Like Disney World, Avalon
would be strollable and full of shops and parks, and like Disney
World, it would be built in the middle of nowhere. In nearby
Osceola County, Disney is getting into the business of
residential utopias, harking back, in a way, to Walt's original
concept for Epcot. His Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow was intended to be sealed under a glass dome to keep
out heat and humidity. It was to have had stores, apartments,
schools, churches, offices, marinas, parks, golf courses, a
monorail, a vacuum-tube trash-disposal system, a central
computer controlling everything from streetlights to hotel
reservations -- and it was to have housed temporary residents
who were to abide by Disney codes of dress and behavior.

    Epcot never took that form, in part, according to author
John Taylor, because Walt realized he would have had to
subsidize residents to attract them to his closely monitored
community. Epcot today is a permanent world's fair that includes
two sets of pavilions: scientific ones that celebrate mankind's
technological mastery of the universe and a clutch of foreign
lands without masses of foreigners -- 11 cultural boutiques that
fit around a man-made lagoon as a symbol of human fellowship.
"Probably it's much cleaner here than some of those countries
you would go to," says visitor Sandy Hyde of Hacienda Heights,
Calif.

    The current generation of social engineers has proposed an
Epcot-inspired "new town" called Celebration, where the cultural
center will be known as a "learning resort," streets will be
"themed" in styles borrowed from Charleston and Venice, and a
special site will showcase industrial wizardry used to design
everything from tennis balls to compact discs. The 8,400-acre
property, near Kissimmee, will also have a grocery store with
computerized carts that display suggested menus.

    The concept of Epcot is resonating through another
fantastical project, which is being promoted off Port Canaveral,
40 miles to the east. Developers have proposed a $1 billion
"city of tomorrow" that would be built on the world's largest
cruise ship, capable of handling 5,600 passengers. The floating
city, like Epcot, would mix pleasure and pedagogy: alongside the
three hotel towers, casinos and villages aboard the nearly
quarter-mile-long vessel would be a 100,000-volume library and
a giant conference center. At sea or in port, Phoenix World City
would be a "place where the best of a civilization converges and
cross-fertilizes to produce a fuller way of life," according to
a florid brochure.

    A group of Soviet and Alaskan businessmen, in the
meantime, have come to town proposing to build what they are
calling Perestroyka Palace, a park for disco, diplomacy and
dealmaking. Plans call for an $18 million palace modeled after
St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, linked
symbolically to an Alaska mining- and trading-company post by
a bridge over a man-made reproduction of the Bering Strait.

    Another developer has picked Orlando for a project on an
even higher plane: a 480-acre theme park called Vedaland,
scheduled to open in 1993. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the
saffron-robed Indian guru who brought transcendental meditation
to the world (and to the Beatles), has teamed up with magician
Doug Henning to produce a spiritual equivalent of gourmet TV
dinners, a high-tech, fakery-filled playground, ostensibly to
help put man in harmony with nature. The 38 attractions will
include a building that appears to levitate above a pond, a
chariot ride inside the "molecular structure" of a rose and a
journey over a fabricated rainbow. Naturally, there are
unbelievers. Says Orlando Sentinel columnist Robert Morris:
"Somehow I just can't picture Buster and Betty Lunchbucket of
Racine, Wis., along with all the little Lunchbuckets, lining up
to get in touch with their inner selves."

    Orlando has also spawned a number of homegrown financial
visionaries, like Glenn Turner, whose name is to financial
pyramids what Ivan Boesky's is to insider trading. Before his
"dare to be great" marketing schemes earned him a seven-year
jail sentence for fraud in 1987, Turner had built a $3.5 million
Cinderella-like castle near Orlando and set his theme song to
the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club anthem ("Now's the time to say
goodbye to all our poverty. M-A-K . . . I-N-G . . . M-O-N-E-Y").
While Turner sits in prison, one of his disciples, best-selling
author Givens, is prospering in Orlando. Givens bought a
lakefront spread outside the city and decorated his driveway
with a white Rolls-Royce, a white BMW convertible, a white
stretch Lincoln limo and a white Excalibur convertible. Givens
married the former Miss Sexy Orlando, and is getting rich
through his books (along with Wealth Without Risk, there is the
newly released Financial Self-Defense) and financial-advice club
by spreading something akin to the Disney spirit. "Life should
be lived like a movie" is one of his favorite mottoes.

    Beyond wealth without risk, what else should a 21st
century American mecca offer its pilgrims? How about eternal
life? Social worker Jerry Schall, 46, claims to have discovered
the Fountain of Youth near Orlando, and five years ago rented
billboard space in his hometown of Philadelphia to advertise its
existence. (Schall claims that the miraculous rill is somewhere
in the woods, a 35-minute drive from Disney World.) He says he
was "disillusioned" with the apathetic response he received,
but who needs the Fountain of Youth when Disney's own powers of
rejuvenation are well known? "The place makes me feel like I'm
living all over again, like I have a second wife," says Louis
Schein, a septuagenarian visitor to the theme park. He
illustrated the point by opening his umbrella and beginning a
little shuffle to the tune of Singin' in the Rain.

    Orlando offers hope for spiritual immortality too. Campus
Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group that plans to bring the
Gospel to 6 billion people worldwide by the year 2000, is moving
its headquarters from San Bernardino, Calif., to the area. The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which owns a ranch
in rural Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties 10 times the size
of Disney's property, wants to build a community for 10,000
families.

    Even Tammy Faye Bakker, the wife of defrocked
televangelist Jim Bakker, has moved the vestiges of their New
Covenant Ministries to a warehouse on the outskirts of Orlando;
Tupperware salespeople once used the place to hold inspirational
meetings. Standing in a sanctuary with pink walls, a pink rug
and large brass giraffes around the altar, she reveals that
Disney World holds the secret of her intended comeback. "The
spiritual person and the person who wants to have fun, it's the
same thing," says Bakker, who helped her husband build Heritage
USA, the giant Christian theme park in Fort Mill, S.C., that
went under. "When you're in Disney, you have hope that things
can be better. And when we know God, there's always hope for a
better place, which is of course heaven."

    While Orlando's entrepreneurs sell instant Edens, Orlando
residents are finding that their earthly garden is being turned
upside down. The last orange grove on Orange Avenue was knocked
down in 1977. A tourist's only glimpse of the crop that once
supported Orlando's economy is likely to be the miniature orange
trees "that really bear fruit" sold in souvenir shops. In the
past 20 years at least four of the city's main thoroughfares
have become cluttered with fast-food joints, gift shops,
motels, hotels and gas stations that mount a neon assault ($2.99
FOR MICKEY MOUSE!) on passersby. On some strips, condominiums
and steak houses have been put up a few yards from pastures
where cows are still grazing.

    "It's ugly, it's awful, it's appalling," says Sentinel
columnist Morris. "You live here every day as a Floridian with
a tremendous sense of loss." The former mayor of Orlando, Carl
Langford, chose to retire somewhere else. "I spent 30 years of
my life trying to get people to move down there, and then they
all did," he says from his new home in Maggie Valley, N.C.

    Orange County commissioner Bill Donegan, who grew up in
California, sees signs that Orlando could become the next Los
Angeles. Traffic on Interstate 4, which runs through the heart
of the city, slows to a long standstill at rush hour. A regional
planning group has said the highway will need 22 lanes by the
year 2000; it now has six. A beltway that will run from the
airport around the city is being started just as the head of
Disney Attractions, Dick Nunis, is beginning to talk about the
need for a second such artery. And so far, no one can agree on
where, or even whether, to build a public transportation system
for the metro area.

    Perhaps the clearest indication of the area's hypertrophy
is the state of its public schools and welfare agencies. There
the precarious prosperity of a low-paying but fast-growing
service sector is quickly exposed. Osceola County had only
19,000 residents in 1960; now it has that many hotel rooms. Many
of the maids and clerks who work in them earn $4 to $6 an hour
without health insurance in a community that requires a car.
They are a mishap away from poverty. "Many people come down here
chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but they come
down unprepared," says Sally David, who helps steer new families
to affordable housing in the county. "They don't have enough
money to survive if their car breaks down or if they have to go
home when they don't make it."

    The lucky members of this fragile immigrant class live in
Osceola's throng of trailers. Welfare workers, who have more
than tripled their case loads in the past decade, report finding
newcomers sleeping in cars or in the woods. At Osceola High
School last year, transience was the only constant: 700 of the
school's 2,200 students were newcomers; 500 students withdrew
before the end of the term. "Kids in the classroom don't even
know the other kids in the classroom. The teacher has to say,
`Hey, you,' and point," says David Campbell, executive director
of the county's mental-health agency. The Orange County school
system is so overcrowded that temporary classrooms have gone up
on almost all the 112 school sites.

    Part of this mess came about because Orlando's glowing
prospects turned nearly everyone into a developer. Land that
went for $200 an acre before Disney Day can soar overnight to
$100,000 on the rumor that Disney is nosing around. Even Herbie
Pugh, one of the area's most vocal environmentalists, admits
that he sold 10 acres to a developer eight years ago and
pocketed $100,000 in return. "They offered me such a good price,
I couldn't resist," he says. Climatic freezes that devastated
the orange groves three times in the past 10 years have added
to the frenzy by driving farmers into developers' arms.

    County commissioners say that until recently, any
discussion of controlling growth brought charges of communism.
Now local leaders say residents have pulled the growth alarm,
but in petty ways and without a corresponding sense of
commitment to the metropolitan region as a whole. Orange County
commissioner Donegan says he had a group of voters come by his
office not long ago to ask him to stop a luxurious 4,000-sq.-ft.
house from going up in their neighborhood because they were
convinced that the project would raise the value of their homes
and thus their tax bills.

    Part of Orlando's evident lack of a psychological core
comes from the fact that the area has never had any control over
the bonanza that has given it definition. In 1967, Walt Disney
persuaded the Florida legislature to give him absolute power
over his newly purchased domain in the form of a government of
his own, seated on the Disney property, with its own fire
department, taxation authority and building codes. As a courtesy
every year, Disney issues to the surrounding counties an
official communication called the "State of Our World" address,
which spells out the theme park's plans. The only people allowed
to vote in elections affecting the entire Disney property,
officially christened the Reedy Creek Improvement District, are
its landowners, which means Disney and a handful of others
chosen by the company. "They could build a nuclear plant out
there, and there'd be nothing we could do about it,"
Commissioner Donegan says.

    Disneydom is used to such hyperbole. Company officials say
it's the price the firm pays for being the big man in town --
the largest taxpayer ($23 million a year), the largest employer
(33,000 workers) and the largest contributor to Florida's
tourism industry. In sum, it is the lure for 60% of the 40
million tourists who dump more than $26 billion into the state
economy every year. To charges that Disney is dangerously
omnipotent, Disney executive Nunis has a firm retort: "But what
have we done wrong? When we came, this was a community that was
dying because young people were leaving. Today you name an
industry and it now exists in central Florida."

    Nonetheless, the county has begun to chafe at Disney's
power. In 1988, Orange County commissioners threatened to
challenge the company's self-governing status after Disney
announced that it would double the number of hotel rooms it owns
inside the park area, add a convention center, a six-nightclub
Pleasure Island with a 10-screen movie theater, and a water
park. Disney was locking up all the tourists on its property,
the commissioners complained. Disney settled in the summer of
1989 by agreeing to pay the county $14 million to help defray
the costs of widening roads off the park site. In exchange the
commissioners agreed not to challenge Disney's dominion for
seven more years.

    Everyone seemed happy with the deal until Disney shortly
thereafter announced its plan for the '90s: seven more hotels,
29 new attractions, 19,000 more employees and a fourth amusement
park. There were cries of betrayal from downtown Orlando. Then
the dispute between Disney and the county took yet another turn.

    Every year the state of Florida allows regional
governments to sell a limited amount of tax-exempt bonds to
finance local projects. Last January $57.7 million worth of this
funding became available to governments in central Florida on
a first-come, first-serve basis. Despite an announcement 25
years earlier that the use of such money for private projects
is "repugnant to us," Disney has regularly stood in line for the
offerings. This time the company was at the front of the line:
it took all $57.7 million to upgrade the Disney World sewer
system, just when Orange County wanted the funding to build
low-income housing.

    When word got out that a corporation that earned $703
million in 1989 had appropriated money that could have helped
the poor, the public outcry could be heard all the way to Future
World. The Orlando Sentinel called Disney the "grinch that stole
affordable housing." Disney kept the money, but the controversy
forced the company to promise it would not apply for the bonds
in 1991.

    Disney's image has also suffered from several unpleasant
illegalities. Last year it was fined $550,000 by the
Environmental Protection Agency for sewage violations and for
improperly storing toxic waste on its property. The company made
headlines in 1989 when -- in an effort to stop vultures from
pecking out the eyes of tortoises on Discovery Island -- Disney
employees apparently trapped and beat some of the scavengers to
death. Federal and state officials charged the company that
animated Bambi with 16 counts of animal cruelty. Disney agreed
to give $95,000 to local conservation groups; the charges were
dropped.

    "Walt Disney was the messiah," says Bob Ward, designer of
Universal's 444-acre theme park. "Disney saw the future, and it
was the themed environment." Ward may be right, but even Disney
planners are sometimes surprised by the infectiousness of their
founder's idea. Everyone might have been less surprised had they
observed the Magic Kingdom's effect on a small corner of nature.
When they were creating the theme park, Disney planners turned
an island on one of the property's lakes into a semitropical
jungle and bird sanctuary, a place of bamboo and palms, of
plants from Central and South America, India, China and the
Canary Islands. The intention was to populate the island mostly
with lifelike robot birds, with a few real ones thrown in for
charm's sake. But the living birds attracted hundreds of others,
which flew in from all around the region.

    Now there are no robots on the island, only a colorful,
noisy bird colony. Like Orlando, it is thriving, out of the
reach (almost) of predators, deep in Disney World's embrace.