Join Len and Sam Gennawey, urban designer and author of the new book "Walt and the Promise of Progress City" as they walk around Main Street U.S.A in the Magic Kingdom. Presented by AAA.
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The Disney Dish with Jim Hill
Episode 10: Urban Design with Sam Gennawey - Main Street U.S.A.
This podcast is sponsored by AAA, the American Automobile Association. AAA members get discounts on tickets, resort accommodations and more at Walt Disney World and other Orlando attractions. If you book a qualifying Walt Disney World Resort vacation package at select AAA offices, you'll receive a free subscription to ToriumPlans.com, as well as dedicated trip planning resources just for AAA clients. Go to AAA.com or ask your local AAA travel agent for more details on this offer. Hi, this is Len Testa with the unofficial guide to Walt Disney World. We're back for another edition of the unofficial guide's Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill. Jim will be along a little later, but for today we have a special episode. We have a special treat. I'm here with Sam Genaway, urban designer and author of the new book Walt and the Promise of Progress City. We're here in the beginning of the very entrance of the Magic Kingdom. Today we're going to walk through the Magic Kingdom and look at it from the perspective of urban design that is the architecture, the style, the overall layout of the park and what Disney's architects were trying to get out of that design. What they were going for in terms of those themes. Sam, welcome to the show. I'm happy to be here. Landless is great. Thanks, Sam. And Sam, your book is available on Amazon, Walt and the Promise of Progress City. It's available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback format, fabulous. How long take you to write the book? Oh, maybe a lifetime, because I was like a little A3. I was like an eight-year-old boy when I saw the Progress City model at the Carousel of Progress upstairs at Disneyland and I guess ever since then I ever wanted to know if the thing could actually happen. But this book actually took about eight months to write and get it published. Fabulous, very good. Well, here at the, we're just past the turnstiles at the Magic Kingdom. We're on the right-hand side over by the Walker rental in wheelchair rental as well. And we're looking up at the train station. Now, Sam, you had mentioned that when you were on one of the WDW Today podcasts that the entrance to the Disney theme parks were heavily influenced by Walt's background in film and movies, right? Yes, yes. And actually most of the Imagineers, the early Imagineers, they were art directors from 20th Century Fox. The reason why is the 20th Century Fox Century, their back lot was four times the size of Disneyland. It had a river, it had a river boat, it had a river town, it had its own little main street, its own little city. Quite honestly, if you could stick a turnstile on the front of it, you would have been able to charge admission to go back there. And they all moved over to start to do the Disney project. Okay. And it was really important because this was the first time in an amusement park that people used cinematic techniques to apply that to built environments. And it's become, of course, very, very influential not only within the theme parks, but cities have started to try to mimic this as well. So, give me an example of a cinematic technique. We're here at the entrance, right? And we're looking at the tunnels here going to the train station. Give me an example of one cinematic technique. You're sure. I mean, we're walking now. Yeah, one of the biggest ones is just the fact that it's like a movie theater. When you push through the turnstiles, the first thing that you're going to be is in the lobby. And that's why the pavement is painted red. And then when you go through the tunnel, the tunnel is as if the curtain is going up on the screen. The tunnels are purposely the size that they are and the depth that they are, so that you never get a full view of town square until you've passed through the tunnel. With an urban planning, this is known as the Deflective View, and it creates a certain anticipation. It also kind of enhances what you see and makes what you see even more special when you do like what we just did. We're now on the other side of the tunnel. You're now finally getting completely immersed in this environment of Main Street. It's like being back in the 1890s. It's the music. It's the smell of the foods. It's getting run over by the strollers. Everything that you ever want is jammed. Just like old times. Yes, yes. That's right. So we've got a Main Street trolley thing coming up. The interesting thing I think about the tunnels, one of the interesting things about it is it's not a central tunnel going through the middle. That's right. That's right. In early designs, Marvin Davis was the designer of Disneyland. Basically what the Magic Kingdom is is a blown up, higher capacity version of Disneyland from an urban planning point of view. They played with the idea of a single entrance, but what the problem was, if you came through the single entrance in the center, you would not only just get on Main Street, but you'd see the castle right up front. The castle is an important thing. By the way, we're walking on the right-hand side of Main Street. We're going past the theater. Disney for some reason has decided to play the Main Street music at Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix levels. I like the new audio and the electronic horses that they're using so that they don't have to sweat as hard. That's pretty cool. Let's go over here in the corner so it's a little noisy. The idea of Town Square, the idea of Main Street is pretty simple. This is the first time in history at an amusement park, World's Fair, or theme park that you had a single entrance in, and Walt did that for many purposes. First, it gave the ability to know how many people were inside or outside of his park. But I think more importantly, if you remember the Walt Disney television shows, he would always stand up at the beginning. He would open a book, he'd show you here's where we're at, and it was a way of getting everybody on the same page. Same thing here. You come through the gate, the entire family shares a common experience until you get to the hub, which we'll get to in a little bit before you go off on your own adventures. It's kind of a way of sort of decompressing and getting you into the spirit of being in Magic Kingdom as opposed to being on the way to the Magic Kingdom. That's great. So even though we've literally just entered the park and we've been in it for like three minutes, we've already seen a couple of different techniques. We've seen the tunnel, which is the curtain rising. We've seen the Deflective View, because from the left or right side, you've got to walk in the middle. Right, and the Deflective View is like a cross dissolve in a film. When you're watching a movie, there's a little bit of film, and then there's another little bit of film that crosses over, and it makes for a very smooth transition. The tunnel also does that. It's like in a cinematic way a cross dissolve. So it's really quite effective, and I think anybody who's listening to this podcast, when you first pass through that tunnel, your heart just starts beating a little bit more, and you kind of know that you're home. And that's an important part, too, which we'll get to in a little bit. So we're on Main Street. We're over by the hat shop, the Shep Ho. So to our right, sorry to our left is the theater. In the middle of our view right now is the train station. We're looking at it from the front. We've got the flag, and you guys can hear the show in the background. We've got City Hall to our right, and then the fire station to our right as well. What was Disney going for here by including these specific buildings? I mean, I understand that Main Street needs a City Hall, and Main Street kind of needs a fire station. The train station is not a sort of an intuitive pick. Neither is having a theater. Why is the train station where it is, and why is the theater where it is, if for any reason at all? Oh, no, there's quite a few reasons. The Main Street station is integral to the whole idea. We're talking about the idea of being a movie theater, right? Well, every movie theater has a marquee in the front of it that everybody can see as they arrive. That's what the Main Street station does. It tells you, here's the place, here's where the front door is, here's the marquee. So it acts like that. It also has another function, which we'll get to in a little bit as a way of making it so it's more comfortable to walk. When it comes to where the town square theater is, where all the characters are at now, that building is full size, and it serves really two functions. The first function is that it hides the contemporary. If it wasn't as big as it was, you'd see the contemporary hotel. So that's why it's as big as it was. And also when it was originally designed, there was a great deal of consideration of building a hotel, and that was going to be an in-park hotel, and the interior's designs were going to be done by Dorothea Redmond, who had done drawings for it. And it's the same thing that she's the artist who did the mosaics that you see inside of Cinderella Castle. Oops, got that one of those wrong. That's right, that's right. So we're walking a little bit up Main Street here just to get away from the show, not that it's not lovely or anything. But now we're sort of between the Emporium, the gift shop, and what used to be the arcade. It's an interesting set of facades here. We've got brick buildings, we've got stone buildings, we've got... Well, the Emporium is brick, but it's sort of gingerbread-y. It's interesting colors, too. You've got the yellow palette, you've got sort of what is it, a greenish gray? Right, right. The idea of the Magic Kingdom's Main Street, it's a really quite an affluent city. It's an east coast version of the kind of the Queen Anne style and the sort of styles. It's a lot more frilly than Disneyland. Disneyland is a lot more of just a sort of a Midwest Main Street, but when we turn the corner, this is the big reveal. You know, when you think about it, you're driving, you're on the boat, you're on the monorail, you never capture the entire castle. You see little bits of the spire. It's only the moment that you turn this corner. You get the full reveal of the Cinderella castle, and it makes a huge impact. It's also really interesting when you think of it from a design point of view, because here you are in a turn of the century city. But at the end of the street is a medieval castle. Now, you would think that the conflict, the contrast, would be overwhelming. But in a sense, the contrast is so complete, each one enhances another. The Main Street's more dynamic because of the castle at the end. The castle at the end functions better because you look up Main Street towards the train station. And that's really important because think about it. You walk in the park. The castle just seems like it's way, way, way down there, right? It seems there's really long, right? When you turn around and you look at the Main Street station, it's a full-size building. All of a sudden, Main Street seems really short. It's this idea that Walt had about museum feet. He didn't want people dragging their butts around. So what he would do is you would all of a sudden say, "Oh, well, the X is not all that far, so let's take our time. Let's go to the shop. Let's do that kind of thing." And it's very effective, and it's a wonderful, another little eye trick. And you're also asking about other cinematic techniques. Now, there's a thing called Force Perspective, and a lot of people have heard this before. In movies, Force Perspective gives you a lot of depth in a film, in a 2D film. It's a way of painting sets or things like that. Right, and in a theme park, the idea with Force Perspective allows the buildings to feel higher, taller, without them actually being that size. It also makes them feel a little bit more intimate and more huggable, especially for adults. And in this particular case, the reason that the Main Street on Magic Kingdom is much bigger is people actually have offices upstairs. There are people who are working up there all day long, so that's why it's a lot larger. That was one of the reasons that drove it. I will say that when we're walking by all these stories, you pointed out the arcade that used to be there. The reason why I fix it on the arcade is because it's still there in Disneyland. That's right, and it's still an arcade. And it's still an arcade with penny films and stuff like that, but it's not in a world that hasn't been in 15 years. No, no, and the same thing with the movie theater. The movie theater at Disneyland is still a movie theater. This Main Street has definitely become one giant shopping mall, and it doesn't necessarily reflect the life of the people who lived here. And that's another cinematic technique. As you look around, you'll notice that a lot of the time, it'll look like somebody was just there, and they had just left, and you just missed them. So it adds a higher degree of life. It seems like somebody was there. So we're now in the middle of Main Street. Run. This is Center Street. This is Center Street. That's right. So it ends on the left-hand side at just an extension of the Emporium. But on the right-hand side, if you're facing the castle, it's sort of a cul-de-sac with Crystal Arts in China. And farther down as a dentist office, let's walk down there and see what's going on. Oh, I just love this area. I mean, if you're ever looking for a nice quiet spot to sort of get away from the hustle and bustle, just turn right down on Center Street. And they have these little audio sound things going on right now. So you look up in the store windows, and if you see a store window that's kind of open, and you sit here patiently enough, you'll hear the piano teacher teaching a very poor student and whacking her with a ruler. You'll hear a dentist who is sort of pulling the wrong tooth and a little hotel where you're here a guy doing a shower. And that's another cinematic technique to sort of suggest that there's a sense of life up above and that you are just missing the people. It's really, yeah, so worth the end of Center Street right now. It's a lovely section. We've got a series of tables and chairs back here. So if you wanted to grab something from the main street bakery, which is in the next building up, you could definitely walk back here. There's not a lot of shade except in the very back. But the interesting thing is that this particular area now seems to be completely overlooked by the vast majority of guests. So we've got some people sitting in the shade. We've got one guy at one table, and then we've got three tables and a whole bunch of chairs and benches that are completely unoccupied right now, which is where, because it's around lunchtime in the Magic Kingdom. And it's a Sunday, so it's a pretty busy day. But no one comes down this far for food. And then behind us, we're actually standing in some really nice shade. The first thing I love about this particular area is this is what I like. So behind us, there are a series of lights and they're sort of square, not squares, they're sort of trying to be a little orish, but not, they don't come to a point. We've got rounded lights over here on the gift shop side. And then by the glass blowers, we've got, it looks like a gas lamp. Right, right, because that's the idea of Main Street. It's at that crossroads from the gas era to the electrical lights. And as you move up Main Street by the time you get to the hub, those become electric lights. That means we've advanced in time somewhat. But there are only a couple of gas lights, right? There's one right here or there's one right there. And then that's it, right? Maybe there's maybe a third. No, no, no, all up and down Main Street up until this particular style of gas. Yeah, yeah, because it's one of those time travel things. You know, the way I always kind of look at the Disney theme parks, or at least at least the castle parks, is there a couple of things. They are a cinematic way. It's like walking through a movie that we've been talking about. Right. It's the world's largest model train set, because that's after all why Walt wanted to build a park because he tried to buy animator Ward Kimball's train and Wardwood and sell them. He said, okay, I'll build my own theme park. I'll show you. So it's just a big model train set. And the Magic Kingdom especially, not so much at Disneyland, but the Magic Kingdom, a lot of the time, it's like a time travel. And as you move through space, you're not just moving through space, but you're also moving through time. Okay. And that's a hallmark of the Magic Kingdom. That is distinctly different than Disneyland. There's a little bit of it there, but not as much as here. You mentioned the time travel thing. We'll talk about that on a couple other episodes coming up, because I know there are other places where you say that it's very prominent. All right, so we're walking up towards the end of Main Street. Now we've got Casey's Corner on our left, the smell of hot dogs and fries in the air. We've got the ice cream parlor on our right. And the other day, Sam, you and I ate at the Plaza restaurant, which I had eaten at in a long time. I remember eating there before. It was great. What a wonderful little spot to sit in too. It's wonderful because you're sort of, you could overlook part of Main Street. It's got, we sat in the area that directly overlooks it with a window view. It was really nice. Yeah, food wasn't bad at all. The club sandwich. I hear is very, very good there. It was lovely. It was very good too. All right, cool. So now we're at the sort of the end of Main Street, coming up towards the hub. So you're talking about the lights. So here's a good place to show. So right at the end of Main Street, you notice they're all gas lamps? Yes, they are. They appear to be gas lamps. And then you turn the corner. Now all of a sudden they're electric lamps. Oh, so we're actually in between the, we're in between eras. We're in between eras. And another really, I think, really quite cool thing is that little bridge as you're going towards Cinderella Castle kind of has a little pitch to it. So for just a brief second, you're slightly elevated amongst everybody else. It gives you a nice little view. And the castle, of course, is just overwhelming. I mean, the thing is just, I'm a Disneyland or so. To me, this thing is just gigantic. But it's, it's purposeful. It served within the park. You can pretty much see it everywhere. And that's important because it helps to orient you. And it also teases people when they're driving up to the parks, which was important because when you think about it, when this thing opened in 1971, the nearest real, I guess, civilization was about 16 miles away. And the Disney people were sort of afraid that people think that we're being sucked into a swamp never to return again. Going to my evil lair. Yeah, so as long as you see the top of the castle, you're kind of going, oh, maybe there's something there. So I'll keep driving forward. That's not bad. So, well, I say, yeah, you mentioned that this is, you actually do walk uphill as you're going along Main Street. So from, it's definitely a very pronounced hill from, from about Casey's corner until sort of the area, the moat. Is this the moat of the castle? Yes, it is. Yeah, that's great. Yes, there's the water that you go over between Main Street and the central hub. And the central hub is also an important design element, right? Right. This is a number of choices, I understand. Yeah, this is another one of the, this is another one of the real critical ideas, which was the hub and spoke. So we talked about the single entrance. We talked about going down a central corridor, which was Main Street that squeezed us all together. And then that releases into what's known as the Plaza Hub. And the Plaza Hub has a very pronounced function. First of all, it allows families, and you were seeing this a lot. I mean, if you look around, there's large groups, they're all taking photos, they're spreading out, they're looking at maps to figure out what they're going to go do next. John Hensch, the Imagineer, suggested that families need a lot of room in order to sort of gather their thoughts and figure out where they're going to go next. So that's what the hub does. It gives the families a lot of room. They can take a stop. They can figure out what they're going to do next. It also allows them to have choices. It's sort of the remote control to your television. So you can look and see the gateways, whether you want to go to Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, or Fantasyland. And then the thing that would drive you to the lands would be what's called the weenie, or View Terminus, as it is in the architectural terms. I heard this great story the other day about where the term the weenie came from. I always knew it because in the silent era films, if you want to get the dog to jump, you just wave a hot dog around, right? But the weenie was very specifically named by Walt Disney. And what happened is that Walt would come home late from working at the studio, and Lillian would be in bed. So he'd go in through the kitchen, and then he would open the refrigerator, and he would take out two hot dogs, weenies, if you're from the Midwest, right? And he'd take out the two hot dogs, and he'd give him to Lady, his chow dog, and then he'd eat one. And he'd wave it around and get the dog to jump and be happy that he's home and all that kind of stuff. So it's the same thing. It works like a beckoning hand, and it says, "Come to me. Come to me." So, you know, we'll take a little tour. Let's look at the weenies, right? So the big one, obviously, is the Cinderella Castle. But it's the motion of the carousel. That's what really draws you. You can kind of see the carousel. If you're sitting literally in the middle of the central hub, you can see the carousel through the archway. Right. And motion is something that always draws attention. People are always drawing to motion. So you look at the, if you look in down to Tomorrowland, what do you see? You see Esther Orbiter spinning two stories high. That's right. Where it's supposed to be as opposed to the one in Disneyland, which is stuck in a hole in the front. Wait, hold on. You're saying there's something wrong with Disneyland sound? Yeah, I am. Paratek. All right. I know. I'm just turning your car to the end of the tour. Take that thing and put it back on. I have to admit, folks, my first ride that I hit in the morning when I come here is to go on the Astro Orbiter, because I just love being up that high. You look towards Liberty Square, and they're really, the weenie itself is a building that's designed to hide the Liberty Bell Steam Riverboat, because it's the wrong era. That riverboat shouldn't be there. So they kind of hide it. But the building itself is attractive. And the adventure land, you see the Swiss Family Roppers in Treehouse. That's right. So I'd never noticed this before, but we were standing in the hub. And I never noticed that if you're standing literally in the middle of the hub and you look towards Adventureland, you can actually sort of see the very top of Swiss Family Treehouse. And not only that, but when there are people on Swiss Family Treehouse, you can actually see them walking through the tree tops. And so the people walking is the movement. So you've got the Liberty Bell's motion, you've got Swiss Family Treehouse, you've got the carousel, you've got the Astrover. Now, there is a difference at Disneyland. When you look at Adventureland, there is no weenie. And the reason for that is that if there were a weenie and you knew it was going to be an adventure land, it wouldn't be much of an adventure now. It's actually the entrance to the men's restroom, but that would be for a different podcast. A different attraction. Maybe that's a man versus a man versus a man and a mouse podcast. So this is interesting because I've been to the Magic Kingdom hundreds of times. And until you pointed out the motion thing, I'd never bothered to look back here, but you can't actually see people in Swiss Family Treehouse. And the idea that you can see people three stories up walking through a tree is the thing that beckons you over towards Adventureland. And it's very, very effective. All the different weenies. You can't help but want to walk towards them. And it's a very, very effective design. And even in big cities, like the old Pan Am building in New York or the board of trade in Chicago, work in a sense as weenies for those major streets. So the thing with Walt is he wasn't necessarily invented anything. He was a great synthesizer of the best in anything that he observed. And so he would go to cities. He would go to places and he would see things he'd like. And he would note them and he would tell his imagineers what he saw. And he was also really big on education for his. He would send his guys out to everywhere to study it. That's how they picked up on all this stuff. That's great. So as we leave Main Street, I just want to comment on the Crystal Palace restaurant, which is sort of Victorian era. It's kind of based on the New York Conservancy or World's Fair or any of those kind of glass atrems that were really popular at the turn of the century done in a Victorian style. But the transition from that to Adventureland, so a couple of things. One is it's pretty seamless because right now we're sort of right, we're about 10 feet from the bridge to Adventureland. And you can kind of see the very rightmost part of the Crystal Palace. And it's still thematically, it still sort of fits in. It's definitely not out of place like a New York skyscraper would be out of place. So I want you to talk about two things, Sam. I want you to talk about how this particular part of the Crystal Palace integrates in with Adventureland. And then I want you to describe how Disney marks off where the end of one land is in the beginning of another land is. So where does one land and when does another land begin? How do they do that from a design perspective? Well, with regards to the Crystal Palace, the idea there is that since it's modeled after a greenhouse and during colonial British rule, the idea of a Victorian greenhouse out in India or Africa or someplace exotic like that would have been a natural fit. So the architectural language is shared amongst different times, eras and place. So they're able to use a language and they do this throughout the park, which is really, really quite clever. They'll take an architectural language and that's what they'll end up blending. The transitions themselves are trying to be subtle, just like that cross dissolve of going through the tunnel. But in some cases that's not really subtle, like right here, you can see exactly where Adventureland is and you can see exactly where Main Street is. So see the steel railing, the metal railing. Yeah, so that's right to the wood. So Sam is describing here, if you guys are familiar, if you guys remember it. At the end of Main Street, there's a waste-high green metal fence that runs along the edge of Main Street. And it's sort of an olive green. It's nothing but horizontal bars and vertical bars making the fence. So there's very little decoration on it. There's not a lot of metal work on it. And it runs right up against two different things in Adventureland. It runs up against a rock wall and it runs up against sort of like small versions of telephone poles, which are the Adventureland fences. For this particular one, I kind of claim, because when you're in doubt and you want to figure out whether you're in one land or another, just look at the trash cans. Okay, so that's right, so the trash cans behind us are the yellow and brown version. So that's the transition to Adventureland and that's the end of Main Street. Yeah, this is the end of Main Street, because these are Main Street trash cans. So let's go across the bridge that separates it and that's another very distinct thing is that we're crossing bridges everywhere we go. So you kind of see islands of Adventure got the idea from Disney in that case. But as we go from one land to another, you're going to cross a bridge. So we walk, look at the surface, you've got kind of this concrete slurry, and then we're going to walk over a wooden bridge. So this is a good, since we're finishing up on Main Street, that's a good place to end this particular podcast. We're leaving the red carpet of Main Street. We're entering the wooden era of Adventureland. I hope you guys will join us on the next show for Sam Genouy, author of the new book, Walton and the Promise of Progress City. This is Len Testa. Thanks for listening. Bye.