After the “classic period” between 1904 and 1910, Coney Island began a slow descent into disrepair, because its novelty had worn off. Trash accumulated, both physical remnants such as discarded food and broken bottles, and cultural in the form of purveyors of “ballyhoo, girlie shows and crooked skill games” (Weinstein, 1992, p. 146). Dreamland burned down in 1911 and was never rebuilt. Luna Park’s creative spirit was lost when it landed in creditors hands in 1919 and then finally burned in 1944. Coney Island began to suffer in the 1920s and became more dilapidated and dirty as time went on. The carnival midways could not compete with Hollywood. Weinstein (1992) notes that by the time Walt Disney saw Coney Island, it had become representative of the “dirty, disorganized, poorly run, honky-tonk amusement parks” that he visited with his daughters on weekends, which had spawned the idea for Disneyland as a positive, safe, clean alternative, which would be aesthetically appealing and imaginative, where both adults and children could enjoy themselves (p. 131).

By the mid-Twentieth Century, there was nothing in sight or in recent memory which compared to Disneyland—Dreamland had been gone for 44 years and Luna Park, even as a shadow of its former self, downsized and dimmed, had been gone for 11 years. Weinstein could find no indication that Disney or his staffers knew about Luna Park or Dreamland, or had looked at documents or pictures, or were influenced by their operations a half a century earlier. Although the influence of prior parks is clear, Disneyland seems to have refashioned the archetypal energies anew, resulting in its own brand of theme park, the likes of which had never been seen before. Weinstein (1992) reveals:

From today’s vantage point, the heyday of Luna Park and Dreamland from 1904-1910 appears as a classical period. The theme/fantasy park evolved, prospered, improved and pinnacled at that time. This is followed by a long period of decline and evanescence, the “Dark Ages” of the genre. In 1955, “the Renaissance” begins—Disneyland is unveiled, the theme/fantasy park is reborn, high public acclaim is tendered, similar parks soon flower. (pp. 156-157)

Disney carried the idea of theme to a whole new level and his new ideas about public entertainment, including Main Street USA, which was based solely on Disney’s life, imagination, film- making abilities, as well as his ability to use the media and the park to cross-promote each other. The operators of Coney Island had no other products but their parks, whereas Disney had his entire film library. Radio and film were in their infancy during the heyday of Coney Island and thus the non-print mass media were never fully available to the operators of those parks. Main Street USA itself essentially nostalgically portrays the time that gave birth to these parks.

These prior parks did not go back to the past but concentrated on the present and the future. Disney’s use of theming and his ability to combine elements of pleasure park, technology park, exposition, and amusement park all rolled into one, was to King the watershed event of amusement park history. As King (1981a) so aptly states: “the genius of theming was, of course, Walt Disney, whose innovations have contributed or created breakthroughs on every major media frontier.” (p. 58). Disney's amusing ancrstry is rich indeed, and now that we are done amusing ourselves, let us “get a little closer to home” and examine the more explicit effects on Disneyland.

More Immediate Influences on Disney

Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, in talking about genes, notes that they are the blueprint, but that the environment actually determines how the genes will express—in his words, to parody James Carvell, democratic strategist for the Clinton campaign: “It’s the environment, stupid” (Lipton, 2005, p. 49). If we metaphorically look at Disneyland’s ancestry, the pleasure parks, the expositions, and the amusement parks at the turn of the Twentieth Century as Disneyland's heredity, we can look at the environment as Hollywood, the surrounding fanciful Los Angeles streetscapes, and Los Angeles itself, as well as the 1950s milieu. Here we will quickly glance at the fanciful LA streetscapes, the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948, and the research trips for Disneyland seeing how each contributed to Disneyland. [The "Child of the Times" excursion explores Los Angeles’s impact along with the 1950s milieu.] [The "Art of the Show" excursion looks into Hollywood and the film industry’s effect on Disneyland.] Now lets lets take a drive-by…

Los Angeles Streetscapes

In Los Angeles, what was once the stuff of fairs and amusement parks spilled onto the streets as exotic fantasy forms of all kinds beckoned. Southern California was described from the late 1920s on as being “a middle class heaven” and “a mixturesque beauty” where one could drive down streets and freeways and find fantasy creations such a plastic pine log cabin, a gigantic marshmallow igloo ice cream parlor, a monster-shaped ice cream stand, a lunch stand shaped like a giant hamburger, and the Brown Derby restaurant shaped like a giant hat. Harris (1997), quoting others' descriptions notes that:

California seemed on the verge of becoming an enormous carnival, a "Christmas play where the plum cake has grown into a house and Jack is waving his cap from a beanstalk as high as a steeple" . . . "this new Greece, an amalgam of the Middle West and the movies, was the land of the happy ending, bereft, critics charged, of critical intelligence, a traditional class structure, good taste and a willingness to face unpleasant facts." (p. 26)

Innovative architecture was being used to lure patrons to the restaurants at La Cienega, and the Farmer’s Market on La Brea. The Samson Tire and Rubber Company, astride the freeway looked like an Asyrrian temple, Weldon Becket’s Capital Record’s Tower in Hollywood looked like a stack of Records, while his Bullocks department store on Wilshire Blvd was memorable as well.

Outsider artworks, such as Rodia’s Watts Towers, which received a good deal of press around the time Disneyland was being imagined, may have also inspired Disney. In 1951, Watts Towers was described as “a bizarre yet pleasant world” (Doss, 1997, p. 189). The three towers and their surrounding garden were built over a thirty-year period, beginning in the 1920s. The towers had an intricate filagree pattern and one of them was over 104 feet tall, while the gardens had ornamental sculptures in them and the “scalloped walls surrounding the property were encrusted with all sorts of found objects, from bits of broken bottles and cracked ceramic tiles . . . to sea shells, shattered plates and cups and imprints made of tools, corncobs and his own hands” (p. 189).

Southern California’s fantasy architecture and springlike climate, made it a place that was “practically perfect in every way” to borrow a line from Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964) for Disneyland to be conceived and to develop; and just as Mary, Bert and the children visited a fair when they jumped into the chalk picture, let us go and visit a couple of different fairs, and see some other inspiring influences.

Take Me to the Fair Redux

Disney visited the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, San Francisco’s sister fair to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where he became enchanted with the Thorne Room Miniatures. When Disney returned home from the Exposition, he began to collect miniatures. Disney appreciated not only their craftsmanship and sense of nostalgia, but, according to Marling (1997), Disney was particularly drawn by their powerful drama and their orderliness:

The format resembled a stage, a proscenium arch through which an interior could be viewed but never entered . . . . the minute size of the furnishings precluded the possibility of actual participation . . . the onlooker could only peer inside and yearn to be a part of that perfectly ordered domain . . . a three-dimensional world that could charm and delight and tell a story.” (p. 38)

While international fairs were on hold from 1939-1962, other fairs played on and one exposition—the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948— seems to have particularly shaped Disneyland in several ways, which Marling (1997) explicates. That fair had a railroad which defined boundaries of grounds, served as the major artery of internal transport within the fair itself, and determined the scale of adjacent buildings.

The Railroad Fair presented prototypical lands which re-created well known tourist meccas, such as the Illinois Central’s French Quarter and the Santa Fe’s Indian villages and western theme. Workers wore clothes appropriate to these locales and the cuisine matched as well, which helped sustain the illusion of being there. The Railroad Fair provided “the coherence and concentration of experience, the sensation of having taken the train on a whirlwind journey through most of the nations beauty spots in a single day” (Marling, 1997, p. 45). Particularly impressive was “the dramatic unity enforced by the pageant, which gave every exhibit a powerful place in the narrative whole” (p. 45). Marling muses that “as Walt made mental notes about the menus and the outfits, the future Frontierland, Fantasyland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland of Disneyland were only a daydream away” (p. 45). Disneyland had morphed in Disney’s mind from its original conception as a small kiddie park adjacent to the Burbank studio, to Disneylandia (a set of traveling miniature rooms), to a full-scale park.

Research Field Trips

Walt’s dream of Disneyland arose when he used to take his daughters on Saturdays to various kiddielands, carnivals, fairs, and other amusement parks. Walt is quoted as saying: “I would take them to the merry-go-round and sit on a bench eating peanuts while they rode. And sitting there, alone, I felt that there should be something built, some kind of family park where parents and children could have fun together” (Bright, 1987, p. 33). These places were, for the most part, poorly run, disorganized, and dirty. “Walt envisioned a whole new kind of park. It would be clean, safe, friendly, and most important, it would give parents the opportunity to participate in the adventures with their children.” (p. 33)

Disney was extremely heartened by Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen when he visited there in 1950, for at Tivoli, in contrast to his prior experience, was a place like that of his dreams:

Walt visited county fairs, state fairs, circuses, carnivals, national parks. He studied the attractions and what made them appealing, whether people seemed entertained or felt cheated. His most depressing experience was seeing Coney Island. It was so battered and tawdry and the ride operators were so hostile that Walt felt a momentary urge to abandon the idea of an amusement park. His spirit revived when he saw Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen; it was spotless and brightly colored and priced within the reach of everyone. The gaiety of the music, the excellence of the food and drink, the warm courtesy of the employees – everything combined for a pleasurable experience. “Now this is what an amusement place should be” Walt enthused to Lilly. (Thomas, 1976, p. 241)

After his trip to Tivoli Gardens, Walt sent teams of researchers out to begin to explore in earnest. Back in his hometown of Chicago, in 1954, two different venues left a lasting impression on researchers, adding to Walt’s previous thoughts. The Museum Of Science And Industry, built for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, yielded the following features, some of which were new and others which reinforced previous ideas: corporate-sponsored flashy industrial exhibits; General Motor’s Yesterday’s Main Street 1900 with gas lamps and cobblestone streets; a moving sidewalk; Colleen Moore’s fantasy castle doll house; and a little Santa Fe railroad. Chicago's Ivanhoe Restaurant would also leave its mark on Disneyland. The Ivanhoe had a unique ambiance: its underground catacombs featured bones protruding from cement rockwork walls, suits of armor on display, stained glass, and an indoor dance floor surrounded by artificial foliage that appeared to be outside. The research team also visited other tourist areas, including the Mall in Washington DC, the French Quarter in New Orleans and New York’s Fifth Avenue, all of which provided additional, and sometimes more subtle influences.

Such an interesting ancestry takes nothing away from Disney, bricoleur supreme, who took “a bit of something here and a bit of something there,” to quote Bert, a fellow bricoleur, from Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964), to create Disneyland. Disneyland’s amusing ancestry sowed the seeds that would later blossom fully, and continue to flower magically over the decades, in the unique creation that is Disneyland.

End of excursion and end of chapter. Proceed to "Mary Poppins" chapter.