In the new book Walt Disney’s Disneyland, architecture historian Chris Nichols retraces the long road from idea to the media empire’s first park. To hear one animator tell it, Disney first hatched his idea for a play land while plugging away on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. At the film’s premiere, Disney himself made it a kind of reality superimposed atop Los Angeles. Guests strolled along the median of Crescent Heights Boulevard, which had been reimagined as “Dwarfland” and crowned with a charmingly ramshackle cottage and a cast of costumed characters.
Disney spent years collecting ideas and measuring other places against the one he was building in his mind. He scrutinized Beverly Park in Los Angeles, as well as lavishly ornate miniature rooms and reconstituted historic villages. He combed Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, near Detroit, and Madurodam, a tourist attraction of miniatures in the Netherlands. He visited Colonial Williamsburg, where costumed reenactors roamed. Then he dabbled. Disney assembled a team of engineers and designers to plan and build a miniature world he dubbed Disneylandia. He imagined diorama scenes built inside train cars, chugging along and showcasing slices of Americana. He brought a prototype—an eight-foot-long hearth scene he called “Granny Kincaid’s Cabin”—to the Festival of California Living in 1952. Visitors crowded around to peek inside, but Disney’s enthusiasm for a full 21-car caravan ultimately evaporated. He thought the project lacked pizazz, so he cast it aside.
Still, Nichols writes, Disney was consumed by the prospect of his own park. Radio and television host Art Linkletter, who traveled with Disney to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens amusement park in 1951, recalled that Disney viewed the trip as reconnaissance. “He was making notes all the time about the lights, the chairs, the seats, and the food. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied, ‘I’m just making notes about something that I’ve always dreamed of, a great, great playground,’” Linkletter remembered. Nichols reports that Disney had blueprints drawn up, and began appealing to local officials for the green light to break ground in California.
In 1952, he made his case to the Burbank City Council, for a 16-acre site between Griffith Park and his studio in Burbank. They didn’t go for it. “We don’t want the carny atmosphere in Burbank,” Nichols recounts one lawmaker saying. “We don’t want people falling in the river, or merry-go-rounds squawking all day long.” The setback got Disney thinking even bigger.