Everything about Celebration telegraphed cozy familiarity. Brochures depicted a quasi-fantastical realm of home-cooked meals, traditional family values, and G-rated movies. The civic buildings were designed by famous architects: the theater by Cesar Pelli, town hall by Philip Johnson, the post office by Michael Graves, the bank by Robert Venturi, to name only a few. The fonts on every street sign, store front, park-trail marker, fountain, and even manhole cover came special order from top design firm Pentagram. The homes were built according to a detailed guide book, which laid out options for four types of lots (Estate, Cottage, Village, and Townhouse) and six styles of architecture (Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Coastal, Mediterranean, and French Normandy). Residents who wanted to experiment with landscaping had to consult a second guide called the Celebration Florida Friendly© Pattern Book. For Disney devotees, Celebration was a dream made real. When the first 350 homes went up for sale, so many people wanted to buy one that Celebration had to host a lottery.
The town also attracted skepticism. Celebration came to represent a loaded nostalgia for a very specific kind of America, a place so pure it might have never existed, or if it did, only for a privileged few. The architecture drew cries of “inauthenticity,” a shallow signifier of good design. Others found the place eerily spotless, like a set for The Stepford Wives or Edward Scissorhands. “Creepy” was a common refrain. A Gizmodo article about that creepiness chronicled the media obsession, from which this article is not absolved, in documenting Celebration’s crash courses with crime, human error, and general mediocrity: “Pixie Dust Loses Magic as Foreclosures Slam Utopian Disney Town,” reported Bloomberg. “Murder and suicide in Celebration, the perfect town built by Disney,” said the Telegraph. “The dark heart of Disney's dream town: Celebration has wife-swapping, suicide, vandals ... and now even a brutal murder,” yelped the Daily Mail.
There was something suspect, the article argued, about anything that sold itself as perfect. It implied a hidden dark side lurking beneath each Arcadian-inspired front porch. Advocates argued, as designer Michael Beirut put it in a defense of Celebration, that nostalgia was merely a “Trojan Horse [to] deliver their radical planning ideas: small lots, mixed use, limited parking.” Celebration was an improvement on the car-centric corridors outside its borders. But the fact remained that community is hard to build top-down. When corporations control towns, they can weigh in on which movies run in the local theater (no Tarantino). They can code your house down to the trim of your chimney. They can also sell the downtown to a private equity firm, stand back, and watch the world-famous buildings they commissioned fall into disrepair—which, incidentally, is what happened in 2004, when Disney sold Town Center to a New York City firm called Lexin Capital, and its founder, Metin Negrin.