A History in Postcards
In 1982 Walt Disney productions had big plans fro the Walt Disney World resort, and since so many of them seem to impact other things that I cover in this chapter this seemed like a great place to talk about them. I got a little insight into those plans thanks to a 1982 issue of Epcot Center construction news (volume 1 no. 14 sept 10, 1982) Two Articles in particular were of interest and I'll go over both of them on this page
Lake Buena Vista Expanding Guest Facilities
In the near future, the Walt Disney World monorail System will be expanded from Epcot Center to the Walt Disney World Village at Lake Buena Vista, thus tying together ail major guest areas within Disney property. Once construction begins. crews will erect 2.4 miles of double beamway and build a monorail station at the Village. Guest lodging facilities soon to be under construction include 112 additional Treehouse Villas adjacent to the existing Treehouses, and 184 more Club Lake Villas around the Walt Disney World Conference Center. The Walt Disney World Village is slated to expand to the west and south from the Empress Lilly restaurant.
Above and Below: The proposed New Orleans style restaurant in the rendering below note the Empress Lilly "Steamboat" in the background, it looks to me as if this would have set where some of the Pleasure Island Restaurants are (or Mc Donalds).
This Phase II expansion will include 120,OOO square feet of restaurants. entertainment facilities and merchandise shops, themed to a New Orleans motif. A secondary part of this expansion calls for a new 600-room low-rise Disney hotel, also themed to the New Orleans feel. This hotel is still unnamed at this writing. All of these hotels and related facilities have either completed design or are in the final stages of design. Their construction will depend on how successful the opening of Epcot Center is.
Disney Expands Hotel Operations By Three.
Currently, Walt Disney World has three major hotels servicing the Magic Kingdom; the Contemporary Resort and Polynesian Village and the Golf Resort. Three new resorts are under design; the Grand Floridian, the Mediterranean and Cypress Point. The Grand Floridian Beach Resort will be set on the shores of Seven Seas Lagoon, just north of the Polynesian Village and across the lake from the Magic Kingdom. The 760-room hotel will be a fantasy image of a bygone era of Florida's old Victorian style of architecture.
The approach will be along a meandering, brick-paved driveway lined with lush vegetation and graceful palms. The main building will be an image of Florida's past, a dazzling white mansion in the grand manner, dabbled with brightly colOred canvas awnings and lush green ferns. a style reminiscent of old Victorian, but more playful and relaxed, embellished with wide verandahs, intricate lattice work, and balustrades. Shuttered windows, widow's walks and rooftop cupolas add their own touch of charm and the unmistakable flavor of a beachfront resort. The Grand Floridian Beach Resort will include a main building, 7 one-story buildings on the beach, 9 two-story buildings off the beach, 5 three- & four-story buildings off the beach and 16 private cottages on an island just off the beach, to be connected by a boardwalk.
There will also be two swimming pools, a marina and large tennis facility. Like the Polynesian Village, the Grand Floridian will be on the monorail track. The Mediterranean hotel will be located on Seven Seas Lagoon northeast of the ticket & Transportation Center, on a large spit of land extending out into the lake. Mirroring the flavor of the Mediterranean beaches, the hotel will include approximately 760 rooms spread out in a dozen buildings, two restaurants, a marina and extensive waterway. The hotel will not, however, be located on the monorail track, but will use watercraft as its chief means of guest transportation. Cypress Point Lodge will be a medium-size hotel facility, located on the south shore of Bay Lake near our Fort Wilderness Campground Resort. Encompassing 550 rooms and 50 log cabins on the beach, Cypress Point Lodge will offer a romantic notion of a turn-of-the-century hunting lodge secluded in a deep forest.
Neither the trees nor the buildings dominate the entire area; but blend together in a natural harmony. One can almost hear the crackling fireplace and feel the large wooden beams offer a haven of security and comfort. Cypress Point Lodge will also include two restaurants, a pool, extenSive beach and lake dock. Guests will commute in and out of Cypress Point Lodge by watercraft.
Now obviously a lot of these things, sound familar, either because they
are Similar to things that were built, the Grand Floridian is the best example
of this but the original plans were on a much smaller scale, still some things
even in that description came out quite differently the "16 private cottages"
on a nearby Island were never built, but don't they look a lot like the
Treehouse Villas from the Disney Village Resort?, and isn't the Wilderness
Lodge basically Cypress Point lodge on steroids?
Some of the other items sound familiar because they fall directly in the
category of "Rumors that just won't die" the Mediterranean resort comes up from
time to time, or some times it's the Venetian which was in much the same
location in some of the earliest plans for the resort, interestingly though in
this case they mention that there WILL NOT be monorail access, some of the
folks that argue that a resort would never be built in this location like to
mention that being so close to the Contemporary it would cause dispatching
problems for the monorail, but having a resort heavy on waterbourne transit
would make that a moot point, the other point often mentioned is that a lot of
the land over there just isn't good enough to build on, if that's true that
may be the main reason this parcel may remain untouched. Another
"rumor that won't die" is monorail expansion, and here we see the seeds of
at least one of the versions of that rumor the original plan to connect the
Walt Disney World Village (todays Downtown Disney) to Epcot Center via monorail.
Still other of the planned expansions mentioned here occurred in much changed
forms the site near the Empress Lilly obviously did not get a New Orleans style
expansion of shops and dining, but the "secondary part" of the expansion
sounds a lot like an early version of Port Orleans or Dixie Landings, obviously
it got built in a different location, but one that still has a special
access to the shopping Village. So why, if all these plans were in Place under
Ron Miller, and Card Walker, and the reason that Disney's Stock fell under
attack was in part because of the under utilized assets in Florida, then why
didn't these resorts move forward until after Michael Eisners team came in?
I can only make guesses, based on history in 1973, around the time of the
opening of
The Golf Resort, during the gas crisis
Hotels that had been springing up like crazy just outside the borders
of WDW's property since its opening (and had even had trouble keeping up
with the demand for rooms the first year) began going bankrupt due to the
gas crunch and the great reduction of tourisim from out of state; at that time
Card Walker vowed that it would be a long time before Disney built more rooms
on property (effectively sealing the fates of
the Asian, Persian, and
Venetian Resorts), in the years after that that development of this kind of
stuff went very slowly, rooms were added in small increments, mostly at the
Disney Village in fact the largest "all at once" expansion in on property rooms
between the opening of The Golf Resort until Eisner came on board were the 136
rooms of the Club Lake Suites which were built to support the Walt Disney World
Conference center which opened there at the same time. Another problem often
cited in the pre-Eisner era was that the Three headed command structure of
the company seemed the perfect structure to KEEP ANYTHING
from getting done. While we look back on these hotels with clear hindsight
and see clearly that this is the business that could have done the most
towards saving the company from going through the "green mail" it
went through in the early 1980's, perhaps it wasn't so clear at the time,
on the other hand, maybe this failure to move forward with these plans is one of
the clearest examples of the possibility that it simply was time for a
change in leadership at Walt Disney Productions.
E-mail Me martsolf@mindspring.com
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Last modified by Brian K Martsolf at 26-Jan-2008 07:56 AM