How Disney Imagineers Recreated '20s and '30s L.A. in 21st-Century Anaheim

[M II A II R II K]

How Disney Imagineers Recreated '20s and '30s L.A. in 21st-Century Anaheim


February 15, 2012

By Nathan Masters



Read More: http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_fo...y-anaheim.html

Usually, when historic landmarks fall to the wrecking ball, they are lost forever, preserved only in our memory—and in our region's archives. But soon memory will once again take physical form when several historic landmarks from L.A.'s past reappear thirty miles to the south, at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim. The eleven-year-old theme park is in the midst of a multi-year, $1.1 billion renovation that has placed its entrance plaza behind construction walls. When it reopens later this year, the plaza—renamed Buena Vista Street—will resemble Los Angeles of the 1920s and 1930s, when a budding animator named Walt Disney arrived in town and began building his media and entertainment empire.

- Recreating prewar Los Angeles required meticulous research. A team of Walt Disney Imagineering architects, designers, and other creative types pored over archival photos and videos from libraries and private collections—resources that were particularly helpful in reconstructing the Carthay Circle Theater, demolished in 1969, and Pan-Pacific Auditorium, destroyed by fire in 1989. The last Pacific Electric red car rolled down the streets of Los Angeles in 1961, but vintage photos—like those preserved at the Metro Transportation Library and Archive—helped the Imagineers faithfully reproduce the cars' paint scheme and design flourishes in the Red Car Trolley ride vehicles.

- Imagineers also found inspiration in field trips to neighborhoods where the city's period architecture has been preserved, according to Coulter Winn, Walt Disney Imagineering principal concept architect for Buena Vista Street. Winn and other members of the team visited downtown Los Angeles, Old Town Pasadena, Westwood, and Wilshire Boulevard near Beverly Hills, in addition to the Glendale-Hyperion Bridge that links Atwater Village to Silver Lake. "The team was looking for scale references, details, finishes and storefronts," Winn said. Ultimately, the Imagineers were trying to create an idealized representation of prewar Los Angeles, not an exact replica. The shop facades fronting the street represent an amalgam of details culled from the team's research, and the Imagineers molded the three structures with real-world counterparts to fit the needs of storytelling.

- Disney has not yet announced an opening date for Buena Vista Street, but the theme-park-version of prewar Los Angeles is expected to open by summer 2012. Although these replicas may be simulacra, removed from the original structures' urban context and repurposed as an entertainment experience, their reappearance at a theme park speaks to the enduring attraction of Southern California history.

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Streamline Moderne facade of the Pan-Pan Pacific Auditorium. 1955 photograph by Dick Whittington, courtesy of the Dick Whittington Photography Collection, USC Libraries.






1940 postcard of Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile district. Courtesy of the Werner von Boltenstern Postcard Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Loyola Marymount University Library.






A Pacific Electric Hollywood car travels down the median of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Courtesy of the Metro Transportation Library and Archive.

[pesto]

Interesting that so much focus is being given to a specific time and place. Disneyland was more "castles and adventures", but this is a lower key urban setting.

More generally, you can argue that with the rapid technical and social changes occurring in the contemporary world everything is a "simulacrum"; that is, nothing is ever in the same context intended when built a decade ago (or last weekend for that matter).

Postmodernists have argued that Disneyland is a simulacrum for the world we all long for (based on a fantasy of a better world that once was). They were partly right, but they always forgot the human will and its power to generalize the simulacrum into a prototype and implement it worldwide. That's really all that entrepreneurs and innovators have ever done and presumably will continue to do when not restricted by law or gun barrel.

Of course, you never get exactly what you planned; there are too many competing interests for that. But the desire for some form of better world, mythical or otherwise, is what drives pretty much everything. The specific form is what changes.

Well, enough of that.

[SLO]

Thats pretty cool, its kind of the era when the mystique of Los Angeles and California was created. I think its fits well, just interesting they are doing a billion dollar renovation to a park thats only eleven years old. My in laws grew up in Pasadena in the late 30s to 60s and weve driven all around Pasadena and Los Angeles, it seems like a magical era.

[Allnatural85]

Love Disneyland... I'm there almost every other weekend.. Ill try and sneak some pictures of the construction

[WilliamTheArtist]

I really like the Disney Hollywood Studios theme park in Florida, it too is done in a 20s-30s style with plenty of Art Deco and "Italianate/Spanish" style buildings. One of the things I think that makes these places so attractive is that they recreate pedestrian friendly urban streetscapes. And one of the neat things about Disneys resorts in Florida is the fantastic Mass Transit. Its one of the things I mention here in our discussions on why we should zone and work to help create more of that in Tulsa. People pay good money to go all the way accross the country to enjoy that type of environment, can't hurt to have it here in Tulsa.