ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996 TAG: 9602230059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CELEBRATION, FLA.
SOURCE: BRIAN McGRORY THE BOSTON GLOBE
BUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN, critics ask, when the utopian community called Celebration sees its first drunken driver?
The army of construction workers furiously building the perfect town square and perfect neighborhoods on a pasture next to a perfect man-made lake are not just creating a community. They are fulfilling a vision.
The Walt Disney Co., which built the Magic Kingdom, is now building a utopian town it says will include children frolicking on swing sets and golden retrievers lazing on front porches.
It will be a place where, as one Disney worker put it, ``Someone gets home from work and, gosh, they don't have any milk. So they send their kid on their bike to the grocery store.''
But what appears to some people as a Norman Rockwell painting come to life represents to others an escapist philosophy.
A few analysts warn that, unlike anything Disney has ever done before, these will not be characters, or ``cast members,'' as the company calls its Disney World employees, but real people leading real lives where happy endings are not always part of a script.
Eventually, 20,000 people will share this existence in Celebration, a community about 15 miles south of Space Mountain and 20 minutes from downtown Orlando.
Walt Disney articulated the vision for utopian villages 30 years ago. Published reports say the company has invested at least $100 million so far in Celebration and expects to reap profits of three times that much.
By July, Celebration's downtown will have been built from scratch and the first 350 residents will have moved into apartments and homes with painstakingly manicured lawns.
By October, the fruit stand and coffee shop will be open, and the town will be in full swing.
It is then that Disney's reputation for tightly controlled virtue faces great risk. Success eventually could mean Disney communities across the country - utopian villages combining lemonade-splashed summer afternoons with modern amenities such as trash compactors.
Failure, though, could tarnish Disney's image as the wholesome, all-American company with a Midas business touch.
Analysts question what will happen, for instance, if a murder is committed on Honeysuckle Avenue, or a drunken-driving accident occurs on Sycamore Street.
``A small town is not as controlled an environment as a theme park,'' said John Marsh, the interim director of the Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida.
``No matter how perfect it will be, sooner or later somebody's going to be killed, something will burn down - and, probably unfairly, people will pay more attention to it because it is Disney,'' he said.
The community has been greeted with widespread enthusiasm by architects and potential residents. The former laud the village-style layout and traditional building designs. The latter commend the neighborhood values that seem a relic of another day.
``The small-town concept that they will put in place is very appealing to us,'' said Warren Edwards, 58, of Springfield, Va., who will be among the first residents. ``I don't want to move to Florida per se, but my family, the way we look at it, it's a dream come true.''
Edwards was one of the winners of an early winter lottery - ``We prefer to call it a drawing,'' said Disney spokesman Greg Albrecht - in which 5,000 people vied for the first 350 home sites.
Residents have a choice of downtown apartments, ranging from $575 to $1,200 a month, or four homes of various sizes - town houses, cottages, village homes and estates - starting at $127,000 and topping at $800,000.
All houses will be built in one of six styles that are the hallmark of old-time Southeastern cities: classical, Victorian, colonial revival, coastal, Mediterranean or French.
``We wanted architecture that was time-tested,'' said Donald F. Killoren, the vice president of community development for the Disney Development Co. ``What we learned was that you don't have to look contemporary to be contemporary.''
Houses must meet strict specifications, and all will be placed unusually close to the street to foster a greater neighborhood feel. Garages will be tucked into alleys.
``They have selected excellent designers, and that is already half the job,'' said Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, an architect and town planner. She was the designer for Seaside, the cutting-edge community in the Florida Panhandle, and is the dean of the University of Miami school of architecture. ``The people who have worked on the plans and buildings are the best we have.''
Unlike almost any other planned community in the nation, Celebration will not cater to a niche market. Disney's goal is to bring all types of people together in one community, along with ``pets and kids and everything that makes life special,'' Killoren said.
``Diversity is a gamble,'' said Peter Muller, an urban geographer at the University of Miami. ``It is quite an experiment.''
How diverse the community will be remains to be seen. At a founder's day in November, the crowd was almost entirely white. Geographers said such communities almost always appeal more to whites than blacks.
Although its brochures depict blacks and Asians in many photographs, Disney declined to release numbers on how many of the first 350 residences will be occupied by nonwhites. ``We don't keep a number on that, but I think it is good,'' Killoren said.
The 4,900-acre unincorporated town will be surrounded by a 4,700-acre green belt and includes a public golf course, a movie complex and miles of walking paths. Fire and police protection are provided by Osceola County.
In all, the town is founded on five cornerstones: education, health, technology, place and community.
The school system is being designed by Johns Hopkins and Harvard University educators, among others, in a proposal so elaborate that teachers were hired a year ahead of schedule to train.
A health campus will include a state-of-the-art hospital with an adjoining gymnasium complex. The town will be linked by a fiber optics system.
``Much of what we have in Celebration you can find elsewhere, but never all working together like in Celebration,'' Killoren said.
But beyond the front porches and the golf course with the specially built children's area tucked into the middle - beyond the downtown restaurants where neighbors are expected to meet amid laughter and local chitchat and the pristine architecture that will define the community's personality - some see Celebration as a setback, not an enhancement, to the American way of life.
Celebration and the communities it is likely to spawn will lead to a more segregated society and a blissful escape from the realities of urban America, said Evan McKenzie, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
``We're supposed to believe it bears some resemblance to reality?'' he asked. ``They show the multicultural pictures of kids in the brochures, and we're supposed to believe this is like L.A. or Chicago?
``It's one thing to escape and go to Disney World for the weekend,'' McKenzie said. ``It's another thing to take your whole family and flee there to live.''
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