There is another Orlando that few out- siders know, with a downtown and well- kept suburbs such as Winter Park, Maitland, and l.ongwood that have been around for more than a century. This Orlando lias a legacy of modest but appreciable town plans and regional architectural landmarks (including the Mankind Art (enter and the Rollins College campus, largely the work ot Ralph Adams Cram and James (ramble Rogers II). This is also the Orlando that invariably gets lost in the shuffle between these world-famous Attractions and the acres upon acres of ill-wrought post- Disney subdivisions and endless highways luted with strip shopping centers, dis- count stores, and side shows.

BETH D U N L O P ® GP [I £) LB (•] © he helicopter-borne radio South of ihe citj limits, where not long ago cattle roamed, the Attractions have traffic reporters have a been herded together m a priceless place of their own: Disney World, Sea World, name for the Orlando out Wet'n Wild, and more. Spawned by Walt HI Disney when he opened his Magic Kingdom in 1971, the Attractions - by Disney - a realm defined not including two movie-studio theme parks and sound stages ( M G M and Universal, by geography, demography, or both cloned from California originals) - is II< i\\ .1 world nl \\ • irlds, u here .1 moch reality but by high-stakes make- Italian opera house shares a mammoth parking lot with a mock medieval village, believe; one that compresses and where strip centers are disguised as Wild West stockades, Iowa "Main time and place into a small - Streets," and Spanish colonial and alluring, if entirely ersatz - settlements. world of its own. The radio The Magic Kingdom has inspired the admiration and envy of urban designers reporters call it "the who yearn for the kind of order and con- trol it offers. But the Attractions are jum- Attractions," and to most bled together in a planner's nightmare - disorienting and chaotic, tasteless and minds it has replaced Las Vegas bland, overstated and fake, yet at the same time exhilarating- a vast and amor- Downtown Orlando. as "the definitive sacred grove of popu- phous sprawl that floats free of context or orientation. Besides the expected lar taste in middle America," to Worlds, as in Disney and Sea, there are Kan World, Shell World, Bargain World, borrow from Reyner Banham.i The even a hotel called Wilson World. l:\prcssways veer through, and other symbolic and cultural appeal of Orlando roads start and stop for no real reason. International Drive, for example, culmi- is already a phenomenon of global nates (or begins) in a vast complex of factors outlet simps called Bel/ Outlet importance that anthropologists study World. At the other end is Sea World, although the road actually bypasses the as they once did Lourdes or Mecca.* vast marine theme park and goes on to link up with Interstate 4. That express- way parallels International Drive for much of its length, causing many of the tourist-luring buildings to put on identical faces, front and back.

"Caverns in Virginia may have neon lights, and California may have its dol- phin shows, but I lond.i makes Worlds • C i t e 3 1 : I 9 9 4 25

out of everything," wrote John Rothchild torn down to build more hotel conven- castles and French chateaux - SunBank near ghost town of the 1970s was aided in Ins informal history of the state, Up tion facilities). With both Disney and Center has little spires at its roofline; by a carefully nurtured plan that safe- for Grabs.* In Florida therchas always (iniwis.il in Orlando, more and mote DuPont Center is a connected sequence guarded shopping and encouraged restau- been an impulse to rearrange reality, to movies are being filmed there. of elongated, mansard-roofed blocks. rants, keeping a reasonable scale along regard the land as a stage set - an Nickelodeon Studios - certainly a leading Orange Avenue. A considerable collection impulse perfected in the Attractions. In purveyor of ideas and images to young Yet Orlando by most standards of reck- of historic buildings was saved, including that peculiar combination of the very television viewers - is based there as well, oning has a successful downtown, the old Wool worth and Kress. Along Pine- drab and the highly ostentatious, there is on the Universal Studios grounds. decently scaled, with an intact main Street, a fine row of two-story I 9th-cen- little outside of Disney World (or perhaps street and a bustle of people day, night, tury brick structures has become a one should say Robert A. M. Stern The Orlando that found and weekend. Its renaissance has a story- lawyers' row. World, Arata Iso/aki World, Michael when he started buying up huge tracts of book quality of its own. Shortly after the Graves World, Gwathmcy Siegel World, Orange and Osceola counties in the early arrival of Disney World, an entrepreneur One building that did not make it was the Arquirectonica World, and Venturi, Scott 1960s was not precisely a time capsule. named Bob Snow eyed a block of old 1958 city hall, described as a "pink and Brown World) that can he considered The arrival of the military during World buildings by the railroad tracks, includ- brownish-looking building" when it was • 5 capital-A Architecture - although the War II (and the air force and naval facili- ing a vaguely Richardsonian train station dedicated. It was replaced in 1991 by a design for Universal Studios' guitar- ties that followed) had spelled a certain and some freight houses, and imagined a new city hall more in the fairy-rale spirit shaped Hard Rock Cafe (by Aura end of innocence to what had been a ribald Victorian entertainment complex ol Orlando - a stnbbily proportioned Architects of Maitland, Florida) won an sleepy town graced by a Kress-and- that would draw tourists away from the copper-domed structure with grandiose honor award from the Florida chapter of Woolworth's Main Street, spring-fed more wholesome theme parks. In 1974, architectural aspirations that looks as if the American Institute of Architects the lakes, oak trees laden with Spanish moss, Snow opened Rosie O'Grady's, full of someone had lopped off the top of a ] L? 0 0 same year that Iso/.aki's "Team Disney" much taller building and planted it building (realized in collaboration with on the ground. It has a three- the Orlando firm of Hunton Krady PryoGr G Or* Q 0 3 story lobby, an art 0 Maso) won both state and national AIA gallery, and even a gift honor awards. shop that sells a $25 There is more here souvenir plate of Orlando is one of America's most visited the new building cities. Last year, more than 13.5 million than just and a poster ot pilgrims checked into its 81,000 hotel the old one rooms, which are fitted into buildings of Orlando offers a weird being imploded. every conceivable persuasion, from meshing of popular inconspicuous, low-slung motels to n many ways Marriott's Orlando World Center and this is not the the Stouffer Orlando resort, both ot fantasy and real town hall which feature atrium lobbies that are anyway, since the among the largest anywhere, and a Flyan mundane taste. Magic Kingdom has Tibetan monks protesting the inclusion of a replica of the Regency (Grand Cypress) with a half-acre Potola Polme as port ol its own (in fact the Splendid China, 1993. swimming pool. Orlando now markets whole Disney empire - itself as a tourist destination in the man- and neighborhoods stocked with imported Victoriana presuming an empire to be ner of its desert twin, and in most Craftsman bungalows, neo-Tudor cot- and tourists, who, happy to bigger than a kingdom - is run from respects Orlando could be considered a tages, and Mediterranean villa-ettes. sing along, sat on benches from an LScN Isozaki's imposing, up-to-the-minute kind of family-values Vegas, with just the Orange Blossom Drive, a major north- Railroad station or on chairs from an "Team Disney" building). But Orlando's merest of ritillations but plenty of the south thoroughfare, was a sin strip for F.nglish monastery, under the dim light of city hall is no more ostentatious than the glitz. Not to be outdone, l.as Vegas is several decades; even into the 1980s it a chandelier salvaged from the 1904 first various restaurants and hotels on now recasting itself as an alternative was honky-tonk enough to provoke civic- National Bank of Boston. Soon the com- Internationa] Drive or State Route 192, Orlando, with amusement-park offerings despair. Now the strip is simply gritty, an plex, called Church Street Station, began which runs from Disney World to the and hotels themed on classic childhood ode to macho sensibilities, with topless to grow, the authentic and the ersatz former cow town of Kissimmee (home of stories such as The Wizard of Oz - the joints interspersed among the tire and unabashedly intertwined and metaphors the Florida Turnpike interchange for the very combination of story line and rides transmission dealers. happily mixed. Western saloon next to Attrac-tions). Route 192 boasts a full- that has served Disney so well over the French patisserie across from English fledged medieval village, a frontier trad- years.4 The two cities' strategies now One might expect Orlando's downtown pub, bawdiness the only common theme. ing post, a Capone's nightclub that offers overlap, to the degree that the profession- to have suffered with the explosive One restaurant boasts a table that Al dinner and a show and "handsome mob- al organization called lighting growth to the south; even the Orange Caponc ate at; a set of guns owned by sters and beautiful dames," and a new "Old T o w n , " tucked neatly into a strip Dimensions International, which special- County Convention Center was located Jesse James is on display at the Cheyenne shopping center next to a Days Inn, not izes in both architectural and theatrical on International Drive, in acquiescence Saloon and Opera House. to mention the Tupperware Hall of Fame. lighting, has scheduled next year's con- not just ro the location of hotel rooms. In December, these points of interest were vention in Reno to include a study trip There were in fact low moments in the If Church Street Station was full of bor- joined by a new attraction called Splendid titled " l a s Vegas: Learning From 1970s, when all the attention was rowed rimes, places, and paraphernalia, China, which carries the re-presentation Orlando." focused on Disney's Main Street while at least it was not a copy of anything of history a step further: its SI00 million, the real one, Orange Avenue, lay desolate else. But where people shop, franchises 76-acre campus includes miniaturized More, perhaps, than Las Vegas ever will, after business hours. Today, downtown lollow. and In the late eighties ( hurt h versions of not only the Great Wall of Orlando exports its products - not just Orlando has reinvented itself as a corpo- Street Station had expanded to include a China but also the Potala Palace of the stuffed Mickey Mouses and floppy-eared rate and commercial success story, with retail complex with plenty of familiar Dalai Lama in Lhasa, Tibet, a picturesque Goofy hats, but ideas, of sorts. The mam- its own NBA team - the Magic - housed names. Not quite a festival marketplace if unseemly trophy of geopolitical aggres- moth publishing company Harcourt in a sleek, contemporary Art Deco arena or a suburban shopping center, it is red sion that no one thought to question until Brace is based there (and at one poinr that forms the centerpiece of the civic brick with simplified Victorian detailing, tin- deed was done. had a wonderful child's-garden-of-the- center, I rom ,i distance, ih corporate a suburban incursion into the center city. mind attraction of its own; but that was towers trade on the imagery of German Downtown Orlando's salvation from the 26 C i t e 3 I : 1 9 9 4

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Today, downtown Orlando has \ reinvented itself as a kind of k /re. V; corporate and commercial magic kingdom

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L**™** s C i t e 3 1 : 1 9 9 4 27

The appeal of traditional "villages" and neighborhoods Disney World on either side are intended to integrate is that its sub- the home and the workplace, schools and ject is the past shopping, in most cases within walking and tliL- future, not distance of each other. re present, and other places, not home. The Disney is about to embark on the devel- past has always been a more opment of an "ideal" town of its own, successful byroad than the future - for Celebration, laid out on 5,000 acres for Disney, for Orlando, and for America. an eventual population of 20,000 hy Down on Route 1^2, for example, there Robert A. M. Stern in association with s is ,i S4.V5 attraction called Xanadu, a Alexander Cooper and Jacquelin i strangely amorphous, sprayed-concrete Robertson. As with much of Eisner-era "house of the future." As a tourist attrac- Disney, it is an architecturally ambitious tion it has a greater impact because of its undertaking, a sort of Columbus, smell, which is dank, than for its Indiana, South, with key buildings imagery, which is no more ahead ol its designed by Philip Johnson, Michael time than a Jctsons cartoon. It stays Graves, Robert Venturi, Cesar Pclli, E empty most of the time, but because it Charles Moore, and Graham Gund, looks like one of those dinosaur gas sta- among others. Among the first to he tions from the forties, it has a slightly built will be the Disney Institute-a wistful aspect, beckoning those tew Chautauqua-type conference and vaca- tourists who might turn off here rather tion study center designed by Aldo Rossi that) into Wolfman Jack's or lilvis and Morris Adjnii as yet another locus Presley's or Al Capone's offerings, not to for Orlando's expanding commerce in mention Shell World, Bargain World, or ideas. Celebration is intended to make Kart World. good, if different, Walt Disney's unreal- ized dream of a Utopian, residential Epcot ("Experimental Community of When "serious" attempts are made to Tomorrow"), which devolved into the Sod the future outside the Attractions, Epcot we know today of large commer- Michael Graves, architect, Swan Hotel, Lake Buena Vista, 1987-90. they too invoke the past, either distant or cial pavilions and the whirl around the recent. After five years of debate and t Rcyiu-r Banhain, Scenes m America th'seria world - a one-mile circuit with stops (Ijyton, Utah: Peregrine Smiih, 19821, p. 42. bureaucratic skirmishing occasioned by in Mexico, Norway, China, Italy, Florida's statewide growth management 2 Alexander Moore, "Wall Ditncy World: Bounded Morocco, Germany,Japan, trance, policy, Avalon Park - a 9,400-acre new Kilu.il Sp.ii.i- .ind [hi- I'liiyfiil Pilgrimage Center," AnthropologicalQuarttrly VI (October 1*801, pp. town planned by Andres Duany ami Kngland, and < .ni.ul.i. before landing 207-18. Elizabeth Plater-Zybcrk for the Flag back in the U.S.A. .1 John Roihihild, Vp fur Crabs (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 49. Orlando's micro-cosmic imputse, begun 20 years ago A C .llvin Sims, "Family Values as a Las \ i i: i> with Disney's small world, Smash," New Yurk Times, 3 February I ^94, p. CI.

now exerts an authentic * l-'rom the Orlando Sentinel: quoted on a wall global influence of its own. plaque in [he new- city hall. In 1939, me WPA guide to (. Andres Duany and Mi/.ihcih I'larer-Zyberk, Florida reported that Towns and Twit-making Principles (Cambridge Orlando had, in less than I tarv.ird I InivvrMiy Graduate School oi I taiga, u half a century, "grown from IS"MI, pp. 88- 4; Allan W.dlis. "I lnrida\ Urban Village*: Salvation or Sprawl?" Planning, December a trading post on a cow 1991, pp. 16-17. range to a city resembling a great park," Today it still I seems less like a city than 1 like the world's first interna- "Plates of Learning" Park. tional park - an improba- ble, extravagantly scaled Development Company - is actually meshing of popular fantasy and the eco- about to break ground.'' Sited 1 > miles nomic magic of mass leisure. • east of downtown Orlando and 25 miles north and east of Disney World and the Attractions, it is planned to accommo- date a population of 70,000. A greenbelt spine runs through it following the banks of the P.eonloekharchce River, while neo-

HWH Architects, Horcovrt Brace's "Places of learning" Park, 1984-8S, demalished. ¥