The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A hotel built next to a roller coaster – how Disney changed the family holiday forever
As Disney turns 100, Chris Leadbeater charts the history of the brand that transformed celluloid sparkle into something tangible
The McConahay Building does not look like the beginning of anything. With its patched-up brickwork and air of dereliction, it appears to have already reached the end of its story.
There it sits, at 1127 East 31st Street, on a dowdy block on the south side of Kansas City. But once upon a time, it was very much the start of something. Something big and bright.
Something often referred to as “magical”.
Of all the empires to have risen, few can claim humbler origins than the world that Walt built. Because it was not amid the sun and palm trees of California or Florida, but here, on a back-street in the Midwest, that Walt Disney planted the seeds of a global behemoth.
Not officially, of course. When the bell rang for Disney’s exact centenary on Monday, it did so most loudly in California; in Hollywood, Burbank and the broader Los Angeles conurbation. But the tale began earlier, with a prequel; an establishing shot which saw the great impresario come perilously close to failing long before he succeeded.
Walt Disney was a son of Illinois, born in Chicago in December 1901. His family moved out of the big city, to Marceline in Missouri, when he was four – and by the time he was 19, he and his friend Ub Iwerks had entered the animation business, setting up the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in downtown Kansas City, in June 1921.
This start-up did not last long. Little more than two years. The studio was all but bankrupt by July 1923 – when Walt relocated to LA to be with his unwell brother, Roy. Even so, a company that turned over $83billion (£68billion) in 2022 could not exist without it.
It was on the second floor of the McConahay Building, amid the dim lights and creaking floorboards, that Walt Disney came up with the concept of a talking cartoon rodent. He took inspiration from a mouse which scurried fearlessly around his desk, even plucking food from the bin. Disney initially planned to call the character “Mortimer Mouse”, but was convinced to try the less stuffy “Mickey”.
He took his invention with him to LA, shaping it into something substantial once he and Roy had founded the Disney Brothers Studio at 4651 Kingswell Avenue, in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Hollywood, on October 16 1923. Come November 1928, Steamboat Willie was Mickey Mouse’s third on-screen outing – but the first with synchronised sound. The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, not history exactly. For all that this is the week it turned 100, it is difficult to discuss Disney in the past tense. Its modern ubiquity is too great, taking in not just cinema, TV and music, but the roar and scream of the theme-park resort. And if you find yourself in one of those resorts – there are six now, on three continents – in this centenary year, you probably won’t stop to think where it all came from. But it is worth putting down the popcorn to marvel at the achievement. Because whatever you think of Disney – all-smiling wonder making children’s dreams come true; all-seeing multimedia titan that swallows everything around it – its ascent was unstoppable. And it changed the concept of the holiday immeasurably.
The “holiday” part did not come until later, of course – until after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had been an enormous hit in 1937; until after a new Walt Disney Studios had been opened in Burbank in February 1940; until after a subsequent lean decade when, battered by the tides of war and financial depression, the company struggled; until the release of Cinderella in 1950 signalled the return of healthy box-office receipts.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, Walt Disney had spotted a way to take that celluloid sparkle and turn it into something tangible. He reputedly imagined the first Disney theme park in the late 1930s, watching his daughters Diane and Sharon on a merry-goround in LA’s Griffith Park. He was further influenced by a return to childhood terrain in the summer of 1948 – to the shore of Lake Michigan, where the Chicago Railroad Fair had taken over the six miles of waterfront framed by the city’s Burnham Park. This was a temporary attraction, conceived to celebrate 100 years of the railway in Illinois, but it came with rides and miniature trains – and Disney saw the scope for something more permanent. The idea appeared in writing for the first time on August 31 1948; a memo to studio production designer Dick Kelsey, stating the potential for a “Mickey Mouse Park”.
Not that the idea was Disney’s. The theme park had existed in some version for well over 200 years, and in its modern form – with attractions which whirl and spin – for more than a century. Indeed, you can trace the birth of the static fairground to the 16th century.
Dyrehavsbakken, the world’s oldest theme park, which sits just north of Copenhagen, certainly does, pinning its legend to 1583 – and the discovery of natural springs on a royal deer park that were then opened to the public. More recognisable as the spark for the fun-zones of today, the Wurstelprater in Vienna – with its giant Ferris wheel – dates to 1766. Another Danish delight, the Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of the capital, was up and running by 1843. Blackpool Pleasure Beach was offering something similar come 1896.
Even in America, you would be hardpushed to argue that Disney was a revolutionary. Lake Compounce, at Bristol in Connecticut, lays claim to being the USA’s oldest theme park, with a birthdate of 1846 (although it did not install its first carousel until 1895). And Cedar Point, the bone-shaking Ohio playground which markets itself as “the Roller Coaster Capital of the World” (it has 18 of them), has been in business since 1870.
But Walt Disney did break one mould. He established the theme park as a place where you would spend not a few hours, but a week. He established it as a holiday destination.
Admittedly, his initial blueprint for Disneyland might have suffered the same fate as the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. In the early drafts for the park, Disney envisaged an eight-acre enclave next to the studio complex in Burbank. He had received numerous letters from fans, asking to visit, and it dawned on him that, even were they to open the doors, there was little for the public to see. A theme park would change that.
A grander vision prevailed. Rather than build at the northern end of the LA metropolis, where the available space was already limited, Disney acquired 160 acres of what were still orange groves and walnut trees in rural Anaheim, 25 miles south-east of the city in Orange County. Once the site was secured, construction proceeded at a remarkable pace. Work commenced on July 16 1954, and finished within a year, at a cost of $17 million.
The birth was fraught. An estimated 28,000 people attended the opening on July 17 1955 – half of whom either had fake tickets, or scaled the perimeter. It was an incredibly hot day at the height of summer, temperatures cresting 100F (37.8C). In the rush to launch the park, the plumbing for the water fountains had not been finished. Visitors sweltered under a pitiless sun, unable to find much to drink. Walt Disney would come to refer to the day as “Black Sunday”, due to the negative publicity, even though the celebrities bussed in to give the day a Hollywood gleam included Ronald Reagan – then a significant screen star.
It was the addition of accommodation which changed the game – even if the construction of the Disneyland Hotel was more a pragmatic decision than an electric brainwave; a recognition that, in 1955, Anaheim was a fair distance from the big centres of population, and that people might need somewhere to sleep if they were to enjoy the park to the full.
It was also a rare case of the boss missing a trick. With considerable investment already sunk into the creation of the park, Walt Disney decided to outsource the accommodation – at first offering the chance to his good friend Art Linkletter. A television and radio personality, Linkletter was sceptical about the park’s prospects, and declined. He was not alone; major brands Hilton and Sheraton also passed up the opportunity to build the hotel.
In the end, it was the Texan oil millionaire Jack Wrather who would seize the moment – and see his foresight rewarded. Originally designed as a motor inn, the Disneyland Hotel opened almost three months after the park, on October 5 1955. The delay was not a deterrent – the property’s initial 100 rooms had mushroomed to 300 by 1960. A concept was forged: come for the rides, stay the night. By the time it was renovated in 1999 (extensively so – almost nothing of the original structure remains), the hotel had 1,490 rooms; a cash-making phenomenon.
Disney had formally bought the hotel in 1988, but by then the man whose name hangs above the door was long gone. Walt Disney died on December 15 1966, while working on the plans for his company’s second theme park. When it finally appeared on the edge of Orlando in October 1971, Disney World had been diluted – the EPCOT Centre that the businessman had imagined as a futuristic planned town (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) emerging much-simplified as one part of a bigger theme-park jigsaw; a quasi-World’s Fair with rides.
But if the Disney theme park no longer breaks moulds in the way it once did, it continues to break ground. As of 2016, its six resorts include three in Asia (Tokyo Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, Shanghai Disneyland), as well as Disneyland Paris. Together, they pull in more than 140million visitors every year; many of them opting to stay on site for multiple days. It is all a long way from a broken-down building in downtown Kansas – but perhaps, as the centenary celebrations kick off without the Laugh-O-Gram Studio, a small mouse will scuttle across the rafters, satisfied at a job well done.
Walt Disney broke the mould, establishing it as a place where you would spend not a few hours, but a week