His announcement boasted that the new theme park would be, "The greatest attraction in the history of Florida." The official announcement was made on the previously planned November 15 date, with Disney joining Burns in Orlando for the press conference. Still, after the Orlando Sentinel broke the story of Disney's land purchase, Disney asked then-Florida Governor Haydon Burns to confirm the story on October 25.
Walt Disney had planned to announce Disney World on Novempublicly. By June 1965, Disney had acquired 27,433 acres-twice the size of Manhattan-for an estimated $5.1 million ($47,359,451 in 2022). There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we could possibly imagine." The plans for "The Florida Project," officially dubbed Disney World, called for a Disneyland-style theme park and resort area, E.P.C.O.T., an industrial park, an airport, and an entrance complex.ĭisney quietly purchased undeveloped wetlands in Osceola County and Orange County using dummy corporations to avoid price gouging. Commenting on the choice, Walt said, "Here in Florida we've enjoyed something that we've never enjoyed at Disneyland: a blessing of size.
Walt also considered incorporating an experimental city into his plans for a Palm Beach, Florida development with RCA and investor John D. Louis, Niagara Falls, Washington D.C., New Jersey, and New York City's World Fair site. Numerous locations were proposed for EPCOT, including St. Concerned with the "urban crisis" of the time, which he believed was one of the biggest problems facing society, Disney also consulted urban planning literature, including books by Ebenezer Howard, founder of the architectural "garden movement," and Victor Gruen. Architect/planner Victor Gruen's plans to convert the site of the 1964 New York World's Fair was also a significant influence on EPCOT, Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar said. Walt Disney, describing the genesis of EPCOTįorerunners of Disney's EPCOT plan include Tomorrowland in Disneyland, which already featured monorails and PeopleMovers, and the House of the Future (1957), which was designed by architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
#Mouse utopia experiment strive free#
And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. Several components and aesthetic designs of the original EPCOT vision survived and evolved into elements of the modern-day Disney World park, including the Walt Disney World Monorail System and the Disney utilidor system.ĮPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. Later, upon the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971, EPCOT served as the inspiration and namesake for the resort's eponymous theme park, and the nearby planned community of Celebration, Florida. Disney intended EPCOT to be a real city, and it was planned to feature commercial, residential, industrial and recreational centers, connected by a mass multimodal transportation system, that would, he said, "Never cease to be a living blueprint of the future." Īfter Disney's death in 1966, the plans for EPCOT were eventually abandoned. One of the primary stated aims of EPCOT was to replace urban sprawl as the organizing force of community planning in the United States in the 1960s. Based on ideas stemming from modernism and futurism, and inspired by architectural literature about city planning, Disney intended EPCOT to be a utopian autocratic company town. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, shortened to EPCOT or E.P.C.O.T., is an unfinished concept for a planned community, intended to sit on a massive swath of undeveloped land near Orlando, Florida, that was developed by Walt Disney in collaboration with the designers at Walt Disney Imagineering in the 1960s. Overlay of the 1966 plans for EPCOT (orange) and contemporary situation (blue).
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