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 HOMEWARD BOUND
 
 
“Home is where the mortgage is.” —American proverb
 
I live in a country that never runs out of promises. There is always a fresh start, a new frontier, a shiny next step, opportunity, or bargain for which enough people will put down some cash, or pick up all their things, and go for broke. Even in the rosiest of times, the prospect of satisfaction is not much better than the chances of coming out on top after a casino visit. Running on such odds, the long-distance stamina of the American Dream is pretty impressive. But much more startling is the widespread tolerance for lesser outcomes when that wobbly old dream, in whatever shape, goes unrealized, as it must for the majority. Most people accept that there exists a cruel gulf between the soapy promises of the hucksters and boosters and the school of hard knocks that is their daily lot. Tacit acknowledgment of this gap has become a staple of American life. As a result, the landscape out there is not a junkyard of dreams, though there are many shabby memorials and woebegone ruins. It is the messy result of what people have to settle for when their aspirations fall short of the mark.
 
This book has a lot to do with dreams, because it is about people who regularly used that term when they spoke to me and to each other about their recent lives. Whatever their dreams had been in the past, they had become lately entangled with the designs of a company that controls a lion’s share of the dream business, and had opted to offer, in the realm of real estate, some of the wish fulfillment it had long traded in the realm of make-believe. Selling dream homes is not unlike selling dream vacations, but for the live-in consumer, it’s quite a different story. My book draws upon a year in the life and times of a new town built by the Walt Disney Company amid the cypress swamp, open pineland, and palmetto groves of Central Florida. Named in the hopeful American tradition of towns like Harmony, Eden, Experiment, and Amity, Celebration is not just a constellation of dream homes, lavishly packaged by a canny developer. It is also the product of a company that merchandizes the semi-real with an attitude that the architectural historian Vincent Scully once described as “unacceptably optimistic.”1 Many of the pioneers who flocked to the new settlement were plainly charmed by the prospect of living, and dying, on Disney land. Yet they would spend a good part of their fledgling years here trying to prove to themselves and to the outside world that this was a real place, “with real problems,” and not a theme park village cooked up by the Imagineers. In the process, they would be under pressure to perform above par while everyone else was watching.
 
WHEN YOU BANK UPON A STAR
 
What sets such people in motion? Treasure seekers, colonists, settlers, runaways, frontier homesteaders, and immigrants of every stripe can testify abundantly to the original motive for their movements. America has always been a harvest of advertising. From mythic word of mouth to Renaissance travelers’ tales about the Blessed Isles and the Fountain of Youth, and from emigrant societies’ breathless pamphlets to realtors’ lustrous brochures, the odysseys across prairie, mountain, ocean, and Jim Crow state line have been spurred on by consistently good advertising copy. The same pledges and guarantees crop up over and over again, like so many versions of a single promissory note. Florida has cornered the market on many of them. The state’s reputation as a haven for migrants has been actively promoted for over three centuries in successive policies offering religious sanctuary, free land, low taxes, and Medicare. At times, its climate of warm expectations has been oversold by bogus assurances, earning it the title of “the most lied-about state,” most notably during the notorious land boom of the 1920s, when unbridled speculation caused land to change hands several times a day, sometimes tripling in price. At the height of the boom, national anti-Florida sentiment about realty fraud forced the governor and a group of businessmen to invite the national press to a promotional “Truth About Florida” meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
 
It’s best, then, to start with the ads. By the time I moved into Celebration, advertising for the new town was featuring a bold pun—“Isn’t this reason enough for Celebration?” On the billboards outside of town, this slogan ran below an image of two girls savoring their go on a playground swingset. Their fresh gusto was bathed in radiant sunlight as they rose up into a blue-sky future. Their self-assurance was barely tempered by the giddy liberty felt at the summit of the swing’s arc. Almost at once, you could see that this picture of carefree play was meant to contrast with the risky thrills and spills of the tourist attractions that vie for the attention of visitors to this part of the world. The homey technology of the traditional playground swing evokes a world of values quite at odds with the over-mechanized apparatus of terror that fills the theme parks and their spin-offs lining the tourist strips of the Orlando region. In that other realm of vicious vertigo machines and virtual bungee-jumps, there is a clear contempt for balance, let alone gravity. Adjacent to Celebration itself is a tourist site that features “the tallest swing in the world,” a freaky contraption that plunges riders into a cardiac-challenging arc from its 200-foot-high tower.
 
So the real message of this and other Celebration ads was not visible on the billboards themselves; it lay in the contrast with their surroundings. Located on arteries that steer motorists past concrete and neon thickets of fast-food shacks and discount malls, acres of asphalt parking lots, and subdivisions of dull duplicate housing, the ads could afford to be subtle. The reason for Celebration lay all around, though to call too direct attention to this fact would be unneighborly. Playing to people’s loathing for the strip-mall landscape, its gaudy commercialism and plug-in housing tracts, was the best tactic for selling this new town. Over time, the ads began to approximate the typical Florida developer’s pitch—“Buy a New House and Get a New Town! From 160s to 750+”—but even then you could still feel the subtle twist of the knife.
 
Like most new blueprints for the pursuit of happiness, the reason for Celebration was rooted in repulsion for the existing order of things. In the early 1950s, Walt Disney’s disgust for the postwar urban sprawl of Los Angeles (and his distaste for the lack of hygiene in other popular entertainment facilities) fueled his idea to build a theme park in Anaheim. Disneyland sprang up as a quarantine zone, artificially purged of the urban ills, design tragedies, and traffic atrocities that plagued its California area surroundings. Almost overnight, however, the park spawned a commercial tourist sprawl directly outside its gates.
 
A land grab of 28,000 acres in Central Florida in 1966 promised enough space for the company to deliver a second, more self-contained solution—Disney World, with its own resorts and full menu of visitor facilities. Walt’s designs even included plans for a utopian residential city, the EPCOT that was never realized. In turn, of course, the collateral impact of Disney World, soon to become the planet’s number one tourist destination, transformed the entire landscape of Central Florida’s sleepy lakeside towns and cow pastures into a purgatory of fast growth and fast food. The Orlando region became a three-alarm signal for runaway strip mall development everywhere.
 
Solution number three—a showcase town for 20,000 residents, designed as a corrective to sprawl—broke ground in Osceola County to the south of the theme parks in 1994. First and foremost, this master-planned community was a bid to maximize the value of 10,000 acres of company land, de-annexed from the virtually autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District that governs Disney World. With half the site preserved for a wetland greenbelt, Osceola Multi-Use Development, as it was called in early planning stages, promised to earn the company a much-needed reputation as a Good Neighbor, since Disney was operating for the first time in the public domain and under the klieg-light scrutiny of the media. In addition, the town was to be a stepchild of New Urbanism, a zealous new movement in town planning that had declared war on auto-driven development and vowed to reintroduce suburban Americans to the civic virtues of active community involvement. Flush with utopian assurances handed down from centuries of American pioneer settlement, Celebration would be yet another fresh start in a world gone wrong.
 
So what was I doing here? Unlike most of the new residents streaming into town in the late summer of 1997, neither attraction nor repulsion had drawn me to Celebration. I was on a year’s sabbatical from New York City. The dense turbulence, multicultural throngs, and ultraliberal lifestyles of downtown Manhattan, where I live and work, seem to repel more Americans than they attract. For people like myself, it is a step closer to utopia than just about anywhere else (and about as far from a master-planned community as you could imagine). But Manhattanites are chronically insular and loath to recognize other signs of terrestrial life, especially the quality and purpose of suburban Middle America. If we are ever to be good neighbors in the larger landscape, there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon map of the “New Yorker’s View of the World.” It was partly in this spirit that I accepted my publisher’s assignment to live and work in Celebration. Friends, colleagues, and familiars of my past writings were dubious of my motive. Disney-bashing is a favored sport in New York City, and has taken on a fresh vigor with the company’s new presence on 42nd Street. I left behind a town frothing with offense at the Disneyfication of Times Square. But if Disney-bashing had been my chief goal, I could have written this book from a safe distance, in common with most armchair practitioners of that ballooning genre. Conversely, once in Celebration, it would take some energy on my part to dispel the suspicion, inside and outside of town, that I was somehow in cahoots with the Walt Disney Company.