The Great Experiment

I think I've found the place I want to live.

Oops, wrong photo

Celebration is a small town which looks like it's straight out of the movie 'Pleasantville' or 'The Truman Show.'

The first thing I passed on my way in was a set of three office buildings...

The third one's off the the right

Then the hospital...

And then... nothing but greenery on both sides of the two-lane road. It was very rustic, and rather unexpected; I thought I was heading off the map.

Until I came upon the center of town.

The hotel

Some shops

A grill

A coffeeshop

Everything was neo-Victorian... and everything was very neat and clean. It was a lot like one of those tourist towns like Williamsburg that has all the people and places arranced to look just so, except that this place felt so much less artificial, more like a real working town, because that's what it is. It was like a modern town, except that there was no dirt or trash anywhere, and the pace of the place seemed so much more relaxed. It was like an old town, except that there were no cracks in the pavement, no paint peeling off the buildings.

My first stop was into the "Celebration Gift Shop" to ask for a map. "You can get one at the Preview Center," replied the storekeeper, until I told her that the reason I wanted a map in the first place was so I could find the Preview Center! We launched into a wonderful discussion of a good twenty minutes in the otherwise-empty shop, and she had a lot of great information to tell me about Celebration.

The land is owned by Disney, and it's part of Walt's original "Reedy Creek Improvement District" land purchase in Florida back in the 1960's. However, the town itself is part of Osceola County and is run much like any other town, with two differences she was quick to point out: One is that all new construction, and externally visible modifications to existing structures, has to be approved by an architecture board so that it matches the 'look' of the town (all buildings follow specific "patterns" based on 1940's architecture). The other is that "some people think this place should be perfect because it's Disney, but it's not," she told me, "and then instead of bringing up problems with the school to the local teachers' board, they complain to the New York Times instead, and that just creates a mess." All in all, she loves the town, and I really got a sense of that from what she had to say.

After I had soaked in as much information as my brain could hold, she pointed me to the Preview Center up the street.

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