A world without the magic of Walt Disney is all but unthinkable, and the World of Disney has formed the backdrop of childhood memories around the world. While their movies are a part of everyday life for many, their parks are the stuff that dreams are made of. In some cases, however, those parks even remained a dream for Walt Disney himself; epic projects that were so visionary and vast in their scope that, for one reason or another, they never came to fruition. From parks and educational centres to resorts and hotels, let’s take a look at 10 abandoned Disney projects that remain unfinished or failed before they could even be built.
Disney’s America (Haymarket, Virginia)
(Image: Mliu92; plan of the unbuilt Disney America theme park)
Atlas Obscura looked in-depth at one of Disney’s most ambitious failed parks. In the early 1990s, plans were in the works for a 3,000-acre park outside Washington, DC. Aptly, it would be dedicated to America’s history, a park as well as a place for public forums, professionals, and students alike. But the hype lasted only 11 days, until it was also announced that the park would feature not just America’s good points, but negative aspects too. The park’s creative director, Bob Weis, said: “How can you do a park on America and not talk about slavery? This park will deal with the highs and the lows… We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave, and escape through the Underground Railroad.”
Disney’s America found itself wading into a quagmire of debate, with the potential for a slavery-themed section of the park just the tip of the iceberg. There were concerns about the environmental impact of Disney’s America, not to mention worry that the park might overshadow the history that lay just a stone’s throw away in the nation’s capital. Finally, there were those who thought that establishing a park a few miles away from the site of the Battle of Bull Run was in poor taste.
Disney’s America attracted so much negative publicity that thousands of people marched in protest of the park that was slated to include a replica of Ellis Island, a Civil War-era fort (complete with nightly reenactment of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac), and Native America, with a centrepiece that focused on whitewater rafting and Lewis and Clark. Cancelled in 1994, the idea was briefly revisited in 1997, but fared no better on the road to realisation.
Beastly Kingdom (Bay Lake, Florida)
(Image: Clavet; the Tree of Life at Disney’s Animal Kingdom)
When Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, an entire section was planned around the creatures of mythology and legend. According to Disney Avenue, it was originally planned for the area that’s now Harry Potter Land, and visitors would be able to walk through a medieval town that had been ravaged by a dragon (and take a roller-coaster ride through its lair). Another area of the park, meanwhile, would have taken visitors though a labyrinth in search of the mythical unicorn.
Beastly Kingdom was supposed to be reminiscent of Disney’s Fantasia, including all its fantastical creatures. Though budget concerns ultimately led to the plans being scrapped (it was supposed to be the park’s first big expansion), the occasional glimpse can still be seen.
Various ideas were recycled into Universal’s Lost Continent, along with Harry Potter Land. Keen-eyed visitors can still glimpse the image of a dragon in some of the logos and signs around Animal Kingdom. This is not a mistake – or a dinosaur. It’s a leftover from the abandoned Beastly Kingdom.
Walt Disney’s Riverfront Square (St. Louis, Missouri)
(Image: Tallapragada sriram; photo shows Disneyland, Paris)
After Disneyland opened in California, the story goes that Walt Disney wanted a second park; one that was more accessible to those living on the eastern side of the country. Today, we know that place to be Disney World in Orlando, but the unfinished Disney park was originally supposed to be somewhere else: St. Louis, Missouri.
St. Louis was centrally located, but its weather dictated that the park must be completely indoors. In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter examined the idea when the 13-page set of blueprints from 1963 were put up for auction, offering a fascinating glimpse into what might have been. The unbuilt Disney park was earmarked for downtown. It would have been a five-story building with rides like the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion (which would, of course, go on to be used in Orlando’s park).
What exactly happened has long been the stuff of legend, with claims that Anheuser-Busch insisted they sell beer, while Disney refused. A 1964 discussion indicated that this wasn’t the case, and a cocktail lounge had been designed as an adults-only section of the restaurant where beer and wine would be sold. According to Disney researcher Todd Pierce, the deal really fell apart when Walt Disney wanted the city to pay for the external structure for Riverfront Square. They refused, and Disney went elsewhere.
DisneySea (Long Beach, California)
(Image: Chuck; DisneySea in Tokyo. California’s version wasn’t built)
DisneySea opened in Tokyo in 2001, but California almost had its own version. According to Theme Park Tourist, many of the ideas for California’s DisneySea were recycled into the Tokyo park, and those plans were nothing short of epic. There was going to be Oceana, a massive aquarium and educational centre connected to the oceans and the tides, as well as a Future Research Center that was a functional laboratory. And, because things can’t be all education, there was also going to be a Pirate Island, rides based on the myth and folklore of the ocean, a shark cage encounter, and an exhibit inspired by Jules Verne.
The problem was partially one of money, with Disney facing its own financial difficulties and unable to shoulder the burden of what the park would have cost to build. (Theme Park Tourist claims the project would have cost around $3 billion.) They were also unable to convince the Coastal Commission to allow the company to build on 250 acres of open ocean. As a result, the plans for the unbuilt US DisneySea fell apart.
Port Disney (Long Beach, California)
(Image: Mliu92; site of the unbuilt Port Disney)
Port Disney was a hugely ambitious project announced in 1990. It was to be built at the mouth of the Los Angeles River and include DisneySea as part of its attractions. The 443-acre park was originally slated to include five resort hotels (with a total of 3,900 rooms), harbour cruises, dinner boats, and a dock for Disney’s cruise ships.
Port Disney – and DisneySea – entered development after Disney acquired the Wrather Corp., which had built and owned Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. The acquisition meant the opportunity to expand, but local opposition was fierce. Disney also ran afoul of the Coastal Act, and the entire thing turned into a legal and public relations nightmare. By 1991, the decision was made to cancel Port Disney and turn their attention to WestCOT.
Unfortunately, WestCOT was just as ill-fated as Port Disney. According to Disney Avenue, plans were for a park that was similar to EPCOT, and included a giant golden sphere called Spacestation Earth and an attraction called Cosmic Journeys. Guests would have the option to stay on-site, and the park would have been grouped into regions (the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa) with hotels in each section. Each would feature rides and attractions relevant to that area of the world. Not everything, however, was quite so well thought through.
Business Insider quoted Disney Imagineer Tony Baxter: “We had settled on depicting the seven days of creation and avoiding all of the problems between the Muslim and the Jewish and Christian versions of that. And we were getting very excited because we were starting to deal with seven of the great artists of the world and trying to have them depict each of the single days they had been given. Maybe that will happen later.” That was in 1994. In the 21st century, it seems highly unlikely. Ultimately, the end of plans for WestCOT came from a combination of local opposition and a lack of funding.
Western River Expedition (Lake Buena Vista, Florida)
(Image: Childzy; Splash Mountain derived from a ride at Disney’s unbuilt WRE)
Pirates of the Caribbean might be synonymous with Disney parks today, but when the Magic Kingdom first opened, there was no pirate ride. Given that pirates have long been a big part of Florida lore, Disney thought a western-themed ride would be more popular. All aboard the Western River Expedition, a boat ride designed for Frontierland.
Disney’s Western River Expedition was a holdover from the company’s plan to build a park at St. Louis, and it was originally slated for the Mississippi River. The feel would be one of grazing buffalo, prairie dogs and bandits, and it was feature spectacles like bank robberies, saloons and dancing girls, and plenty of cowboys.
When the Magic Kingdom opened its doors, though, there was one overwhelming complaint: a lack of pirates. As a result, Pirates of the Caribbean was built and Western River Expedition was shuffled off to the side. When Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was built on the patch of park that had been reserved for WRE, the end of the project seemed to be nigh. Pieces of Disney’s unbuilt Western River Expedition can still be seen, however, particularly in the layout of Splash Mountain and the canyon scene from Phantom Manor.
Mineral King (Sequoia National Park, California)
(Image: HikingMike; site of unbuilt Disney park Mineral King)
In 1965, the Forest Service was looking for someone to come into California’s pristine national parks and build a ski resort. Gizmodo reported on one particular proposal: the winning bid came from Disney.
Plans were unsurprisingly epic, and included a 1,030-room hotel, movie theatre, ice rink, tennis courts, golf course, and a series of four mile-long ski runs that plummeted 3,700 feet. There would be 10 restaurants, cafes, and coffee shops, and an animatronic show whose format was eventually recycled into Disneyland’s Country Bear Jamboree. Disney expected to attract about a million people ever year to the resort, which was budgeted at $35 million. In comparison, average tourist numbers pre-Disney was around 24,000 people a year, That budget was more than twice the price Disneyland had cost to build.
The proposals proved controversial, as environmentalists and wilderness experts campaigned against the plan to tear up a large swath of national park for a resort. Debate over the project came to a screeching halt in 1978, when Mineral King Valley was folded into Sequoia National Park.
Disney’s Venetian Resort (Lake Buena Vista, Florida)
(Image: Scdis32; The Walt Disney Company (inset); proposed Venetian Resort site)
In the early 1970s, Disney was well aware of how much visitors appreciated the ability to stay on site, and the company planned three themed hotels that would be tagged onto Walt Disney World. The Venetian Resort was intended, obviously, to be a Venice-inspired hotel built on Seven Seas Lagoon, alongside the Thai-themed Asian Resort and the Iranian-themed Persian Resort.
Jim Hill of Jim Hill Media had a contemporary copy of the Walt Disney World: Vacation Kingdom of the World guide, and in the first few years of the 1970s, not only were the resorts planned, the sites were prepped and had been advertised. The Thai Resort would include a restaurant, lounge, and dance floor, the Persian Resort would feature its own marina, swimming pools, and restaurant, while the Venetian Resort was going to have shopping centres that visitors would reach by gondola.
Though the 1973-1974 Oil Embargo put a halt to the Thai and Iranian resorts altogether, tests were carried out to determine whether the boggy ground was even able to support the weight of the unbuilt Venetian Resort. It wasn’t. Disney was forced to cross several top priorities developments off its list of future projects. Just one of that group of planned resorts – the Wilderness Lodge – was ever built.
Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT)
(Image: Herbert Ryman; concept art for Disney’s unbuilt EPCOT city)
Disney designed several exhibits for the 1964 World’s Fair, and according to Esquire’s in-depth look at this grandest of failed projects, the four attractions were something of a testing ground for the original EPCOT design concept. Ideas from the World’s Fair were rolled into the concept of EPCOT as a city of the future. This community would be a real, functional Utopia, a futuristic city where the living was clean and spaces were green, a new design to transform the chaos of modern cities. By 1965, plans were so far along that Disney had secured a patch of land sprawling across more than 25,000 acres – an area twice the size of Manhattan.
Unfortunately, Walt Disney died before EPCOT entered a phase considered more practical than fantastic, and once his Imagineers were confronted with the logistics of life under a massive dome, things started to fall apart. Even though the idea of a city centre and outlying living areas all tied together by a simple, easy-to-use monorail was great in theory, the practicality was something else. In the end, designers held onto Walt Disney’s unbuilt futuristic vision and used it as the basis for the real EPCOT – which adopted his monorail in the form of the PeopleMover.
Related: Visionary Architecture: 10 Grand Unbuilt Structures of the World
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