Disney's Virginia
Project Receives Its
First Two Approvals
NEW YORK TIMES
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY,
Published: September 23, 1994
The Walt Disney Company's plan to build a giant theme park in northern Virginia has gained its
first official blessings, winning approval for local zoning changes and transportation projects for
the $650 million venture.
By a 7-to-1 vote on Wednesday night, the planning commission of Prince William County, Va.,
agreed to zoning changes that would allow the company to build the park, Disney's America, as
the centerpiece of a 3,000 acre project with more than 2,100 residential units, a hotel, schools,
offices and stores.
Earlier, the metropolitan transportation planning board for Washington, Maryland and Virginia
authorized a spending plan that included two major road improvements to accommodate the
Disney project. Despite both actions, the project still needs to meet Federal and state
environmental requirements, as well as win approval from the Prince William Board of
Supervisors.
But the decisions were a major victory for Disney and a setback to environmentalists and
historians who fear that the proposed theme park celebrating American history would overwhelm
nearby Civil War battlegrounds and monuments. One group opposed to the project has identified
13 historic sites and 16 Civil War battlegrounds, including Bull Run and Manassas, that are
within 50 miles of the project.
"Yesterday's votes were important ones for the people of the Washington region," Mary Anne
Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Disney's America, said today. "They mean better roads and a step
forward in the zoning process for Disney's America. The zoning process has been at times
difficult and intense and has involved long hours of give and take as we've sought to address
community concerns."
The park, scheduled to open in 1998, has been a widely disputed project from the moment it was
announced last year. During a demonstration this summer, Prince William residents screamed at
Disney's chairman, Michael D. Eisner, as he entered a theater for the Washington premiere of
"The Lion King."
Opponents of the project have found allies in Congress. While no legislation that would derail
Disney's plans or slow development of the region has been introduced, several members,
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including Senator James M. Jeffords, Republican of Vermont, have asked Disney to consider
building in another area of northern Virginia.
In addition, the Department of the Interior has expressed concern over the project's effects on the
environment. In a Sept. 8 letter to the Prince William County Planning Commission, George T.
Frampton Jr., an Assistant Secretary in the Interior Department, recommended actions that would
satisfy the department's misgivings over the project, including height restrictions, air quality
controls and changes in the road system.
The Environmental Protection Agency has also expressed fear that the Disney park and
surrounding development would increase pollution, which ise already high in northern Virginia.
The agency has threatened to block road improvements in the area if the state fails to comply
with the Federal Clean Air Act of 1993. Peter H. Kostmayer, an E.P.A. administrator in
Philadelphia, said that Virginia has been out of compliance for nearly a year.
If Virginia fails to comply, he said in an interview, the agency will try to block the road
construction connected to the Disney project. "If, in spite of that, Disney decided to build, that is
up to Disney," Mr. Kostmayer said. "That will generate additional pollution, as would any
development. That would then trigger additional sanctions against Virginia."
But Disney officials, who have won support from some members of Congress, as well as from
state and local officials in Virginia and citizen groups excited by the prospect of new jobs, have
promised that all Federal and state regulations would be met.
"We have agreed to development controls and limits that are unprecedented," said Dana A.
Nottingham, director of development for Disney's America.
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The Battle to Stop Disney's America
COSMOS CLUB JOURNAL
By NICK KOTZ AND RUDY ABRAMSON
Published:
"Are you now or have you ever been an employee of the Walt Disney Company?"
We posed that question to Peter Hannaford after the 1994 Cosmos Club dinner at which he was
greeted as a new member of the club.
"No," replied the bemused public relations executive who had helped Ronald Reagan become
President of the United States. "Why do you want to know?"
We had good reason. Several weeks earlier the Walt Disney Company had announced plans to
build a history theme park and a huge real estate development near the Manassas Battlefield at
the eastern end of the historic northern Virginia piedmont, just 35 miles from the White House.
The project, we were convinced, would be disastrous for a region of extraordinary beauty and
priceless history. People with Peter Hannaford's skills were needed to help communicate the
threat posed by the much-publicized Disney development.
Not long afterward, Protect Historic America, an ad hoc citizen's committee led by historians and
writers, launched a national campaign to oppose the construction of Disney's America. As it
happened, PHA's coming-out press conference was organized by Peter Hannaford, who at the
Cosmos dinner had readily volunteered to direct the fledgling organization's public relations
effort.
By then, the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Save the Battlefield Coalition, and other
organizations dedicated to preserving the Piedmont and its historical sites had already come out
in angry opposition to Disney's project. But local government officials, developers and many
Prince William County residents looked at the coming of the entertainment colossus as Prince
William County's salvation. The proposed development at Haymarket had become a blistering
local and regional issue.
As outlined by Disney and its ardent supporters, the project had powerful appeal, especially in
Prince William, a fast-growing county that badly needed to broaden its tax base. On 3,000 acres,
four miles west of the Manassas Battlefield, the company proposed to invest more than $650
million to build a 400-acre history theme park, as many as 6,000 housing units, 1,300 hotel
rooms, 2 million square feet of commercial space, a water park, a campground, and golf courses.
Disney officials estimated that 6 million tourists would come every year, bringing wallets laden
with cash and credit cards. The complex was supposed eventually to generate 19,000 jobs and
millions of dollars in tax revenue.
3
With powerful state legislators and Gov. George Allen's administration immediately and
enthusiastically in Disney's corner, it seemed that little Haymarket, population 483, was on its
way to becoming another Orlando.
But less than a year after Disney's stunning announcement, and barely more than four months
after Protect Historic America undertook its campaign, Disney scuttled the project without ever
breaking ground. The company remained committed to the idea of a history theme park, said a
formal statement from Peter S. Rummell, president of the Disney Design and Development
Company, but it would not be in the Piedmont. "We recognize that there are those who have
been concerned about the possible impact of our park on historic sites in this unique area," he
added, "and we have always tried to be sensitive to the issue."
Translation: The project had become too controversial. The opposition was still growing, and
Disney's image was taking a shellacking that company officials were unwilling to accept. The
Piedmont continues to be gravely threatened by urban sprawl, but with Disney's withdrawal it
was spared a tidal wave of development.
Sensible regional planning still has a chance to preserve the natural and real historic assets that
make the area special. Within half an hour's drive of the open fields where Disney's America was
to be built there are 64 sites listed on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic
Places. In rolling country east of the Blue Ridge between Harper's Ferry and Charlottesville there
are no less than 22 Civil War battlefields, 13 officially designated historic towns, and 17 historic
districts.
On one point Disney supporters and opponents agreed. Disney's America would have changed
the Piedmont of northern Virginia forever. The issue was really about sustainable growth,
compatible development and preservation of heritage and culture. Cancellation of the theme park
was a victory for air and water quality, for open spaces, for communities, and for a grassroots
coalition of Virginians, old and new, across the political and economic spectrum.
Within hours of the November 1993 announcement of the planned park, leaders of the Piedmont
Environmental Council began searching for a strategy to prevent it. Having worked a quarter
century on behalf of the rural landscape, communities, and natural resources, PEC saw the
Disney project as an unprecedented threat-because of its size and because it would set off an
avalanche of helter-skelter development. Disney's America seemed a fait accompli-the site had
been acquired and the plans laid without so much as a rumor. The notion that Disney could be
thwarted appeared far-fetched indeed.
But at the first session of PEC strategists-just five days after the announcement-William Backer
of Middleburg, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive, put his finger on Disney's
problem. If theme park opponents could somehow generate national criticism of the project, he
told his colleagues, Disney executives might take a second look. Within days, the first visible
opposition appeared in the form of PEC bumper stickers exhorting Disney to "take a second
look."
4
The company's response to local opposition was not surprising. It hired an army of lobbyists and
public relations operatives who stressed jobs, tourist spending, new business opportunities,
increased property values, and robust new tax receipts for Prince William County. Traffic
gridlock, inadequate sewer and water treatment facilities, and increased air pollution were
ignored. The opposition was characterized as nothing more than fox hunters and Piedmont
gentry, oblivious to the interests of ordinary people, jealously protecting their estates and
privileged lifestyle.
The strategy was effective. Disney had momentum, stupendous resources, and a message easily
packaged in sound bites and headlines. To the company's further advantage, the issue received
little critical examination by the region's most influential newspaper-the Washington Post.
With most of its reporting done by its Prince William County bureau, the Post treated the issue as
a local zoning fight, an unavoidable land-use squabble. Editorially (unlike the New york Times,
which adamantly opposed Disney) it remained staunchly ambivalent. If Disney had been able to
limit the debate to zoning and land use, undoubtedly it would have prevailed, for a majority of
the Prince William County supervisors never looked beyond the promises of jobs and new
prosperity. Local news coverage focused on the message and the efforts of activists who
supported the project without reservation. The Piedmont Environmental Council was dismissed
as little more than a tool of the gentry rather than as the effective organization it is-3,000
members in seven Piedmont counties-which had defended this historic region for decades.
Hardly anyone realized it at the time, but the tide turned in mid-May 1994 when the fledgling
Protect Historic America entered the battle. PHA would soon make Disney's America a national
issue-much larger than a local zoning quarrel pitting environmentalists against developers. The
ad hoc citizens' committee had been quietly organized by a handful of historians and journalists
who saw the opportunity to put the conflict on a larger screen. Its founders included W. Brown
Morton III of Waterford, a college professor, preservationist and minister; Julian Scheer of
Catlett, a former public affairs chief at NASA; Ernest B. (Pat) Furgurson, a journalist and Civil
War historian who has written for years at his hideaway on Cobbler Mountain; John Rolfe
Gardiner of Middleburg, a novelist; and Nick Kotz of Broad Run, a veteran journalist.
By the time PHA introduced itself to the public, some of the country's most revered and best
known historians had agreed to lead it in defending "the cradle of democracy." Among them
were renowned academic leaders C. Vann Woodward of Yale University, John Hope Franklin of
Duke, and James McPherson of Princeton, plus nationally prominent writers David McCullough,
Shelby Foote, William Styron, Roger Wilkins, and Tom Wicker.
The venerable National Trust for Historic Preservation became a third powerful force. Richard
Moe, its politically savvy president, had long before set out to intensify the Trust's commitment
to preserving landscapes and fighting sprawl. He had written one of the first op-ed pieces
challenging the Disney project, and days before Protect Historic America's inaugural press
conference he gave the issue national visibility with a full-page newspaper advertisement
addressed to Disney chairman Michael Eisner.
5
In the late spring and early summer of 1994, 200 historians from across the country joined PHA's
advisory committee, volunteering to write, speak, and work against Disney's America. Some of
them had been involved in another Piedmont crisis in the eighties when a developer had
proposed a shopping mall on the very doorstep of the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Led by
Annie Snyder of Gainesville, Va., the Save the Battlefield Coalition, comprising historians and
history lovers, prevented stores and parking lots from sprawling along the perimeter of the
battlefield.
The PHA's historians and writers were joined by a host of others offended at the thought of the
same battlefield and other historic sites being jeopardized by sprawl from Disney's development.
The new volunteers included Don Henley, the rock musician; Harry McPherson and Neil Proto,
Washington lawyers; William Dunlap, a Washington artist and Disney stockholder; John Moyers
of the Schumann Foundation; and Herbert Gunther of the Public Media Center.
But the roll of prominent names, organizations and professions arrayed against the theme park
only hints at the real depth and breadth of the coalition. It included the very young and the very
old. It included rich and poor. It included people who have never set foot in Virginia and perhaps
never will. It included families new to America, and it included many whose ancestors lie in
Revolutionary period churchyards and in both Union and Confederate burial grounds.
Organizations lined up with PEC, PHA, and the National Trust included local chapters of
national organizations such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. They included other
regional environmental organizations, such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and grass-roots
community groups, such as Protect Prince William.
Together, they not only made Disney's America a national issue, they transformed it into a
metaphor for the whole problem of urban sprawl-a subject which may well be the unifying
environmental issue of the next decade.
A study conducted for Protect Historic America concluded that the Disney development would
become the core of a new "edge city" equivalent to 17 others in the Washington area combined.
An additional population surge of 230,000 residents in the area, the study predicted, would
overwhelm the planned transportation system, overtax water supplies, and contribute to the
Washington area's already serious air pollution.
In short, Haymarket would have become the core of a new urban center outstripping Capital
Beltway complexes such as Tyson's Corner, where-in only a decade-a country crossroads had
been transformed into a prototypical edge city of malls, traffic jams, high-rise offices and
apartments, car dealerships, and fast-food outlets.
It was because of the region's extraordinary concentration of historic sites that so many
Americans found this prospect so appalling. They were disturbed by the very thought of
battlefields, old homes, churches, country stores, stone fences, and scenic byways being
obscured and overrun by neon and franchises.
6
Vann Woodward, dean of American historians and co-chairman of Protect Historic America,
reduced the image of the Piedmont and its heritage to its essence. "This part of northern Virginia
has soaked up more of the blood, sweat, and tears of American history than any other area of the
country," he wrote in the New Republic. "It has bred more of the founding fathers, inspired more
soaring hopes and ideals, and witnessed more triumphs and failures, victories, and lost causes
than any other place in the country."
Professor Woodward's words were a huge step toward creation of a regional identity for the
Piedmont. They gave PHA's message national resonance. Obviously Americans knew that
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were Virginians. And they knew about Civil War
battles at Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania
Courthouse. But there had not been a wide appreciation that so much important American history
had unfolded in this small region between the river falls and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Fortunately the Disney fight took place not long after the PBS broadcast of Ken Burns' riveting
and hugely popular series on the Civil War. The program had educated a whole new generation
of Americans about the bloodshed in northern Virginia, and it had turned a number of historians,
most notably Shelby Foote, into television personalities.
As the debate escalated, Foote received a steady stream of interviewers anxious to hear him
expound on The War in his inimitable fashion. "A lot of us think we know a great deal about the
Civil War," joked one of Foote's colleagues, "but Shelby thinks he actually fought in it."
With Woodward, McCullough, Foote, McPherson, Styron, Wilkins, Wicker, and scores of other
historians and writers working against the development at Haymarket, columnists, cartoonists,
and editorial writers joined the Piedmont cause. In four months the files of Protect Historic
America accumulated 10,000 news articles, editorials, and cartoons.
Clearly Disney had not anticipated any such backlash. At a meeting with Washington Post
editors and reporters, company chairman Michael Eisner conceded that he should have taken
more time to work on public relations before announcing plans for the development. Still, in the
summer of 1994 it appeared that Disney would overcome every obstacle. The Virginia
legislature had approved an outlay of $163 million in public funds for access roads, a new
interchange on Interstate 66, and worker training. Local officials remained steadfast in their
support. Disney representatives marched ahead with their plans. But at PEC headquarters in
Warrenton and at the Protect Historic America office in Washington plans were being laid for a
prolonged struggle. The search for new ways to bring pressure on Disney continued day after
day.
Then in early August Richard Moe had a private conversation with Disney executive John F.
Cooke, a long-time acquaintance in a Democratic party think tank. In an earnest and friendly
fashion Moe reviewed the basic argument that all of the opposition groups had been making-that
the Piedmont was manifestly the wrong location for the project Disney had in mind. Cooke was
non-committal, but he got in touch with Moe again in early September; and for the first time
Moe sensed that Disney was looking for a way out.
7
On September 28, 1994, the shoe finally dropped. Eisner telephoned Moe to say that Disney was
pulling out of the Piedmont. The company would look elsewhere for a site.
For a day the decision was known only to top Disney officials, to Moe, to David McCullough,
and to James McPherson. The news leaked only when a shaken Governor Allen emerged from a
meeting where he had been formally notified of the company's decision.
Undoubtedly Disney had internal reasons for the decision to strike its tent on the Piedmont
battlefield. But it had also faced the danger of a Pyrrhic victory. In all probability, it could have
prevailed and built its theme park, but it would have suffered serious and perhaps permanent
damage to its reputation.
Bill Backer had been right from the beginning. Enjoying the status of a cultural icon, the
company could not afford criticism raining down from every corner of the country. Ever since
the memorable September evening when Disney announced that it was abandoning Haymarket,
those of us involved in the episode have been asked over and over how the opposition succeeded
against seemingly impossible odds.
The simplest answer is that our coalition was put together for one purpose and it stuck to one
message-that the rural, historically rich Piedmont Virginia was the wrong place for another
Disneyland. But that is too simple. If that were the whole story, environmentalists and
preservationists would win more of the battles against urban sprawl.
The Disney fight was a special case. Its imagery was compelling. Cartoonists lampooned Mickey
Mouse with glee. In a thousand different ways they showed Disney desecrating history. A few
editorial writers argued for Disney's America, but cartoonists were unanimously on the side of
history.
Only a year after Disney unveiled its plan to cash in on history and heavy tourist traffic in
Washington, Protect Historic America put itself into mothballs. It distributed most of its funds
among the PEC and other groups that continue working for the protection of the Piedmont's
landscape and historic sites.
More than two years have passed since the Disney crisis ended. The relentless pressure of urban
sprawl continues, more insidious but no less ruinous. Preservationists, led by the Brandy Station
Foundation and the Association for the Protection of Civil War Sites, have beaten back a planned
automobile race track on the Brandy Station battlefield near Culpeper. In Fredericksburg
preservationists and historians prevented construction of a giant Wal-Mart store on the farm
where George Washington lived as a boy, but another Wal-Mart battle is being waged at
Warrenton.
Hundreds of the same Piedmont residents who stood against Disney are working to head off
construction of a major new thoroughfare running through the Piedmont countryside from
Stafford County to the area of Dulles Airport. They are fighting a proposed Middleburg bypass
and the long-debated and resisted western bypass around Washington.
8
In hindsight, we have a much clearer understanding of what happened in the fight over Disney's
America. While it was a memorable victory for preservationists, environmentalists, history
lovers, rural culture, families, and common sense, it wasn't the end of anything. It was one battle
in a struggle that will go on.
Aside from heading off a huge explosion of new development in a rural area, the anti-Disney
coalition accomplished two important things: it enhanced public appreciation of the Piedmont
region, and it made clear the imperative for regional planning. In dramatic fashion it reminded us
that we have to have regional strategies for fighting urban sprawl, that we must steadily build
and rebuild coalitions to fight for regional interests.
We must understand that the future of rural life is linked to the quality of urban life. We have to
find ways for compatible development. We have to resolve that farms are not suburbs-in-waiting,
and we have to resolve that not all of Virginia is for paving.
RUDY ABRAMSON, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent, was executive director of
Project Historic America and author of Hallowed Ground--a regional best-selling book on the
Piedmont and the battle to protect it.
NICK KOTZ, ('86), an author, freelance writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, lives at Broad Run,
Va.
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Mickey Mouse Culture:
Disney is proposing to build a $ 650 million
American history amusement park. At what
expense to serious heritage?
THE GUARDIAN
By: MARTIN WALKER
Published: December 28, 1993
IT'S THAT Disney time of year, saccharine sentimentality as a highly profitable art form. But 'tis
not the season to be jolly for this modern corporate version of Voltaire's Dr Pangloss.
Nearly a billion dollars lost at Euro Disney outside Paris; lawsuits with the local school district in
the Disney heartland at Anaheim, California; and now a local revolt against Disney's new
project, a $ 650 million American history amusement park just outside Washington.
"This is a Goliath," complains Robert Dennis, who runs the Piedmont Environmental Council
which represents 2,500 local landowners. "It is going to suck the urban sprawl out to the Blue
Ridge mountains." But what this will ultimately mean, according to Richard Moe, President of
the US National Trust for Historic Preservation, is more highways, fast-food restaurants, hotels
and shopping malls, probably leading to the devastation of "some of the most beautiful and
historic countryside in the whole of America".
Not only the local farmers and horsey folk around the hamlet of Haymarket are objecting to the
Disney plan. For the first time, the American establishment is starting to complain of Disney's
sanitised, determinedly cheerful way with history.
And they are doing so in terms which sound remarkably like those French intellectuals who
sneered at Euro Disney, and brought the Gatt talks to the brink of collapse by fighting for the
right to protect their film and TV industries from Hollywood's cultural invasion. "Can George
Washington co-exist with Mickey Mouse?" demands Moe. "Can slavery be properly interpreted
in an amusement park?"
The fuss began six weeks ago, when Disney confirmed that it had secretly, and using aliases to
stop the prices from going up, bought up 3,000 acres of land in Prince William County, just 35
miles from the American capital and the 1.3 million tourists it attracts each year. The objective
was to build a new theme park called Disney's America which would "celebrate - not sugarcoat America's history".
"We are going to be sensitive, but we will not be showing the absolute propaganda of the
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country," says Disney Chairman Michael Eisner. "We will show the Civil War with all its racial
conflict - there will be painful, disturbing and agonising exhibits."
There will also be fun rides through a simulated 19th century steel mill, including a thrilling
escape from a vat of molten steel, a wooden roller coaster and a 60-foot-high Ferris wheel.
"This is not a Pollyanna view of America," vows Bob Weis, Disney's Vice-President, who
unveiled the first model of the park with its Civil War fort, family farm, Indian village and
tribute to baseball.
"We want to make you a Civil War soldier," Weis adds. "We want to make you feel what it was
like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad."
Up to a point, Mr Weis. Mark Pacala, the park's general manager, strikes a rather different note:
"The idea is to walk out of Disney's America with a smile on your face. We don't want people to
come out with a dour face. It is going to be fun with a capital F."
Most of the questions about Disney's latest theme park boil down to the uneasy attempt to blend
fun with reality, profits with popular education.
"The countervailing pressures of authentic history on the one hand and sustained commercial
success on the other are probably too great for each other," argues Moe.
But that is only part of the story. This argument about Disney's abilities to put its stunning
abilities to entertain to a higher purpose of explaining the complexities and contradictions in the
birth and growth of a superpower takes place within a broader financial and cultural context.
Local people, whether in Virginia, Florida, California or France, are no longer automatically
convinced that a Disney theme park is a good neighbour. The gap between the friendly image of
Disney-culture and the tough reality of its corporate policies has begun to yawn embarrassingly
wide.
At Anaheim, home of the original Disneyland for the past 38 years, the local school district this
year sued Disney over its plans to build a new $ 3 billion annex to the theme park, called
Westcot. The new park would bring in thousands of new workers, and their children would have
to be educated. The school district wanted Disney to cough up some more money for the new
schools and teachers. Disney was in no mood to compromise.
"From day one they came to my office and said 'You're entitled to what the law is and that is X',"
recalls the school district superintendent Mel Lopez. "They used the power of their PR
department to get the community to call us and say 'Hey, you guys, you're crazy.' "
Communities usually like the jobs and the tourist wealth and the soaring land values that Dinsey
brings. But they can pay a remarkable price for this.
In Virginia, Disney has warned the state and local authorities that the new park will not be
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developed unless the local motorways are widened and railways extended, exit ramps built and
sewage systems constructed. And having Disney as a neighbour can involve another price, living
as a citizen of, at best, a paternalist mini-state with its own police powers, at worst as a subject of
a quasi-feudal system in which political power is based on the ownership of land. In 1967, the
entire 27,400-acre Disney estate, and the two incorporated towns of Bay Lake and Lake Buena
Vista, were granted special legal status by the state of Florida as the Reedy Creek Improvement
District. Drafted by Disney lawyers, it includes some extraordinary privileges.
It has the power to condemn the property of others "for any of the projects of the district" and to
impose taxes on property, to issue tax-free bonds, to enforce its own traffic rules on its private
roads. It has its own police powers, including the right to detain anyone "causing a public
nuisance" and evict anyone deemed undesirable.
Financially, Florida has profited handsomely from the deal, and the Disney magnet effect of
attracting new growth and jobs meant that in France and now in Virginia, governments have
proved generous with tax breaks and infrastructure.
But Disney's America may, for once, be taking on too big a competitor. The US government
takes its history - and its capital - seriously. The National Trust's new warning that the lure of
Disney will "cut deeply into the area's already-established tourist market" puts a new obstacle
before Disney's plan to exploit the US national memory in the same way its cartoons, films and
theme-parks have colonised so many of the world's fantasies.
"What will Disney's America mean for the authentic historic sites that depend on visitation for
their survival?" asks Moe. "It's bound to be bad news for Mount Vernon and Monticello [homes
of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson] or quasi-public institutions such as the
Smithsonian or national parks such as the Manassas Civil War battlefield - this is one project that
should not be driven by economics alone."
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In Haymarket: Division on Disney
THE WASHINGTON POST, METRO, pg. B1
By: ERIC L. WEE, MARIA E. ODUM, CARLOS SANCHEZ
Published:
More traffic, fewer cornfields, better entertainment, more air pollution and economic boom times
-- depending on who's talking, all are predicted if Walt Disney Co. goes ahead with its proposal
to build a 100-acre theme park in western Prince William County.
With up to 30,000 visitors projected to pour into Disney's America on a busy day after its
scheduled opening in 1998, and with expectations that the $ 750 million park will spur other
development, Disney is bound to change the lives of hundreds of people who live near the site.
One couple already is thinking of fleeing west toward quieter country, while a small-business
man anticipates a chance to make some money, finally, after a long, dry recession. A commuter
dreads the arrival of more traffic, and a grandmother looks forward to the transformation of her
sleepy neighborhood into a happening place.
Hunting for New Grounds
It's very simple. If Disney comes to Haymarket, John and Pat Brake will probably have to give
up the profession they have pursued for 20 years.
"It would be the end for us," Pat Brake said.
That's because the couple need an isolated rural setting for their work: raising and caring for the
hounds used for fox hunting, and riding with the hunt. John, 47, is the huntsman, and Pat, 52, is
his assistant -- called first whip -- for the Bull Run Hunt. Twice a week, the sounds of yelping
hounds fill the air as the couple gallop at the head of dozens of riders through 1,200 acres of
empty hills and fields around the proposed Disney site in search of the elusive animal they
almost never catch.
"It should be called fox chasing," Pat Brake said. "We aren't out to kill them."
The rest of the week, the two train and care for the 40 hounds that live with them in a kennel at
their farmhouse on 10 acres a mile from the proposed amusement park. For their labor, the two
get free housing and horses. John Brake is paid a salary of $ 15,000 a year by the 130-member
Bull Run Hunt organization.
"It's not lucrative. We do it out of love," Pat Brake said.
The couple came to the job three years ago after the section of Maryland in which they lived
became too developed. They had hoped to work in the Haymarket vicinity an additional 10 years
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before retiring.
But Pat Brake believes that if the Disney's plans go forward, houses will be built on the land they
now ride over. Within four years of the start of construction, she believes, their hunts would end
and they would move out to a quieter area. But why couldn't they do the same work somewhere
else? Pat Brake thinks it would be too hard psychologically simply to leave the Bull Run hounds
behind and try to bond again with a new group of dogs elsewhere.
"These hounds become very close to you," she said.
Instead, the couple probably would look for another line of work. John would return to
carpentry; Pat isn't sure what she would do.
"I don't even want to think of it," she said. "I'll handle it when it comes." -- Eric L. Wee
A Shot in the Arm
To Steve Merkli, of Haymarket, the proposed historical theme park would mean a chance to get
back in business. The 40-year-old father of two, who lives on 10 acres about a mile from the
park site, owned an excavation and utilities business for 22 years before it went bankrupt two
years ago when the recession flattened Prince William's then-thriving construction business.
"My story is similar to hundreds of contractors in the area," said Merkli, who spent a recent
morning operating a loader clearing tires and pipe off land under option for purchase by Disney.
Haymarket and neighboring Gainesville have long been the heart of western Prince William's
construction industry, which normally employs at least a fifth of the local work force, or about
15,000 people. As many owners of small construction businesses see it, Disney could turn the
area's economy around like a wave of Tinkerbell's wand. Not only would there be countless
opportunities to make money grading the land, laying sewer lines, stringing power lines and
digging foundations for Disney, but the theme park also is expected to attract other kinds of
development.
"What Disney is going to do is give us something of an umbrella of prosperity in these troubled
economic times, not to mention the upbeat nature of the project itself. It will give everyone an
upbeat attitude about life," Merkli said.
"My business is probably a bit too small for Disney to notice, but I would love to build horse
tracks, ponds and swimming pools for the neighboring landowners," said Merkli, who as a
specialist in earth moving and grading can do everything from installing sewer pipes to leveling
soccer fields.
Merkli said he and his wife, Rebecca, 39, and their children, Stephanie, 16, and David, 14, are
not worried about potential traffic, pollution or noise problems.
"Right from my kitchen window, I'd be able to see the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster,"
14
Merkli mused. "They're going to spend $ 750 million in our area, and it will have a positive
effect on every man, woman and child. I'm counting on those of us who are unemployed being
able to find work." -- Maria E. Odum
More Congestion
Gaston de Bearn says he has nothing against Disney, but he's not thrilled about coping with the
traffic that Disney's America might draw. Traffic specialists are estimating that an additional
7,500 vehicles carrying visitors to the park will be in de Bearn's Haymarket neighborhood on an
average day. De Bearn, who lives a mile from the Disney site and must commute 42 miles on
Interstate 66 to his downtown Washington office and back each day, is not optimistic about what
that means to him.
"I think that Disney . . . can only make the traffic situation worse," said the 54-year-old de Bearn,
who works for a health care products manufacturing company.
De Bearn and his wife, Ann, who have seven children, moved to Haymarket in 1979. Each year
since then, de Bearn said, his commute has taken more and more time.
"When I moved here, I could get home and to work in under an hour," he said. "Now it takes
anywhere from 90 minutes to as much as two hours. The bad [commuting] times used to be
narrow boxes during the day. Now, they're big windows."
Disney officials believe that de Bearn's commuting route will bear the brunt of the traffic
increase once the theme park opens, though much of it will be headed in the opposite direction as
de Bearn goes to and from work. He expects park visitors to clog the area generally. The fourlane, five-mile stretch of I-66 between Routes 29 and 234 near the Disney site already is
intolerable for drivers, de Bearn said. It now carries 45,000 vehicles daily.
He calls his daily commute in his new Mercury Sable "a dice throw," which often requires him to
leave his house by 6 a.m. to get to an 8 a.m. breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill.
"If they put another lane on 66, if they put two more lanes on [Route] 15, I think that would be a
temporary improvement," de Bearn said. But he believes that the $ 60 million cost of highway
improvements should not be borne by taxpayers, as Disney officials want. Instead, he said, the
company should pay to solve the traffic problems it will be creating.
"Things are happening too fast for me," he said, adding that an independent assessment should
be done of both traffic and environmental effects before the theme park is approved.
As a Disney neighbor-to-be, de Bearn tries to get to as many meetings on the project as he can.
But even that is becoming a challenge.
"To make a 7:30 meeting in Gainesville," he said of a recent night, "and to make sure I had
enough time to pick up my wife [who works at Dulles Airport], get home and get there in time
for the meeting, I left work shortly after 4." -- Carlos Sanchez
15
Anticipating Excitement
Denise Bettinger loves her privacy. That's why she and her husband, Frank, moved to their fivebedroom, red brick house at the end of the quarter-mile gravel driveway surrounded by horse
pastures, wild geese and 22 acres of overgrown fields. The nearest homes are just vague shapes
in the distance, and the stream of cars passing on Route 15 at the end of their driveway is only a
faint hum.
But just across that road, 20 feet from their mailbox, Disney plans to build an amusement park,
drawing more than 6.3 million people a year toward the Bettingers' hideaway. A nightmarecome-true for the Bettingers, you say. Think again.
"I just wish I was 20 years younger so I could be a more vital part of it," said the 55-year-old
Denise Bettinger. "It's going to add excitement to my life."
And, she said, convenience. Bettinger said she expects the nearby town of Haymarket to develop
into a thriving community with new restaurants and shops her family can go to. Instead of having
to drive an hour to seek out entertainment, she will have it right around the corner. Now she
must drive at least 20 minutes to the supermarket, either in Manassas or Middleburg. With
Disney's America coming, she expects a supermarket will be built nearby. Later, she imagines,
her four grandchildren, who live on her land, will get their first jobs at Disney. In the meantime,
she said, they will be thrilled to watch Disney fireworks from their front door.
Bettinger said she's ready for the friends and relatives who will want to come stay with her and
her husband. As for traffic, she said she can live with the increase, just as she can live with the
increase in the value of her property, which she expects to rise by at least 30 percent. But she
said she hopes the supervisors will freeze property taxes for at least four years until current
residents can make the adjustment to higher values.
Even with all the changes, Bettinger said she doubts she will lose her privacy.
"We'll live in peaceful coexistence with each other," she said. -- Eric L. Wee
16
Downside to Disney’s America
THE WASHINGTON POST, Editorial, pg. A 23.
By: RICHARD MOE (resident of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and author of "The
Last Full Measure," a Civil War history)
Published: December 21, 1993
"Disney's America," a theme park of the American experience proposed for a site near
Haymarket, Va., appears to be on a fast track. The prospect of added tax revenue, new jobs and
spinoff development opportunities makes the project nearly irresistible to Virginia officialdom
and many local residents. But this is one project that should not be driven by economics alone.
There are bigger issues at stake here, and several far-reaching questions to be addressed.
Will the project encourage sprawl beyond the boundaries of the park itself? There's little doubt
that it will.
What is sprawl? It is low-density development on the edges of cities and towns. It is poorly
planned, land-consumptive, automobile-oriented, designed without regard for its surroundings -and usually ugly as well. Sprawl has already established a solid beachhead in Northern Virginia,
and this project will almost certainly give it a big push westward. New and widened highways
will be built for the 30,000 tourists expected at the park each day, and this will likely lead to the
rapid proliferation of fast-food restaurants, motels and strip malls. It is sadly easy to envision this
"road rash" devastating some of the most beautiful and historic countryside in America.
This devastation is not inevitable. State and local officials can take steps now to contain sprawl,
but the experience to date in Northern Virginia is not reassuring -- nor is the experience of the
areas surrounding Disney theme parks in California and Florida. The question is whether
Virginia decision-makers will learn from Anaheim and Orlando and apply the lessons here while
they still have the chance.
What effect will "Disney's America" have on public visitation at "real" historic sites? Disney
spokesmen claim that the park will draw thousands of additional visitors to the area and that all
historic sites will benefit. But the park's power to attract new visitors is no sure thing. When
Disney steps too far beyond its tried-and-true formula of audience-pleasing entertainment and
storybook endings, it can stub its toe. EuroDisney, an American-style theme park near Paris,
drew disappointing crowds and lost nearly $ 1 billion in its first year. Disney may find that
selling real history to Americans is as great a challenge as selling the Magic Kingdom to
Europeans.
If the park does draw huge crowds, it will likely do so by cutting deeply into the area's alreadyestablished tourist market. Washington is one of the country's most popular vacation
destinations. Last year, more than 13 million domestic tourists came here for fun and a dose of
17
history; it's as time-honored a ritual as anything in American tourism. Disney surely knows that a
family planning the typical three- to-four-day visit to Washington will be under strong pressure
from children -- and probably adults as well -- to spend at least one day at the theme park.
What will that mean for the authentic historic sites that depend upon visitation for their survival?
It's bound to be bad news for Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier and scores of other private
house museums, not to mention quasi-public institutions like the Smithsonian or national parks
such as the Manassas Battlefield. The fragile support underpinning these resources almost surely
will be threatened. Will Disney encourage visitors to pursue real history nearby?
What will "Disney's America" mean for the teaching of American history? How authentically
will Disney portray the awfulness of slavery or the brutality of the Indian wars? Is the "wartsand-all" teaching of history too much at odds with modern notions of mass entertainment?
Not necessarily. Ken Burns's television classic, "The Civil War," deeply moved millions of
viewers, and David McCullough's series on "The American Experience" has reached millions
more. Any number of films and plays, ranging from "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" to the recently
released "Gettysburg," have enriched our understanding of American history.
Can Disney do the same? Perhaps, but the countervailing pressures of authentic history on the
one hand and sustained commercial success on the other are probably too great for each other.
Can George Washington co-exist with Mickey Mouse? Can the meaning of the Civil War be
conveyed next to a roller coaster? Once a visitor has seen the Disney version of Ellis Island, will
the real thing retain its appeal? Can slavery be properly interpreted in an amusement park?
American history and the republic itself will survive if the folks at Disney make a botch of this.
But if they are determined to go forward, they should at least attempt to enlist some real
historians -- people like James McPherson and Shelby Foote on the Civil War, John Hope
Franklin and Barbara Fields on the black experience, David McCullough and James MacGregor
Burns on the whole fabric of political and social history.
Whether Disney attempts to involve such authorities -- and whether any of them agree to be
involved -- will say a great deal about the kind of place "Disney's America" is likely to be.
Likewise, the seriousness with which officials address the challenge of the park's potential
impact on the community will either preserve a stretch of scenic and historic countryside -- or
leave us hoping for another theme park to remind us of what this beautiful part of Virginia once
looked like.
18
Park to Spur 12,400 Jobs, Disney Says:
Company Releases Consultant's Study
THE WASHINGTON POST, METRO, pg. B8
By: MARIA E. ODUM, BILL MILLER, WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITERS
Published: December 14, 1993
A theme park planned by Walt Disney Co. in Prince William County would bring in 6.3 million
visitors a year and directly or indirectly lead to jobs for as many as 12,400 Virginians, company
officials said yesterday. The figures, compiled in a study by a California consultant, were
presented at simultaneous news conferences in Manassas and Richmond. According to the
study, the project would generate $ 1.86 billion in taxes for the state and county over 30 years
and would provide the spark for a "vibrant regional economy," said Mark Pacala, senior vice
president and general manager of Disney's America.
David Hoddess, director of special projects for Disney's America, said the projections in the
study were derived from Disney's experience with Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., and Disney
World in Orlando, Fla., with modifications based on the Washington tourist market.
However, opponents of the project were skeptical of Disney's tax revenue projections. Betty
Rankin, an activist who in 1988 helped block a regional shopping mall proposed near the
Manassas National Battlefield Park, said she doubted Disney's numbers. Until the company tells
how much taxpayers must pay for roads and other projects, she said, "I've got a lot of concerns,
and they're growing larger.
"I guess they're in virtual reality and I happen to be in the real world," Rankin said.
Chris Needels, director of the Disney -- Take a Second Look Campaign, a Warrenton-based
opposition group, said the study revealed nothing new.
"Disney is giving all these wonderful figures. These are all their figures. They still are very
vague," Needels said. "We don't know the cost to the taxpayers."
According to the Disney-commissioned analysis by Kotin, Regan & Mouchly Inc., a Los
Angeles real estate consulting firm, tax revenue "will be offset to some extent by increased costs
of municipal services associated with the project," but those costs are beyond the scope of the
study. While economic analysts said they had not thoroughly researched Disney's figures,
several said the numbers sounded right.
"I would expect it's fairly solid," said Ron Ferguson, an associate professor of public policy at
the Kennedy School of Government. "They know what the scale of the new theme park will be
19
and what it will take to staff it."
Ferguson said that Disney's projections about spinoff jobs seemed realistic and that the tax
projections did not appear out of line.
"It's reasonable, given what we know," he said.
Patrick A. McMahon, deputy director of economic development for the state, which also is
analyzing the project's impact, called Disney's projections conservative. McMahon said the
theme park would "work as a beacon" to generate a boom in tourism, with visitors making the
park the centerpiece of a longer stay with stops across the state. With $ 1.86 billion in tax
revenue expected, Pacala said, Disney will be asking for help from taxpayers in building
additional roads, sewer and water lines and other services for Disney's America.
Pacala spoke of a three-way partnership of Disney, the state and Prince William County. "This
project and this partnership will pay its own way many times over," Pacala said.
But Prince William Supervisor Bobby McManus (I-Gainesville), who represents the area
including Disney's 3,000-acre site, said her constituents "don't like to pay higher taxes or set up
special districts or guarantee bonds" for private developers.
How successful Disney will be in getting what it wants from state and local government depends
on its political support. Though most elected officials have said they favor the project, opposition
has grown among environmentalists and some nearby landowners.
Annie Snyder, the Prince William ex-Marine who led the successful fight against the shopping
mall on the edge of the Manassas Battlefield, announced this week that she will fight Disney as
well.
According to the Disney study, the park alone would generate 2,700 full-time jobs. By 2007,
Disney says, 3,700 more jobs would be generated to support Disney hotels and other businesses
that cater to the park's guests, according to the study. And 6,000 more jobs, in everything from
supermarkets to schools would be generated by the economic boom created by all the spending.
20
Skip the Slave Shows
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, Editorial, pg. C3
By: COURTLAND MILLOY
Published: December 8, 1993
By: aving been hauled by kids into most of the amusement parks along the East Coast, I'll
probably end up at Disney's America historic theme park someday. But instead of scanning the
park map for roller coasters, as I usually do, my main objective there will be keeping the kids
away from the slave show.
A Lewis and Clark river ride? Fine. An Industrial Revolution Ferris wheel? Just strap me in. But
to walk into a theme park with an exhibit designed to make me ''feel what it was like to be a
slave'' simply lacks that amusing quality that I've come to expect.
Now, I may be completely wrong about this. But in order to give visitors an authentic slave
experience, we'd be looking at a Jurassic Park-like setup, right, with plantation overseers as
virtual reality? Count me out.
I can just imagine the simulated auction-block breakup of families who get sold down South to
Orlando and are forced to work at Disney wages.
Forgive me. But as a black parent, I have to be prepared for the worst. In all my years, I have
never ceased to be amazed by America's endless penchant for racial madness.
In a nation that buys wholesale into Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who can blame Disney
for figuring that some of these same customers would be amused by black people strapped to a
whipping post in 3-D Sensurround sound?
Against a backdrop of a continuing distortion of African-American history, which includes awful
textbooks and self-induced amnesia about the legacy of slavery, a slave exhibit by Disney doesn't
even sound right.
Peter Rummell, president of Disney Design and Development, has attempted to counter this
contradictory imagery by insisting that the company doesn't give a darn about political
correctness.
''An intelligent story properly told shouldn't offend anybody,'' he said.
But how can the story of slavery not offend? And what about the words of Bob Weiss, a Disney
vice president, who promises to leave tourists ''feeling good'' about their visit to the park?
21
Something's got to give. Quite frankly, I think it ought to be the slavery exhibit itself. Just leave
it out. Disney never would have entertained the idea of a Holocaust exhibit near a merry-goround. Besides, we've got enough mementos to the legacy of slavery.
Our city schools sure look like slave museums to me. Sometimes it seems that when it was
illegal to teach blacks to read and write, we had more blacks reading and writing than we do
now.
You want to see a slave exhibit in Virginia? Go to Lorton, the site for D.C. prisoners, where
more black men wear shackles than business suits. And what about our neighborhoods, which
feature liquor stores on every corner? They represent a lot of black people with alcohol on the
brain, embalmed in their own slave museums.
Better to get rid of some of those exhibits before we start coming up with new ones.
Nevertheless, the Disney slave show is planned for a pavilion called We the People, which is
described as ''a park area celebrating the nation's immigrant heritage, including ethnic foods,
music and multimedia exhibits.''
And I wonder what kind of food goes with the spectacle of a slave's being raped? (Oh, that won't
be in there? Then what is Weiss talking about when he says, ''This is not a Pollyanna view of
America''?)
You can bet that the Ellis Island experience will be a featured part of the immigrant heritage. But
there should also be a hologram, at least, of California Gov. Pete Wilson whipping up an antiHispanic immigration fervor. And how about some video of AWACS aircraft patrolling the
ditches along the Texas-Mexico border while the U.S. Coast Guard returns Haitian refugees to
their deaths?
A rough map of the recently unveiled Disney park highlights the flaws of using an amusement
format for historic displays. Everything is compartmentalized, as if history happens in a vacuum.
Indeed, the park appears to re-create the same distortions found in most public school history
texts. In our children's books, the end of a cursory treatment of slavery marks the end of black
folks in American history -- until Martin Luther King Jr. appears sometime during the so-called
1960s civil-rights era.
Will black people be included in Disney's version of the Industrial Revolution? They rarely show
up there in history books. What about on Disney's Victory's Field exhibit? Except for the
Tuskegee Airmen, blacks almost never show up as soldiers who fought for democracy in
America. For Disney, which would like to attract 30,000 people a day, the compartmentalized
approach probably makes good business, but it's lousy history. At least it'll be possible for me to
visit the park, hit the rides and miss the lynchings.
Then again, the plans are still on the drawing boards, so maybe, just maybe, Disney will get it
right. For all I know, the Underground Railroad will allow you to enter Tomorrowland, where
kids get Happy Meals for surviving.
22
A Theme Park Built on Blood and Bones
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS, MN, TRAVEL, pg. 1G
By: CATHARINE WATSON, STAFF WRITER
Published: December 5, 1993
On a mild day a couple of weekends ago, a friend and I walked the rolling, tree-sprinkled hills of
northern Virginia and traced the movements of troops in the first major battle of the Civil War.
But we had trouble concentrating. We kept thinking about Walt Disney.
That was the weekend the Disney corporation announced its latest plan: a theme park devoted to
American history and located, like the battlefield, in Prince William County on the western
fringe of Washington, D.C.
Why here? Apparently because it's a population center - and because it's real historic.
Colonial Williamsburg is nearby, as are Yorktown and Mt. Vernon. Thomas Jefferson's
Monticello is about an hour and a half's drive to the southwest. Richmond, the old Confederate
capital, is about the same distance due south. And the area is paved with Civil War battlefields.
That explains, apparently, such proposed Disneyisms as a Lewis and Clark raft ride, a version of
the Underground Railway and a reconstructed Civil War fort.
The idea left us appalled and sputtering; we kept coming back to it as we walked. Southerners
called this battlefield Manassas, after the nearest town. To the North, this was Bull Run, named
for a nearby river that formed a natural barricade between the armies. Bull Run today is what it
always was - a quiet stream, barely wider than Minnehaha Creek - though its name is forever a
part of history. A family was picnicking alongside it when we were there, enjoying one of the
last warm days of fall.
The rest of the battlefield is equally peaceful now - a pretty place, sweetened with green grass, a
couple of old farm houses, small lanes edged with split-rail fences and a woods that lingers on
the brow of a hill.
Its prettiness makes it heartbreaking. We walked along what had been the line of Union guns to
the Henry house, where the first civilian victim of the war was killed, then looped around to the
Confederate line, which ran just in front of the hilltop woods.
It was along there that Southern hero Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood in front of his troops "like
a stone wall" - earning the nickname that would follow him forever.
23
We thought about Stonewall as we walked, and about the men - mostly boys - who fell here on
both sides, and about the thousands upon thousands of others who would fall before the war was
over. It made us deeply sad.
Then we'd remember that a bright shiny Disney version was about to come out, and we'd get
angry again. Earlier, we'd listened to a park ranger describe the action. It was after this brief,
clumsy battle on July 21, 1861, that both sides suddenly took the war seriously, he said. It was
here that both sides realized the war wouldn't be over in 90 days. Here that both sides
acknowledged - proved - that they were willing to die for their causes.
Here at Manassas, in other words, the Civil War stopped being a glorious adventure.
The Disney story had just broken in the Washington Post when my friend and I were there, and
we'd read statements from Disney reps averring that their new history park would not whitewash
such sticky realities as slavery, the Indian Wars or Vietnam.
("What are they going to do?" one angry local resident asked us rhetorically, "build My Lai?")
The new park would be full of real history, Disney promised, but fun history. "We want to make
you a Civil War soldier," one executive had told a news conference. "The idea is to walk out of
Disney's America with a smile on your face," said another.
There is something wrong with this, we kept telling each other as we walked the battlefield.
It isn't just that the 3,000 acres for the park were acquired under a cloak of secrecy that would
have done the CIA proud. It isn't just that local residents are upset and fearful about what will
happen to their suburban lifestyles and their already crowded freeways.
It's that Disney apparently believes Americans will flock to see history toned down, cleaned up
and frankly fake. Maybe our history is safer that way. Or easier to live with. And we do have a
lot to live with.
Along the Confederate line on the day we visited Manassas, little kids were climbing on the
cannon wheels and swinging from the cold iron barrels, as parents tried to explain this most
difficult to explain of all American wars.
The South was trying to get away, I heard one man tell his small son, and the North was trying to
stop them. The little boy looked at the ground, pensive. "Did we win?" he asked. The North
won, his father said. Another pause, then the little boy asked, "Are we the North or the South?"
"Well, you were born in Texas - that's the South. And then you moved to Illinois - that's the
North. And now you're in Virginia, so you're back in the South."
That was enough for the boy. He perked up, dashed to the barrel of the next cannon, made one of
those explosion sounds that little boys are so good at and took an imaginary blast full in the
chest. He reeled backward in an elaborate, graceful arc, imitating a shattered soldier, then picked
himself up and ran on down the line.
24
Which part of that boy's experience at Manassas will Disney reinforce? I wondered. The tough
questions? Or the glorious, painless death? What do we, as a culture, want Disney to reinforce?
And are there really so many Americans to whom real history is boring but fake history will
appeal? Probably. At least Disney thinks so. And except for its money-losing EuroDisney
project, this mega corporation is seldom wrong.
After all, Disney already has proven that it's easier (though not necessarily cheaper) to take the
family to Epcot rather than to Europe. Why not cruise through American history the same way?
Why not? Because when the answers get too easy, the truth gets twisted.
At Manassas, for example, the Southern cause could start to feel poignant. Slavery wouldn't look
so bad. War would seem exciting, and death could become something painless and temporary reversible by instant resurrection, just like in the movies.
I don't like sanitized versions of places or history. Or life, for that matter. I think the memories of
our collective past are supposed to sting a little, like the original events themselves.
It is better, I think, to walk the real battlefield of Manassas and know that this ground soaked up
real blood, that these woods echoed with the real screams of real human beings, and that the real
reasons were anything but simple.
In short, I believe real is always better than fake, even when real hurts. And it troubles me to
think that holding such a view may be almost un-American.
25
Disney's Defeat Didn't Stop Growth -- Or
End Debate -- in Prince William
THE WASHINGTON POST, pg. A1
By: STEVEN GINSBURG, WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER
Published: November 24, 2003
In the end, there was no Industrial Revolution roller coaster, no Lewis and Clark raft ride, no
Civil War fort or nightly fireworks. In the end, Mickey Mouse and his friends never came to
Northern Virginia. Their magic was no match for the intense opposition to an American history
theme park proposed by Disney 10 years ago for the rolling hills of western Prince William
County.
Much has changed since Disney came knocking in November 1993. The theme park's fierce
opponents, who eventually forced the Walt Disney Co. to abandon its plans, went on to build an
anti-sprawl movement that has influenced politics and growth throughout the region. At the same
time, Disney's retreat didn't take development with it. In fact, Prince William has boomed,
adding nearly 100,000 people in the past decade.
Thousands of upscale homes have sprung up in the area where Disney wanted to build a $650
million theme park. And rather than theme-park gridlock, western Prince William suffers from
commuter gridlock.
Debate still simmers among some residents: Would the county have been better off with Disney
and the accompanying T-shirt shops and fast-food restaurants, or has it benefited more from the
high-end houses that have come instead?
If the park had been built, it would have given the area an economic boost, many say. At the
same time, others argue, it would have perpetuated Prince William's reputation as a countrycousin county of mainly low-end retail businesses, stretching from the discount mecca of
Potomac Mills mall in the east to Disney in the west.
"We're finally starting to break ourselves out of being completely dependent on a service
economy and moving into the high-tech and biotech worlds," said county board chairman Sean
Connaughton (R), referring to Prince William's ability to lure outposts of corporate giants
America Online and Eli Lilly. "I don't think we ever would have done that if Disney became the
driving force in the economy."
In the early 1990s, the county was considered something of a backwater, lagging behind the
progress that was reshaping much of Northern Virginia. It had the highest tax rate in the state, its
26
business base was mainly confined to discount stores and, despite all its history, it was best
known as the place where Lorena Bobbitt carried out the infamous attack on her husband.
Ten years later, its profile is tonier. Not far from where Disney would have gone, George Mason
University has built a campus, AOL has established two data centers and pharmaceutical leader
Lilly is building a $425 million facility that will employ about 700 people.
Time magazine named one of the county schools High School of the Year in 2001. Housing
prices have shot so high that county leaders who once complained of too many cheap
townhouses are considering building subsidized housing for county workers who otherwise can't
afford to live in Prince William. County revenue is so healthy that the tax rate has dropped 20
cents in three years.
More growth is on the way. Last year, for example, Prince William supervisors approved a plan
that could put development on the scale of Tysons Corner a short distance from the former
Disney site.
The debate over the county's direction since the demise of Disney seems to come up repeatedly
at Red Rooster Antiques and Collectibles. It's one of the few surviving businesses in Haymarket,
the blip of a town that once stood to gain immeasurably from Disney.
Owner Pam Stutz said she was opposed to Disney because she didn't understand why people
would want to visit a re-created version of American history. She also said that resulting traffic
would have been a nightmare.
"We got it anyway," Corinna Pearson said from behind the cash register. Their eyes met across
the knickknacks and country kitsch with a look that said they'd had this discussion before, many
times.
"The biggest complaint for everybody was too much traffic. Well, hello!" Pearson said, pointing
toward the unending line of cars passing through town. "I think it would have brought more
money into the area. It would be better than millions of houses."
Former Haymarket mayor John R. "Jack" Kapp agreed. From the moment that a group of Disney
executives crowded into his living room on a cold Wednesday in November 1993, he and other
officials were jubilant at the idea of a major tourist attraction, employment center and tax
generator at a time when the area was struggling to emerge from a crippling recession.
"Had Disney come, we would have had money and . . . we wouldn't have had to pay for schools
and infrastructure and roads," said Kapp, who retired to Williamsburg several weeks ago.
Shortly after Disney made its announcement, Virginia lawmakers approved $163 million in
incentives for Disney, including about $130 million to improve Interstate 66, Routes 29 and 15
and other nearby roads. Those fixes are on indefinite hold.
Others credit the thousands of homes built on the original Disney site for attracting wealthier,
27
more educated residents who have elevated the county from its former poor-cousin status.
Stephen S. Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who was a fan of the
proposed Disney park at the time, sees a healthy post-Disney Prince William.
The next 10 years will be the age of Prince William, he said. "Once Eli Lilly gets up and
running, along with some of the other smaller businesses that are either in the works or likely to
follow, I think it'll do better than Loudoun or Fairfax," he said. "I think they're a real player. In
the next 10 years, they're going to come of age."
In fact, Fuller said, the forces that sent Disney packing did Prince William a big favor. "Given
what the county has achieved since, if we went out another 10 years and asked the question, we
might agree it wasn't such a bad thing that they didn't get it."
The additional legacy of Disney -- the advent of a well-organized, slow-growth movement -- has
had its own impact on the region. Opponents have been able to turn their victory into a lasting
strategy for battling new development and some roads in formerly rural areas.
"Disney began the process of helping a locally based conservation movement get better
organized," said Christopher G. Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, which
led the battle against the project. "It demonstrated that we could be a lead participant in a broader
effort and make a difference. It was a seminal moment."
From that moment, Miller and his allies created some of the region's most influential lobbying
groups on growth and development -- the Coalition for Smarter Growth, Virginia's chapter of the
League of Conservation Voters and the Prince William Conservation Alliance, among others.
Members of those groups are regulars in county offices and at public hearings and regional
forums, where they champion transit-based development and argue against sprawl. Last year,
those organizations scored a major victory when they helped defeat a proposal to raise sales
taxes to pay for new roads.
In the aftermath of the Disney fight, the opposition forces moved north to Loudoun County,
where they helped elect a slate of slow-growth board members in 1999, who this year radically
reduced development in the western part of the county. On Nov. 4, county voters ousted the
slow-growth majority and elected a new slate of board members who have been critical of the
development restrictions.
In Virginia's Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley, where a core group of anti-Disney activists live,
environmental leaders say that Disney caused a surge in conservation easements that have
protected 100,000 acres over the past decade, 20,000 acres more than were set aside in the
previous 20-plus years.
In post-Disney Prince William, slow-growth activists who organized against the park have
achieved real gains. Although development has continued to march across the county, activists
have lobbied successfully to control it. In 1998, county officials agreed to cordon off 80,000
acres bordering the Disney site for low-density development, an initiative that officials say never
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could have happened with the Magic Kingdom next door.
They succeeded again this month, when a majority of slow-growth candidates were elected to the
Prince William board for the first time.
Winning candidates gave credit for their victory to political pressure that has built since the
Disney battle and an earlier fight against a shopping center that was planned for next to
Manassas National Battlefield Park.
"The Williams [shopping] Center controversy and Disney really galvanized the citizens to create
a new vision for the community," said Connaughton, who was first elected four years ago and
led the group of slow-growth candidates to victory this month.
"I can honestly say I doubt I'd be sitting on this board if it wasn't for those two events changing
the citizens' views and perspectives on the future of the county."
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Where Jefferson and Henry Strode, There's
an Anxious Turn to Trendy
THE WASHINGTON POST, FINANCIAL, pg. F1
By: Jura Koncius, Washington Post Staff Writer
Published: November 30, 2003
Just as workers here are assembling 2,550 traditional holiday wreaths trimmed with apples,
pomegranates and oyster shells, there is again talk of revolution in Colonial Williamsburg.
It's been a year of challenges here in the restored 18th-century capital of Virginia. In fact, it's
been a troubled decade for the nation's largest living-history museum. There's declining
attendance -- there hasn't been a 1 million-visitor year since 1990. There's a deficit -- $30 million
on a total operating budget of $200 million. And over the course of 2003, management has
eliminated 400 positions, leaving about 3,200 wigmakers, blacksmiths, silversmiths, wait staff,
scholars, fundraisers and other employees to cater to visitors.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. Even so, the latest strategy by Colonial
Williamsburg caretakers has locals flipping their wigs at Chowning's Tavern. In August, they
announced that the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, which saw only about 82,000
visitors in 2002, would decamp from its current home slightly outside the historic district and
adjoin the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in a new building. The folk-art museum's
quarters near the plush Williamsburg Inn, they said, would be used for a privately funded resort
spa. A stone's throw away, a health-evaluation facility to be constructed by an outside firm
would provide physicals for harried executives and other moneyed travelers.
Call it revolution or evolution, it's part of hard-fought change at Colonial Williamsburg as the
historic village repackages the telling of our nation's story to a 21st-century public jaded by
theme parks, fast-food restaurants and drive-by vacations.
Tourist destinations across the country have suffered major losses in the past few years, and this
nonprofit educational institution is not the only historical chestnut to get burned. Mount Vernon,
George Washington's estate on the Potomac, Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello and other
sites are also reeling from two years of sputter, beginning with Sept. 11, 2001, and continuing
through the battered economy, drought, sniper attacks, then nonstop rain and, finally, Hurricane
Isabel, which felled 1,000 trees here.
Long Virginia's No. 1 tourist attraction, according to the Virginia Tourism Authority (no,
Potomac Mills outlet mall doesn't count), the 301 acres of Colonial Williamsburg still entice
many from Washington to travel the 150 miles south and buy the $39 single-day admission. This
year, attendance is expected to total 750,000 or so. Because Colonial Williamsburg's streets are
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public domain, it's estimated that an additional 2 million visitors stroll down Duke of Gloucester
Street each year, soaking up ye olde colonial atmosphere without paying to enter the historic
buildings and museums. But travelers also have their eyes on nearby Busch Gardens ($46.95 a
day) and Water Country USA ($34.95), the Anheuser-Busch Adventure Parks that, combined,
registered about 3 million visitors when the season ended this fall, according to a spokeswoman.
Why are the numbers down? Culture and history are a tough mix, says Richard Handler, a
professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia who has studied the re-created town.
"The dilemma . . . is education versus entertainment or commercialization," says Handler, who
wrote "The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg" with
Eric Gable in 1997. Management is "aware of the conflict and they struggle with it all the time.
They have to compete in this market for people's leisure time, so they are constantly trying to
create new attractions."
There is only so much razzmatazz some Americans will accept where their hallowed forebears
are concerned: Remember the outcry 10 years ago when Walt Disney Co. tried to build a $650
million American history theme park in Prince William County?
But historians such as Anne M. Whisnant, a program administrator at Duke University, believe
that even at legitimate historic sites, entertainment often clashes with reality. "There is an
uncomfortable coexistence between tourism and history over the years in many sites, from
Williamsburg to the Blue Ridge Parkway to Lincoln's Birthplace," says Whisnant. "History is not
always entertaining in the way people want to be entertained on vacation.
"And history is not always inspiring and uplifting, but often dark and depressing and sad. If you
actually were in Colonial Williamsburg in the colonial period, you would have animal feces in
the streets and filthy and unwashed people. Is this what tourists want to experience on vacation?"
As December, one of Colonial Williamsburg's busiest times, unfolds, the site expects around
25,000 to attend next Sunday's traditional Grand Illumination, or colonial-style fireworks.
Meanwhile, the museum is laying out a plan to expand its appeal to both families and upscale
travelers. With better numbers in October (attendance was up 9.5 percent over the same month
last year) and an economy that is pointing to an uptick in tourism for next year, the foundation's
president, Colin G. Campbell, thinks he can eliminate the budget deficit by 2006. He knows
Williamsburg must find a way to capture more vacation dollars. "Everybody is our competition,
from Disney to Virginia Beach," he says.
Campbell and his team have a new message prepared. "Our history has stayed the same, but the
people and how they choose to explore and experience it have changed," says Timothy W.
Andrews, director of public relations, who is sporting a bold retro-looking silk tie covered with
postcards of Williamsburg scenes such as fife and drums corps and the Governor's Palace.
"Twenty years ago, people wanted to be observers; now they want to be part of it. Instead of
looking at old houses, visitors want to 'talk to' people from the 18th century and make 18thcentury-style bricks. Some have raised eyebrows about our willingness to embrace change. But
along with focusing on our mission, we must appeal to a larger audience."
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No plans yet for ye olde roller coaster. Colonial Williamsburg's tamer answer to thrill seekers is
a carriage ride that trots tourists past the old houses and through pastures where they might
glimpse a famous 18th-century breed of sheep, the Leicester Longwool.
And change has meant adding the Huzzah! pizzeria, where they're still trying to perfect a
triangular pie to be served in a similarly shaped box, reminiscent of the tricorn hat -- get it? (The
pizza innovation came about when museum officials noticed all the Domino's deliveries to the
property's less-expensive family hotel.) And then there's the executive health-evaluation center,
to open in 2006. Have your cholesterol tested after stuffing yourself with spoon bread and beef
filet at Christiana Campbell's Tavern.
Historic sites everywhere are tweaking their offerings to get locals as well as travelers to come
back. At Mount Vernon, which recently built a tasteful fast-food court on its property, this
weekend's first-ever $15 candlelight tours of the mansion with "Martha Washington" were sold
out on Friday and Saturday nights. "It's important that institutions like us experiment with new
methods of communication, that we learn from people like Disney," says James C. Rees, Mount
Vernon's executive director. "Not copy them but learn how to make it exciting again. We can't
become theme parks, but we can't put things under glass and expect that Americans will travel
across the country to see them."
"We're an increasingly high-paced society, with two adults working and less leisure time," says
Nancy Brennan, executive director of Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., where attendance
is down about 6 percent compared with last year. "Everyone is adding more programs, and the
good news is that there is a lot more access to history in creative ways than there was 15 years
ago. Just think of the popularity of things like [David McCullough's] biography of John Adams,
the viewership of the History Channel and video games that simulate the living-history
experience like Sim City."
At Monticello, Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, says attendance
has dropped by 5.7 percent, but he and his staff are working on new marketing initiatives and an
Internet reservation system to cut the long lines at peak visiting times. The good news has been
robust sales of licensed products through stores, catalogues and e-commerce, as well as
purchases from the shop that carries Jeffersonian-era plants. "Visitors say they are glad to be
here because this is real, as opposed to 'The Bachelor,' " says Jordan. "Monticello is personal and
connects them to history."
The management of history as tourist attraction is perhaps the most complex at Colonial
Williamsburg, which officially opened in 1934 after restoration funded by John D. Rockefeller
Jr., the only son of America's first billionaire. It has entertained more than 100 million people in
its 88 original 18th-century buildings and 400 reconstructed structures. "One of the challenges of
Williamsburg is that it is a very complex place," says Campbell. At the same time a conservator
is painstakingly restoring an 1804 Gilbert Stuart portrait of James Madison in a state-of-the-art
lab, a colonial baker at Raleigh Tavern Bakery is serving a tray of warm ginger cakes to a
busload of fourth-graders.
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The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which runs the property, receives no regular state or
federal funding. It's the foundation that both preserves and interprets the 18th-century history of
Williamsburg as well as running for-profit subsidiaries (such as the shops that sell 25,000 tricorn
hats each year). One division conserves and refines the distinguished collection of 65,000
objects, does exhibition design, and operates the decorative-arts and folk-art museums. Another
division specializes in educational outreach, producing Electronic Field Trips for school kids,
creating teacher programs, publishing books and continually fine-tuning the Web site, at
www.colonialwilliamsburg.org.
It must be daunting to run a shrine and a resort that is open 365 days a year and includes five
hotels with 1,000 rooms, 11 restaurants, three golf courses and 27 retail stores. Accommodations
range from the posh Williamsburg Inn to the new Woodlands Hotel & Suites for families, where
the price of the room includes a breakfast buffet.
Colonial Williamsburg has built a powerful brand name, starting with its 18th-century furniture
reproductions (originally by Kittinger and now made by Stickley), which in the 1930s first
created a demand by American consumers for the traditional Williamsburg look. Last year, the
licensing and products program brought in $40 million a year, compared with $27 million from
admissions and programs. At the core are 4,000 licensed products made by 52 manufacturers.
James L. Easton, vice president of products, arrived two years ago with experience at Toys R Us
and Lord & Taylor, and he has ramped up the offerings to include $9 round spectacles with blue
or green lenses -- we moderns might call them sunglasses -- based on those worn by the founding
fathers, and $18 Williamsburg toile baseball caps in which no founding father would have been
caught dead. There are co-branding partnerships with Lowe's for lighting and Linens 'n Things
for bedding. The products are featured in the 5.5 million Colonial Williamsburg catalogues
mailed each year, as well as online at www.williamsburgmarketplace.com.
But even as some products stray from the truly historical, others are more authentic than ever. In
one new retail venture, the Prentis Store on the property is selling 18th-century wares handmade
by the museum's 100 skilled craftspeople. Their handwork commands top dollar: checkerboards
for $180, leather slippers for $575 and a $175 colonial-era mouse trap.
Programs are constantly being reevaluated. "Colonial Williamsburg is a living history museum;
it's not the Smithsonian, MoMA or the Getty," says Rex M. Ellis, vice president for the historic
area. "We create a slice of life." Ellis is working on plans to engage visitors more interactively,
for instance by letting them lend a hand in the blacksmith shop. This year, a new exhibit called
the Great Hopes Plantation depicts an 18th-century farm where slaves worked the land. He's also
working on creating a colonial cast of characters who have episodic adventures that tourists can
revisit -- because research has shown that people in the region come to town only about once
every eight years.
There are some 800 costumed interpreters who range from the founding fathers to a salesperson
in the millinery shop. Richard Schumann, portraying Patrick Henry, is one of 40 character
interpreters on staff, employees who play specific historical figures every day. Over lunch earlier
this month at Shields Tavern, Schumann spoke of his encounters with visitors. "People are
coming to me every day to talk about today's issues, and the relevance of those of the 18th
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century to today is amazing. Some of the burning questions of those times -- slavery, gun
control, suffrage, and separation of church and state -- are still burning."
Schumann says he noticed a change starting right after 9/11. "Before that, it was 'entertain me,' "
he says. "But after that day, they were coming here for answers. Just what is this country all
about? We all realized that impending war and terror is still with us today, just like it was 200
years ago."
Colonial Williamsburg has hooked history buffs who make the pilgrimage annually, but it also
has its critics. "Some people have questioned whether these places represent any real sense of
history, they are so sanitized and more Disney-fied than not," says Erve Chambers, a professor of
anthropology at the University of Maryland. He adds that one cause for the attendance drop here
is that there is so much competition from county tourism offices all over the country promoting
their own local heritage. "As for me, I like entertainment. I'm not a purist. And I don't have to
believe it's real."
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