In an artice I was reading they said Walt found like 4000-5000 acres in some city like in Fullerton or Santa Ana. Why didnt he choose that city for Disneyland instead of the city of Anaheim?
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In an artice I was reading they said Walt found like 4000-5000 acres in some city like in Fullerton or Santa Ana. Why didnt he choose that city for Disneyland instead of the city of Anaheim?
The Genesis of DisneylandQuote:
The Stanford Research Institute was given the mission to find another, more appropriate site. The projected growth patterns of Southern California - driven by the newly planned freeway system - pointed to an orange grove in Anaheim, 35 miles south of the Studio.
I don't know the amount of acreage he was looking at, but I think he was looking at some land in Fullerton. I don't think he was looking at Santa Ana -- as that is the county seat of Orange County and much of the land in the city of Santa Ana was developed, unless he was looking at land closer to what is now Tustin or Irvine.
If you look on a Southern California freeway map, you can see a nearly direct line from the San Fernando Valley where the studio is, through downtown Los Angeles to the exact location of the current resort property.
All i know about it was that he was going to build ithis humble thing in the parking lot of his studio but obsibely it got way to big and that didn't happen
Anaheim was (correctly) projected to be in a prime location to serve all of Southern California, and it was desirable for Disneyland to be built right next to the Interstate 5 freeway. The little Disney studio couldn't finance the park on its own, as banks were only willing to loan so much, so Walt bought only as much land as he felt he could afford, even though there was a lot more potentially available at the time. The original 160 acres were adequate for decades of expansion of the park itself and automobile parking due to increased attendance, and I suspect that Walt anticipated being able to buy more land as the money from the park flowed in. What he had not anticipated, so it seems, was every scrap of land surrounding the park quickly getting snapped up and developed before he could afford to buy any of it. By then, his dreams and ambitions were growing too large for the area anyway, so with Disneyland set for a good while, Walt turned his attention to cheaply (which implies covertly) acquiring tens of thousands of acres elsewhere, which would ultimately (well after his death) become Walt Disney World (not what he envisioned, but that's where his attention was with regard to real estate).