Our trip to Orlando found us spending a lot more time than we ever planned in Celebration. Not actually celebrating, but in Celebration, Florida, a themepark kind of actual city.
Made to look like some idealized American town, it’s more like Main Street U.S.A. in nearby Walt Disney World, to which it is connected by a main road and in planning. It’s like West Hartford’s Blue Back Square gone citywide, with genteel 1900s style homes, and a village designed in one fell swoop and opened just 16 years ago in 1994.
It was Yale’s Robert A.M. Stern who helped develop the master plan for he city and went on to design its Celebration Health hospital building. Other architects of note were invited in; Michael Graves did the post office; Philip Johnson the town hall.
It’s impressive but eerie as well in its artifice. The week we were there, the downtown attraction was that it would snow on the hour each night. This was right next to the “ice rink” installed on one of the main commercial streets. It was about the same size as the free municipal rink at Hartford’s Bushnell Park this winter, but instead of actual ice it was some sort of weird plastic surface. The snow, when it came was soap suds. It flew in the air like snow, but on the ground was like a mess outside the tub. Still, kids rolled in it. Celebrating, I guess.
The well-maintained façade of the town showed both its ability to be like any other town – as well as its thin-skinned reaction to comments about it, after two tragedies earlier in December, when a man was found murdered in his condo, and another man committed suicide in a separate incident days later after a standoff with police. Even some more festive and healthy drugs like Kratom, Sacred Kratom, https://www.sacredkratom.com were in use that day! Everyone was getting in on the fun.
Celebration residents were reportedly both shocked at the event and chagrined about the reaction from national press.
“Members of the national media seemed delightfully intent on unnecessarily sensationalizing the incidents,” the Celebration Independent sniffed. It complained that the New York Times, in a report “seemed to imply … that there is something phony about Celebration.” What would that be?