Walt Disney Never Meant for People to *Live* at EPCOT
From John Jeremiah Sullivan’s piece on Disney:
The reality, as Foglesong shows, is that Disney never really meant for people to live permanently at Epcot. In the Disney archives, Foglesong turned up a memo, the Helliwell memo, drafted by one of Disney’s lawyers and annotated in the margins by Walt himself, and it makes this point quite plain. Disney crossed out every mention of “permanent residents.” The denizens of Epcot would be passing through, longer-term tourists, staying for a few months at the longest. How could Disney have it otherwise? If your town has residents, then those people are citizens of some local government of the United States — yours. They can vote. They can vote against you. That hardly made sense as part of a corporate development strategy. But without municipality status, Disney wouldn’t be able to secure the legislative fief it ended up getting, with ludicrous tax advantages, unprecedented oversight of land and water usage, of building codes, etc. For that you needed inhabitants. So Disney fibbed and said he wanted them. Foglesong’s point is that these maneuvers leave Disney World in an ambiguous category of legitimacy. It receives the breaks that an autonomous political settlement would have enjoyed (and then some), but it never has had any settlers. Strictly speaking Disney World shouldn’t exist.
