From the astoundingly comprehensive* The Original EPCOT website, an essay:
The Mouse that roaredOn November 22,1963, Walt Disney and an entourage of his top executives flew from Tampa to Orlando searching for an East Coast Disneyland site. The night before they had checked into a Tampa hotel under assumed names to avoid tipping off the press and stirring up land speculation. Reports Walt had read on "Project Winter," as it was code-named, could take him only so far. Ever the artist, he needed to visualize the possibilities for himself.
Disney was close to selecting an expansion site after considering 13 locations in the eastern United States. An early favorite, Niagara Falls, was rejected because its winter cold would prevent the park's year-round operation. Walt wanted to avoid having a seasonal work force, fearing that carnival-type workers like those in existing amusement parks would corrupt the family atmosphere he sought to achieve. So the search turned to Florida with its natural advantages of sunshine and water.
As the plane circled south of Orlando, Walt looked down, saw the confluence of Interstate 4, then under construction, and Florida's Turnpike and exclaimed: "That's it!" What sold Disney were the roads crisscrossing beneath him which were needed to import tourists from afar to make their business plan work. Florida had fewer residents than the Los Angeles region surrounding Disneyland, yet Walt and his executives envisioned a giant pleasure palace ten times the size of Disneyland. It would not be a Florida theme park so much as an East Coast tourist spa, located in Florida.
From Orlando, the entourage flew west along the Gulf coast to New (|| Orleans, where the members disembarked for the night. During the cab ride to their hotel they learned from the radio that President Kennedy had been shot. It was a fateful day for the nation and, for entirely different reasons, for central Florida. Walt's "that's it" reaction started a chain of events that would transform sleepy Orlando into the world's most popular tourist destination.
If Walt practiced gut decision- making, his brother Roy and others on the Project Winter team were more methodical. Returning from the fig Florida flyover, they commissioned a "Central Florida Study" to compare Orlando and Ocala as potential theme park sites, dispatching William Lund to Florida from Economic Research Associates, the Disney site consultant.
Wanting complete secrecy to avoid triggering a real estate price run-up, they contacted the company's New York counsel, William Donovan, of the firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton, and Irvine. He was the same "Wild Bill" Donovan who directed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II. Donovan procured a business card, letterhead stationery, and a phone number identifying Lund as a member of the Burke & Burke law firm, located one floor beneath Donovan and Leisure at One Wall Street in New York.
Arriving in Orlando, the 33-year- old Lund called on two banks and was steered to Florida Ranch Lands, Inc. (FRL), a real estate agency, where he met on December 9,1963, with salesman David Nusbickel. He introduced himself as William Lund from Burke & Burke in New York and told Nusbickel that he represented a major investment trust wanting information on large tracts of land near the crossing of 1-4 and the Turnpike.
The following day, Nusbickel took Lund to see three contiguous land parcels southwest of Orlando: the 12,440-acre Demetree tract, owned by Bill and Jack Demetree; the Bay Lake tract, owned by ten investors; and land east of the Demetree tract owned by Wilson and Carroll Hamrick. Lund spent a third day in Ocala before flying - through New York - back to California....
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From the essay, A Commodified Utopia:
.....Originally called ‘Progress City,’ Disney eventually named this new urban construct EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. As described in the film, EPCOT would be an ever-evolving showcase of modern technology:
It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.[7]
For Disney, the consummate businessman and innovator, planning techniques like urban renewal and political reform paled in comparison to the combined power of technology and efficiency enabled by modern capitalism.
Disney felt that the corporation and not traditional government could best create jobs, prevent poverty, improve education, and provide for the common good. In fact, he believed that a corporate structure should replace democracy itself in EPCOT. Disney’s utopia would have no popular government, but would be managed by those who knew best, the Disney Company and its corporate partners:
It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In EPCOT there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them….[8]
These were strong words indeed for an American history buff oft-praised for his audio-animatronic versions of U.S. Presidents.[9] But as many critics have insisted, and as will be discussed below, the foundation of all Disney developments in Florida has been the elevation of corporate control over democratic rule.
Physically, EPCOT would be a radial garden city of 20,000 residents.[10] The outermost of the city’s three rings would be low-density residential; the middle ring would contain churches, schools, parks, and cultural institutions. A round, 50-acre business district would comprise the city center. In order to maintain perfect weather conditions year-round, this center would be domed and climate-controlled. The focal-point would be a Corbusier-inspired hotel skyscraper that would rise through the dome for all to see. The downtown transportation system would be highly rational, with various modes, both traditional and modern, clearly delineated. There would be “electric People Movers on elevated tracks; surface streets given over to pedestrians; one underground level for monorails and more People Movers; a second underground level for cars; and a third underground level for trucks.”[11]
As to who would live in EPCOT, Walt was somewhat explicit: “There will be no retirees. Everyone must be employed. One of our requirements is that people who live in EPCOT must keep it alive.”[12] This proposition seems counterintuitive for a man well into his sixties, whose business partner and older brother (Roy O. Disney) was considering retirement. But it does fit with EPCOT’s grounding in capitalism and industry: a city designed to ‘showcase American free enterprise’ should, by this logic, be filled with those who would work and produce. It should also be noted that Walt had spent his entire career providing and marketing entertainment to the American nuclear family. The middle class family was his focal point, and he designed a city just for them.....
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