Designing Disneyland

In the mid-1950s, when Walt Disney’s long-planned, eponymous California theme park was taking shape, he found himself butting heads with a member of the his construction crew. “One of the contractors on the job tried to substitute plastic for wrought iron, and Walt insisted on authenticity,” says Chris Nichols, whose new book Walt Disney’s Disneyland (Taschen, $60) lavishly illustrates the creative process of the park’s creation, from drawing board to ribbon-cutting. “Imagineer John Hench said that if the design elements were not authentic, guests would have a harder time suspending disbelief and placing themselves in the story,” Nichols tells AD PRO. That, in a nutshell, is what sets Disneyland apart from the scores of other amusement parks, fairs, and attractions that both presaged and followed its 1955 debut: No other park of its kind was designed with so much emphasis on the idea of transporting visitors, both physically and narratively, into another world, as though a teacup ride might actually sweep one down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland.

The original Disneyland sign on Harbor Boulevard welcomed guests from 1958 to 1989. Its bold colors, shapes, and kinetic exuberance make it an icon of midcentury design.

Nichols’s handsome tome presents a treasure trove of archival material, including drawings and photographs from the historical collections of The Walt Disney Company, that sheds light on how Disneyland came to be. Needless to say, it didn’t appear fully formed at the wave of a magic wand. Walt Disney initially conceived of the idea when he was visiting a Griffith Park merry-go-round with his school-age daughters and wondered if he could build a place where the attractions were as much fun for grown-ups as they were for children. For inspiration, he visited places like Henry Ford's museum and Greenfield Village in Michigan, as well as European pleasure gardens such as Denmark’s Tivoli and Efteling in the Netherlands. What he encountered over and over were distilled “experiences” that offered visitors a rich sensory taste of something else—fantasy, history, nostalgia, play—in a comfortable setting with plenty of creature comforts and variety.