Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [1]
Then Disney arrived, ultimate goodness versus ultimate evil, and the cynics gradually went silent. Times Square has boomed.
The dissolute, sticky-shoed ambience of Forty-second Street has been subjugated by the gleamingly wholesome presence of the Disney Store. Truly it’s a phenomenon, for the shelves offer nothing but the usual cross-merchandised crapola: snow globes, wristwatches, charm bracelets, figurines, and lots of overpriced clothes. Hard-core fans can buy matching Mickey and Minnie garden statues, a $400 Disney Villains chess set, or a twenty-fifth-anniversary Disney-edition Barbie doll, complete with teensy mouse ears. Your basic high-end tourist trap is what it is.
Yet somehow the building radiates like a shrine—because it’s not just any old store, it’s a Disney store, filled with Disney characters, Mickey and Minnie at play in the fields of Times Fucking Square. And evidently the mere emplacement of the iconic Disney logo above the sidewalks has been enough to demoralize and dislodge some of the area’s most entrenched sin merchants.
The mayor of New York says that’s a good thing, and citizens agree: good for tourism, good for children, good for the morale of the community. If Times Square can be redeemed, some would say, then no urban Gomorrah is beyond salvation. All you need is a Disney retail outlet! (As of this writing, there are more than 550 in eleven countries.)
It’s not surprising that one company was able to change the face of Forty-second Street, because the same company changed the face of an entire state, Florida, where I live. Three decades after it began bulldozing the cow pastures and draining the marshes of rural Orlando, Disney stands as by far the most powerful private entity in Florida; it goes where it wants, does what it wants, gets what it wants. It’s our exalted mother teat, and you can hear the sucking from Tallahassee all the way to Key West.
The worst damage isn’t from the Walt Disney World Resort itself (which is undeniably clean, well operated, and relatively safe) or even from the tourists (although an annual stampede of forty million Griswolds cannot help but cut an untidy swath). The absolute worst thing Disney did was to change how people in Florida thought about money; nobody had ever dreamed there could be so much. Bankers, lawyers, real-estate salesmen, hoteliers, restaurateurs, farmers, citrus growers—everyone in Mickey’s orb had to drastically recalibrate the concepts of growth, prosperity, and what was possible. Suddenly there were no limits. Merely by showing up, Disney had dignified blind greed in a state pioneered by undignified greedheads. Everything the company touched turned to gold, so everyone in Florida craved to touch or be touched by Disney. The gates opened, and in galloped fresh hordes. The cattle ranches, orange groves, and cypress stands of old Orlando rapidly gave way to an execrable panorama of suburban blight.
One of the great ironies upon visiting Disney World is the wave of relief that overwhelms you upon entering the place—relief to be free of the nerve-shattering traffic and the endless ugly sprawl. By contrast the Disney resort seems like a verdant sanctuary. That was the plan, of course—Team Rodent left the park buffered with thousands of unspoiled acres, to keep the charmless roadside schlock at bay.
As Orlando exploded, business leaders (and therefore politicians) throughout the rest of Florida watched and plotted with envy. Everyone conspired for a cut of the Disney action, meaning overflow. The trick was to catch the tourists after they departed the Magic Kingdom: induce them to rent a car and drive someplace else and spend what was left of their vacation money. This mad obsession for sloppy seconds has paid off big-time. By the year 2000, the number of tourists visiting the Orlando area is expected to reach forty-six million annually. That’s more than the combined populations of California and Pennsylvania storming into Florida every year, an onslaught few places on