“Building Tall” reveals the challenges that Tishman Realty & Construction faced while building EPCOT Center

Jim Hill

11 years ago

Since sinkholes are back in the news again in Central
Florida, Hungry Howie was inspired to drop me a line earlier today to ask about
the sinkhole that almost swallowed EPCOT Center back during the construction of
that theme park:

For years now, I’ve been hearing stories about EPCOT’s
sinkhole. Where exactly was this thing located? Is it still there? Was Disney
able to stabilize this thing or is it someday going to swallow that theme park?

To get a definitive answer to your question, I grabbed my copy of John L. Tishman‘s memoir, “Building Tall:
My Life and the Invention of Construction Management
” (University of
Michigan Press, September 2011). For those of you who don’t know: Tishman was /
is the “owner / builder” of Tishman Realty & Construction, the
company that built the world’s first three 100-story towers (i.e. the original
“twin towers” of the World Trade Center and the Hancock Tower in
Chicago), NYC’s Madison Square Garden and the Renaissance Center in Detroit.

In fact, it was that last construction project that got Tishman
EPCOT Center.
As John explains in this 240-page hardcover:

… during the construction of the first section of Disney
World, the Disney Company had had a bad experience with their general
contractor. They had fired the contractor and ended up forming Disney’s own
construction division and then having their in-house construction people
supervise the contractors and subcontractors.

To avoid that very same problem with EPCOT
Center, Disney made a point of
getting to know the construction managers that it was considering for this
massive project. In Tishman Realty & Construction’s case, this meant that
…

Detroit’s Renaissance Center during its initial
construction phase in 1974

… four-top Disney executives asked to come and see us at
work, to inspect something currently under construction, and we made an appointment for
them to visit the half-completed Renaissance Center site. The Disney executives
arrived, four strong, and wanted to climb all over the construction project, go
up ladders, travel on hoists, get their feet dirty, wear construction helmets
— the whole nine yards.

And those execs must have liked what they saw in Detroit.
For the next thing John knew, he was meeting with Mouse House managers to form
some sort of battle plan on how exactly
to construct a theme park the size of EPCOT
Center.

We began by making up a preliminary milestone chart that
showed, to us and to Disney, the scope of the job in broad strokes. Then we
broke that chart down into smaller sections, each with its own chart.
Eventually we produced hundreds of schedules interrelating about 2,000
different activities.

Gag photograph from EPCOT Center’s construction phase. Copyright Disney
Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserve

The method of scheduling was the same (as when Tishman and his
team constructed) the World Trade
Center towers (in the middle of Manhattan).
But while during the WTC project the logistics had a vertical axis, at EPCOT
the need was to plan the logistics on a horizontal axis. In turns, this meant
such things as having to plan for and carve out parking lots for the
construction workers’ cars, some 2,500 of them each day. We had to create those
lots, and a lagoon (where there had not been one) and a major monorail system,
as well as major access roads leading to and from EPCOT to the nearby highways
— and all of this had to be done before any pavilions could be erected.

Getting now to Hungry Howie’s original question. Tishman
Realty & Construction had just begun doing site prep on this project when
…

… smack in the center of the 600 acres (construction site for
EPCOT Center)
a huge sinkhole (was discovered). Sinkholes are geological formations that can
be as old as 15 million to 25 million year. This one had been waiting for us
quite a while, and its boundaries were not fixed — regularly, cars and trucks
that we thought had been on solid ground would start to sink and would have to
be rescued by a tow-truck. The sinkhole was full of organic silt and peat, and
the sand underneath went down as far as 300 feet. Nothing solid could be built
on it, since the underlying sand could not support the weight of a building.
The most logical thing to do with the largest sinkhole of all (at this
construction site) was to dig it deeper and make into the lagoon around which
the World Showcase pavilions would be situated.

In the top center of the above photo, you can see the bathtub-like pond that Tishman
constructed as well as the dredge that was used to clear the muck out of the World
Showcase Lagoon sinkhole. Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

Simple idea, difficult thing to do. Under (Tishman’s)
direction, three general contractors specializing in heavy construction worked
on the area. First, they had to construction a bathtub containing an area that
could be filled with enough water in which to float a dredge to excavate and
remove the muck. The muck was five feet thick and there were a million cubic
yards of it to be removed so that the underlying sand could properly serve as
the lagoon bottom. Complicating the task of removal were two huge “root
islands” in the muck. Unable to get them out, we eventually poured onto
them a half-million yards of sand taken from another part of the lagoon. Then,
top heavy with sand, they sank beneath the surface of the water and stayed
there. Today, looking at the lagoon, you see no evidence of them. But they are
there, beneath the surface, and the boats that ply the lagoon know to avoid
them.

And speaking of water-related challenges that Disney &
Tishman faced on the EPCOT Center
project, John — in this very entertaining memoir — revealed the key role that
he played in securing a sponsor for Future World’s The Living Season pavilion.
As you may already know …

… Disney wanted to have each Future World pavilion sponsored
by a major industrial firm. AT & T, Kodak, Exxon, Kraft Foods, and General
Electric became involved. Exxon, for instance, in the pavilion devoted to
energy. In that pavilion, visitors would view a show displayed on huge screens
and dioramas … AT & T was to provide the show that was inside the central
geodesic, a multifaceted look at the progress of human communications from the
caveman era to the present day. A third pavilion, whose theme was the oceans,
was to contain the world’s largest aquarium; its visitors could walk alongside
the aquarium and sometimes through the parts.

I had the ideal candidate to underwrite that aquarium,
United Technologies. Harry Gray (i.e. the Chairman and CEO of United
Technologies) was interested, and with his blessing and the permission of the
Disney board, I presented the case for this $50 million project to the board of
United Technologies. The UT board liked the idea and signed on. Some of their
products, including Otis elevators, were to be used in this pavilion and
several others. The elevator in this big-aquarium pavilion was going to shake
and shiver, to give guests the impression that they were descending several
hundred feet to the level of the sea bottom, although the elevator (didn’t
really move at all).

The aquarium was a marvel. Huge, it was also compartmentalized so that it could
be stocked with over 1,500 varieties of fish and marine life. Every space in
the pavilion was to face the aquarium, so that, for instance, diners in the
restaurant could have a full view of the living backdrop as they ate their
meals.

Construction of the aquarium was quite complicated. Water is very heavy and
large volumes of it exert substantial pressure, more and more of it as you go
down toward the bottom. Because of the immense water pressure, near the bottom
portion of the aquarium the viewing glass had to be nine inches thick, although
the glass in each window was to become thinner as it went upward, to the point
where at the top it would be only one inch thick. The thickest glass had to be
imported from Japan,
the only place of manufacture. It was a manufacturing challenge to maintain
strength and transparency without distortion through this thickness of glass.

There are dozens of similar sorts of great Disney-related stories to be found
in “Building Tall: My Life and the Invention of Construction
Management,” terrific behind-the-scenes tales about how the Dolphin &
Swan was built (not to mention how NYC’s New Amsterdam Theatre was restored).
So if you want to get a very different take on how some of The Walt Disney
Company’s most impressive projects of the past 30 years or so actually
came together, why not find a comfortable chair to sink into and then pick up a
copy of this memoir (which — giving credit where credit is due — was written by John L. Tishman with the help of Tom Shachtman).