“Everything by Design” offers a detailed look at the development of Disney World’s never-built Mediterranean Village Resort

Jim Hill

11 years ago

Jody R. tossed me a note over this past weekend, praising
last Tuesday's "Building Tall" story, saying that …

… it's articles like this that keep me coming back to Jim
Hill Media, that keep me listening to that podcast you do with Len Testa. Your
ability to continually uncover pieces of information about the Disney Company
that I had never heard before.

Thanks for your kind words, Jody. But to be honest, I'm not the
only one out there who's doing this sort of stuff. Have you seen the stories
that Todd James Pierce has been posting lately over on the Disney History
Institute website? Pierce's recent piece about that California Living project
which Walt wanted to build right next door to Disneyland
in the early 1960s is not to be missed. And the same goes for Todd's terrific
"Walt Disney and Riverboat Square"
series.

Whenever we get together at various Disney functions (If I'm
remembering correctly, the last time I saw Mr. Pierce in person was at that
Destination D – Disneyland 55 event which D23 staged at the Disneyland Hotel
back in September of 2010), Todd and I compare notes about stories we've heard
(we share a fascination for "The Master Builder of Disneyland,"
wheeler-dealer extraordinaire C.V. Wood). And what Mr. Pierce & I have both
noticed is that — often — the very best stories about The Walt Disney Company
can often be found in books or magazine articles that aren't really about the
Mouse.

Case in point: "Everything
by Design: My Life as an Architect
" (St. Martin's
Press, October 2007) by Alan Lapidus. Nowadays, Alan is probably best known as
the guy who designed the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic
City and/or the Broadway
Crowne Plaza
in Manhattan. Or — better yet —
for being the son of architecture legend Morris Lapidus, who designed the
Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

Now strictly judging a book by
its cover, at first glance, you wouldn't think that "Everything by
Design" wouldn't have a lot to offer Disney history buffs. But that's
where you'd be wrong. You see, Alan had a hand in designing the Mediterranean
Village Resort, a themed hotel for the Walt Disney World Resort whose main
claim to fame (at least among Mouse House history buff) is that this project
never quite made it off Disney's drawing boards.

But just because the Mediterranean
Village Resort (which was supposed to have built alongside Seven Seas Lagoon
near the Ticket & Transportation) never made it past the blueprint &
model phase doesn't mean that this proposed Disney World hotel doesn't have a
fascinating history. Which — to hear Alan tell the tale — began with a …

… phone call … from Mouse Central.

It came in 1979, when the Walt Disney Company was about to
start planning a new eight-hundred-room theme hotel at Disney World in Orlando,
Florida. The hotel would be the first new
one in the park since it opened eight years earlier, and Disney executives had
decided to look outside from Disney headquarters in Glendale,
California, wanted to know whether I would
be interested in making a presentation to the board of directors.

Proposed construction location for Disney's Mediterranean Resort

Youbetcha!

Disney's new resort was to be called the Mediterranean
Village. I was handed a site plan
and the program — meaning, how many rooms, suites, restaurants, conference and
meeting rooms and the like there were to be. I was also given many photos of
the site itself, showing a parcel of totally unremarkable middle Florida
land. No one mentioned a budget.

I also had to sign one of the oddest legal documents of my
career, which stated that I could never let anyone know that I had designed
this structure; I could not use it in my brochure or in any form of publicity.
The Mouse had its own architectural license, and all the documents would list
the architect as WED Engineering. In short, I was to be a nonentity. The
company would even provide me with preprinted sheets of drawing paper,
identifying WED Engineering as the architect, which I would use to produce the
construction documents. This policy was reversed several years later, during
the Eisner regime, when Disney decided to start publicizing its hiring of
prominent outside architects.

Lapidus had worked for some large corporations (Not to mention
some colorful characters. These included Bob Guccione, Aristole Onassis, and
Donald Trump) before. But none of his previous work experience had prepared him
for the way that The Walt Disney Company (at least back in the late 1970s) did
business. Alan was absolutely fascinated by the Mouse's sky's-the-limit /
anything-is-possible approach to the project. Which became clear from Lapidus'
very first meeting …

… with John Hench and a couple of talented young
architects from WED Engineering. At our first session, I asked which type of
Mediterranean architecture they were thinking of — Spanish Mediterranean,
Greek Mediterranean, Italian Mediterranean? John Hench looked at me with an
amused gleam in his eye, laced his finger together, turned his palms out,
extended his arms, and replied in an amused tone, "Alan, we want Disney
Mediterranean!"

"John, if I am doing a Mediterranean
Village, it really should be a sort
of fishing village."

Disney Legend John Hench. Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved

"I think so too."

"But then we have to have a seaport."

"Absolutely."

"But a seaport has to have a sea."

"We'll build one."

"And a fleet of colorful fishing boats."

An assistant was soon on hand with several books of pictures of colorful
Mediterranean-type fishing vessels.

Marty Sklar (L) and John Hench at WED Enterprises back in the 1970s.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved

"You pick them and we'll build them."

"How about some windmills?"

Books of windmills were produced.

This was fun!

During this whole process, no one ever mentioned a budget. And no idea was ever
dismissed as being impractical, unattainable, or undoable. In those days,
Disney truly was a world to itself, an asylum run by the inmates.

Working within The Walt Disney Company's truly unique design
parameters, Alan began dummying out the Mediterranean
Village.

The resort began to take shape as a series of streets with
multicolored waterfront "houses" (actually, rows of hotel rooms of
various heights). There was a waterfront walkway with a mosaic serpentine
design, a harbor entrance with a lighthouse, windmills, a breakwater, a
marketplace, olive groves, and trellis-cover walkways leading to streets of
"tavernas," market squares, and many hidden courtyards with a variety
of fountains and outside cafes.

Doesn't that sound like a terrific place to stay. So why
didn't Disney go forward with construction of the Mediterranean
Village? Well, as it turns out, a
similar sort of project was being prepped for a piece of property on the other
side of Seven Seas Lagoon

During the course of my work (on the Mediterranean
Village), I observed the Imagineers
designing a companion hotel to mine. It was just as large, and it looked great.
Called the Grand Floridian, it was quite a bit more elaborate, with such inside
architectural reference as the Addison Meisner Room, in honor of an architect
who established the classic 1920s Palm Beach
architecture that symbolized the good life to the F. Scott Fitzgerald
generation. Meisner was not exactly a household name, but it would be
perpetuated by some very clever folks.

Seven months after I began, my design for the hotel was
finished and Disney enthusiastically approved it.

It never got built.

After Michael Eisner took over as CEO in 1984, it was a
whole new ballgame. The people I had been working with told me Eisner had
decided to delay the Mediterranean Village
until the Grand Floridian was up and running and ad a year or so to demonstrate
whether it would be a success. No one ever told me the village project wasn't
going forward, just that it was being put on hold. Two or three years later, by
the time the Grand Floridian had opened and started performing well, the
Mediterranean Village had long since been forgotten.

Which had to have been frustrating for Alan. Both on a
professional & personal level. But on the other hand, Lapidus had some very
memorable experiences at the Walt Disney World Resort while he was on property
doing onsite survey work for the Mediterranean
Village project:

After many months, while I was attending some meetings in Florida,
someone up the chain of command judged that I was worthy of being let in on the
innermost secret of the Magic Kingdom.
Like a mother who has decided to tell her pubescent daughter about sex, Dick
Vermillion announced that he had authorization to show me "the tunnels."
Trembling with excitement, I was led around to the back of the park, to what
looked like a hole in the side of a large earthen mound. Once we passed the
security checkpoint, my jaw dropped. There was a world beneath the World: an
underground city straight out of a science fiction film.

The first thing I saw were three Goofy characters walking
side by side. In the (tunnels), a fleet of maintenance trucks constantly
cruised along. Since the roof of this structure was actually the subfloor of
the park, all of the piping, electrical conduits, sewer lines, and other
utilities were hung in plain view of the repair vehicles. All these lines were
being constantly monitored, inspected, maintained, fixed or replaced from
below, so nothing disturbed the peace and tranquility of the kingdom up above.

(Just above the tunnels), a vast network of hidden entrances
to the park was concealed in various aboveground structures and landscape
features. This is why you never see any of the employees go on break. Mickey or
Goofy or Donald ducks into a building and then quickly reappears — except it's
a new Mickey or Goofy or Donald. The setup also makes it possible for emergency
vehicles to reach any part of the complex unseen by the vacationeers above. A
medical emergency can be attended to swiftly, without the ambulance having to
navigate through the crowds or alarm the kiddies. I was dumbfounded.

"Dick, this is the most brilliant piece of urban
planning I have ever seen. Why hasn't the company shown this as an example of
what is possible?"

He looked at me as he would at a slow child. "Alan, this is the Magic
Kingdom, and magicians never give
away their secrets."

This is why I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of "Everything
by Design: My Life as an Architect." Alan Lapidus (who's an absolutely
magician of a memoirist) isn't afraid when it comes to revealing secrets.
Especially The Walt Disney Company's secret.

I mean, in what other book are you going to be able to read about that time
when construction mogul John L. Tishman
(best known in Disneyana fan circles as the guy who supervised the construction
of EPCOT Center
for Tishman Realty & Construction) …

… sued Disney! For $2 billion! Not only did (Tishman) sue
(The Walt Disney Company), but he also brought a RICO charge. RICO is the
federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally enacted
by Congress in 1970 as a tool to use against organized crime … The
possibility that the Mouse would become a convicted felon was enough to bring
Eisner back to the table.

This is the sort of juicy stuff that you'll only be able to
find in a book like "Everything by Design." Which offers some really
great insights & observations on The Walt Disney Company and how it
operates all because this really isn't supposed to be a book about the Mouse.
So go pick up a copy if you're looking for a juicy, business-related Summer
read.

Your thoughts?