More Old Fantasyland Demolition

It's been a long time since I last posted a destruction shot of the old Fantasyland from the 1982-1983 timeframe. Here's Mr. Toad going to pieces:

I Wonder What They Found

September 11, 1974 Disneyland Line:

At the present time, the Disney University is doing research on the history of the Park. In trying to re-create Disneyland as it has developed through the years, they are tracing the changes that have taken place both on and off stage. If you have any old maps, photos, guide books, or any other historical data, the University would greatly appreciate your help. All material used will be Xeroxed and returned. For further information or inquiries, please call Jon Worsdell at the Disney University at Ext. 641 or 642...Thanks!

What motivated them to research the Park's history at this point in time? A specific training program? Did anybody submit anything that we today would find amazing? What did the University eventually do with the material?

Mineral King Wilderness

President Obama today signed into law the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act. Among other things, the Act includes the Mineral King valley as part of the John Krebs Wilderness. McClatchy has a good article about the wilderness area and John Krebs.

Nixon and Disneyland, Part 7

The Disneyland Line furnishes details on another Disneyland Cast Member who went to work for Nixon. From the January 9, 1974 issue:

Joanne Miller, Personnel Representative in Employee Relations, will assume the duties of Receptionist/Guide and Secretary at the Western White House beginning January 7. Joanne will be the secretary for the Buildings and Facilities Manager and will be responsible for coordinating conferences at the Western White House.

We wish Joanne success in this new endeavor.

Disneyland Resort Era

In the past couple of weeks, I've been hard at work on a new category I've added to the thesaurus: DLRERA, short for Disneyland Resort Era. I'm currently thesaurusing four Disneyland telephone directories, covering a couple of decades. In addition to the Cast Members named in these, I had many from Disneylanders, Disneyland Lines, and other sources. I currently have over 6,600 Cast Member names recorded, and finally realized it would be useful to add some temporal perspective.

So, I created a new category (DLRERA, with decades as subcategories) and also created new terms for 1950s Cast Members, 1960s Cast Members, 1970s Cast Members, 1980s Cast Members, 1990s Cast Members, and 2000s Cast Members. While the Cast Member terms denote something specific, the DLRERA category is a little more ambiguous. I have a working definition that a a decade should be applied to a term if it had some presence in or influence on the Disneyland Resort during that time. A Cast Member who worked at the Park in the 1970s would have the 1970s category applied, obviously. I worked at Disneyland in the 2000s, but I've also applied 1990s to myself because I was active in the Usenet community, had a popular Disneyland web site, co-founded the Bruce Gordon Fan Club, etc., etc. The categories are sort of a way of pulling all the terms for a particular decade together.

I have not gone through to apply this categorization to every term in the thesaurus just yet (and frankly, I'm not sure I'd go to the trouble of categorizing all of the date terms themselves). The process of back-categorizing thousands and thousands of Cast Members was onerous enough, as I had to read the notes I'd typed about them to determine when they worked. These are the numbers I have so far, with overlap between categories possible and occurring:

1950s Cast Members: 628
1960s Cast Members: 1,203
1970s Cast Members: 2,111
1980s Cast Members: 1,096
1990s Cast Members: 1,240
2000s Cast Members: 2,779

The numbers reflect the sources I've used thus far and so shouldn't be used for statistical purposes. The number of 1970s Cast Members, in particular, reflects the large number of Disneyland Lines from early in that decade.

The Disneyland Resort as an Organization

As I've mentioned before (and you can see here in my post listing 1,000 Cast Members and lessees), the thesaurus goes beyond just documenting the public parts of Disneyland, but attempts to encompass the entire operation, including Guest, Cast, and Imagineering perspectives. So, I'm attempting to track the organizational structure of the Park/Resort through the years. This can be a bit daunting at times because Disney (especially modern Disney) loves to rearrange and move functions around, and I'm operating with incomplete information. Rarely do I have a complete organizational snapshot at any point in time.

This October 1959 Disneyland, Inc. division responsibilities chart provides very valuable information, but is just the tip of the iceberg:

It only provides the division directors, not any lower managers, and does not provide information on the finer distinctions (such as all of the various shops to be found under "Maintenance"). But mostly I don't even have this level of information, and just have to document each of the departments and divisions as I find them, and periodically assess what I know. For instance, here Janitorial is part of Construction & Maintenance (which became simply the Maintenance division sometime in the 1960s). In 1973, it was part of Operations, and in 1975 part of General Services. Today it's known as Custodial (a change which I believe occurred in the mid-1970s) and is part of Guest Services.

The best sources for this information are Disneyland Lines, particularly those which include feature articles on various departments or have lists of service anniversaries or committees which draw from around the Park, and Park telephone directories. My plan is to do the best I can with the information from these sources, and hopefully in the future run it past some people who have great familiarity with the organizational Resort over the decades.

As I was looking through the June 1993 directory, I was struck by just how many people were working off-site. The original Disneyland Administration Building consisted of two houses from the property joined together in the East Service Area, behind Main Street, U.S.A.--one of the houses belonging to Ron Dominguez's family. Seen here is the building as modeled in the model of 1955 Disneyland currently on display in the Opera House:

A larger Administration Building was constructed nearby in 1966, also housing the Primeval World Diorama. (According to a 1984 Cast Member training book, The Spirit of Disneyland, Walt Disney rejected an expensive admin building, stating "There isn't going to be any administration building. The public isn't coming here to see an administration building." It's not clear from when this quotation dates, but the large administration building was built under Walt's leadership.)

By the 1980s the Park had outgrown that Administration Building. In early 1985, Disneyland purchased the site of the Global Van Lines building. Global Van Lines had used this building, north of the Park and along the Santa Ana Freeway, as its western regional headquarters before moving it to Orange:

As Disneyland began contemplating expansion in the 1980s, it also recognized the importance of a new administration building. In 1987, in what Disneyland spokesman Bob Roth described as a "temporary move," Entertainment, Marketing, Finance, and Disneyland International moved into leases offices in the Plaza Alicante at 300 Plaza Alicante, Garden Grove, just down Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland. An April 1988 account of the move in the Orange County Register said the new building should be finished by the end of a three-year lease. While the Cast Members decorated their new digs to make it feel like home, one CM commented that they sometimes didn't get to the Park for several days. When Jack Lindquist was named President of Disneyland in October 1990, he said in regards to the Cast Members scattered in area offices, "I don't even know where they all are."

Disneyland didn't select an architect for the new administration building--Frank O. Gehry--until December 1992. Below is a graphic illustrating where Disneyland had Cast Members working circa June 1993, using an October 1995 photo as the base:

The immediate Operations staff remained on site, of course, as did the Facilities, Engineering and Construction personnel. The Administration Building still housed Administration, Public Relations, Costuming, Legal, Cast Activities, Broadcast Services, and Security/Fire. Publicity and Vista-United were on the second floor of the Opera House. Some parts of Entertainment were in the America Sings building (such as Show Operations and Stage Management). The Walt Disney Travel Company was over at the Disneyland Hotel, as it had been since its formation in 1972.

Disneyland had a small presence at the Pacific Inland Bank, 888 S. West Street, Anaheim (now 888 S. Disneyland Drive); on the second floor were offices for the Purchasing Office, Walt Disney Specialty Products, and Contract Administration. Disneyland also rented out a couple of floors at Stadium Towers, 2400 Katella Avenue, Anaheim, housing operations related to Human Relations functions. On the 12th floor were Labor Relations and Wage & Salary Administration, while the 8th floor contained Cast Communications, the Disney University, Personnel Records, Guest Claims, Workers' Compensation, and related departments.

But the greatest number of Cast Members ended up at the Plaza Alicante, 300 Plaza Alicante, Garden Grove, somewhat more than a mile down Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland. All or most of the Finance, Marketing, and Entertainment divisions ended up here, and Disneyland had space rented on all but the 9th floor (that I can tell). These are some of the departments found on the various floors:

• 1st: Business Process Reengineering; Queen Mary Finance
• 2nd: Finance Division: Accounting Department; Finance Administration; General Ledger; Planning & Analysis
• 3rd: Finance Division: Accounts Receivable; Inventory Accounting
• 4th: Finance Division: Capital Development-West Coast Finance; Facility Finance; Industrial Engineering
• 4th: Entertainment Division: Entertainment Art; Choreography; Music Department; Show Development/Directors
• 5th: Disneyland International; Euro Disney; TDL Finance; Walt Disney Attractions Documentation
• 6th: Marketing Division: Advertising; Creative Services; Promotions; Marketing Special Projects; Vista Advertising
• 6th: Entertainment Division: College Music Program; Music Library; Entertainment Special Events; Talent Booking; Guest Talent Development
• 7th: Marketing Division: Marketing Administration; Alumni Club; Ambassador Program; Magic Kingdom Club; Magic Years Club; Corporate Alliance; Synergy; Disney News Magazine
• 8th: College Relations
• 10th: Attraction Sales; Convention Sales; Corporate Sales; Private Parties; Grad Nites

Following the naming scheme established with the corporate headquarters (Team Disney Burbank) and Walt Disney World (Team Disney Orlando), the new administration building was known as Team Disney Anaheim when it opened in February 1996. People sometimes complain that management who work at TDA don't get out into the Parks, and so make decisions divorced from the Guests and any personal connection to how things are in the field. Surely there are some Cast Members like that, just as there must have been some who went to the old Administration Building and didn't go into the Park. But having the main administrative functions consolidated in one location, on property, is a huge improvement over the scattered way things were in the late 1980s into the mid-1990s. I'd be interested to find out how this Cast dispersal interacted with concurrent efforts to expand and form the Disneyland Resort. If anybody reading this blog worked off-site, I'd be very interested to hear your perspective on how efficiently Disneyland functioned during this time.

Photos from George Short, Part 15

You didn't think that I ran out of photos from George Short, just because I haven't posted any in eight months, right? (As a reminder, George Short is a Club 55 member who spent his career in the Sound Department.) Here's an early 1959 shot of Main Street, U.S.A. from Main Street Station. You may be able to see some steel girders for the Matterhorn in the corner. It's a good thing the Matterhorn was on the horizon, too--without the new attractions, I'm not sure the place would have made it. Where is everybody?!

And a comparison shot from 1999, with a bit wider zoom and much fuller trees: