DUE SOUTH:Thousands longing for the wholesome safety of 1950s America have bought into a tightly regulated Florida town constructed by the Disney Corporation. But recent deaths and foreclosures have shown the dark side of their southern idyll
CELEBRATION, A TOWN of 10,000 built by the Disney Corporation over the past 15 years near Disney World in central Florida, has no folk memory of the Civil War and Civil Rights movement that transformed the rest of the American South. Most residents have migrated from other parts of the US. The whites of Charleston, where I started my journey in this series, were nostalgic for the 1850s. The whites of Celebration, where I ended it, came in search of the 1950s.
Bob Hansell, the sheriff of Osceola County, is a fourth-generation central Floridan, with childhood memories of orange blossom and cow pastures. “Then of course, Disney World opened, in October 1971. We had a boom . . . I’ve seen changes that would have taken three or four lifetimes before. My kids say, ‘Gosh Dad. I wish I had grown up when you were a kid.’ I didn’t realise it was that great, but when you look back, it kinda was, because it was a slower pace,” he says.
Celebration markets safety and nostalgia, at property prices 20 per cent higher than elsewhere in Florida. Newcomers are haunted by the atrocities of 9/11, and want to know their neighbours, says Kathleen Carlson, an estate agent. The town seal shows a silhouette of a little girl with a ponytail riding a bicycle past an oak tree and a picket fence, followed by a dog.
“This is the hometown you’ve been searching for,” says the “Memory Book” that Carlson gives prospective buyers. “A place where kids still ride their bikes to school, and neighbours greet each other from wide sunny porches.”
Akin Muegel (69) moved to Celebration from a gated community in Las Vegas. The former general manager of a railway company, Muegel says the planned activities in Celebration relieve the boredom of retirement. “Anybody who moves here wants to be involved. That’s the idea of it. It’s meant to be a throwback to the 1940s and 50s – not just architecturally, but sociologically.”
Celebration’s promoters describe its hodge-podge of faux Colonial, Victorian, Hispanic and Caribbean architecture as “neo-traditional”. Pavements are wide so that couples can walk hand-in-hand. Porches are low and close to the street to encourage neighbours to talk to one another. Rocking chairs are placed in parks and beside the man-made lake for the same purpose. The water tower at the entrance serves only to support the “Celebration” sign; it’s not a real water tower. The white coral-style fence that lines the road is made of plastic, not wood. The windmill outside the golf clubhouse is purely decorative.
In the autumn, the town managers blow tissue paper leaves over the town centre in an event called “Leaves Falling”. From Thanksgiving until New Year’s Eve, they stage “Snow Falling” four times every night. “On weekends, we also have an ice-skating rink and horse and buggies,” says Carlson, the estate agent, “just like (New York’s) Central Park.”
At dusk, I ignore the sign saying “Residents only. ID required” to follow the joggers and dog-walkers into Lakeside Park. A great blue heron picks his way along the shoreline, his spindly legs moving as if pulled by a puppeteer’s strings. For a moment, I wonder if he too is artificial.
Perhaps only a young town could be so impatient to establish its history. In restaurants and hotels you see sepia photographs of ladies in Victorian dresses, in locations that appear to show Celebration – except that Celebration was a swamp then. The community observes “Founders’ Weekend” every November. This year, they’ll inaugurate the official town History Centre, the mission of which is to collect memorabilia about events in Celebration.
“We turn 15 this year,” says Laura Poe, the spokeswoman for the management corporation which residents have hired to run the town in lieu of an elected council. “Each founding resident received a brick with their name and the date they arrived. The bricks are arranged in a circular area around the flag pole.”
Rigid rules underlie Celebration’s pretty conformity. All property buyers sign the covenants, which dictate that all curtains facing the street must be white; that mobile homes, boats, trailers or inoperable vehicles cannot be parked outside for more than four hours; that any pet deemed to be a nuisance can be removed at the town’s request; that no more than two people may inhabit any bedroom in Celebration . . .
“It’s a glass house, because people are constantly watching you,” says Bert Fitzgibbons (66), an IBM engineer who moved to Celebration to escape the snow in Poughkeepsie. The town’s 2009 annual report notes that the covenants committee sent 1,220 non-compliance letters that year.
Fitzgibbons has received complaints for planting annuals instead of perrenials in his flowerbeds. All changes – including repainting your house – must be approved by the architecture review committee. Fitzgibbons was declined permission to build a screened-in, mosquito-free porch beside his pool. “I had to put in magnolias and philodendrons to hide it,” he recalls. “They’re not doing things to hurt you. They’re doing it to keep the property values up.”
I ask Poe, the spokeswoman, whether rebel spirits chafe at the restrictions. “Those type of people probably wouldn’t move here,” she says. “You buy into that; that’s what you want.” Celebration, several residents told me, is a “type-A” community. “A type-A person is a leader, an entrepreneur, an opportunist and a strategist,” the Rev William Lewis, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church, explains. “Everybody here wants to be in charge. That creates a different dynamic.” The lifestyle does not appear to attract African Americans. The town website says 87.3 per cent of residents are white non-Hispanics; 1.7 per cent are black.
Lewis says his parishioners have brought “their attitudes, dysfunctions and normal human nature” with them into the utopia that Disney tried to build. “Success enables you to mask your pain. But it also causes it . . . You can buy a solution rather than address your problems. That’s what people do here.”
It almost seems that Celebration’s residents have found life eternal. Funeral parlours, like everything bad, are relegated to Highway 192 outside. “There are shockingly few funerals in Celebration,” says Lewis.
The town has only three entry and exit points. The enclave feels so safe that some residents don’t lock their cars or houses. The Celebration Residents’ Association pays off-duty sheriff’s deputies to patrol their streets. And the sheriff’s office provides uniforms, radios, training and patrol cars to 13 residents who’ve signed up for the Community Volunteer Patrol Programme.
On November 29th, 2010, a 58-year-old resident was found murdered in his home on Water Street, strangled and beaten to death with an axe. Four days later, a 52-year-old man committed suicide a few blocks away in Yew Court, after a 20-hour stand-off with police.
The incidents were unrelated, but their occurrence in rapid succession shocked the town. “Things like that just don’t happen in Celebration,” Sheriff Hansell says. “It was a bam-bam thing. Right on the heels of the homicide, the suicide. It was like, ‘What’s going on? Is Celebration collapsing?’”
The Sheriff says Celebration wants to emulate the television sit-com Leave it to Beaver, or America as portrayed in Norman Rockwell’s paintings: “I don’t know if we have that anymore. It’s more than just design and construction. It’s a lot to do with the moral fabric of a community, and sometimes you wonder if that can still be accomplished.”
The murder victim had brought a homeless young man to his apartment. The alleged killer claims the victim made unwanted sexual advances, and that he acted in self-defence. He was caught because he stole the victim’s Corvette sports car, computer and coin collection.
The man who took his own life was about to be charged with domestic abuse. A former military trainer, he barricaded himself in his house, where he kept an arsenal of weapons. Police evacuated the neighbourhood during the stand-off.
The man accused of murder was found several days later in an itinerants’ encampment on Highway 192, the unsightly succession of cheap motels, T-shirt factories and fast-food joints that runs just north of Celebration. If Celebration is paradise, 192 is hell in close proximity.
Captain Andy Lang, the sheriff’s deputy responsible for Celebration, knows several families who were expelled from their ersatz Eden by foreclosures and now live six-to-a-room in the weekly hotels on 192, so their children can continue to attend Celebration’s public schools. “A good portion of students are bussed in from the local hotels. We have a big problem making sure they are eating,” Lang says.
The Rev Lewis and the local Catholic priest ask their parishioners to address the misery on Highway 192. I envision well-dressed residents darting out of the enclave to do a little missionary work. Lewis corrects me. “We dash out with our chequebooks,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s still a commitment.”
Celebration and 192, less than a mile away, are “reality and fantasy, up against each other,” Lewis says. “And we don’t have to go there. You can bypass it. But if you turn onto 192, you are confronted with it immediately.
“You can see it if you want to see it; care if you want to care; avoid it if you are so inclined.”
Series concluded
