Walt Disney World Resort over the past four years has transformed and expanded the Downtown Disney shopping and entertainment complex into Disney Springs. The opening next month of Town Center, the fourth neighborhood in Disney Springs, which is positioned as a fictional Florida town born along a freshwater spring in the mid-1800s, will mark a crucial milestone in the project. During a visit to the site last week, Travel Weekly senior editor Robert Silk spoke with lead Disney Springs imagineer Theron Skees about what it takes to build a fictional city.
Q: You were presented with the task of transforming Downtown Disney four years ago. How do you get your arms around a project like that?
Theron Skees
A: We really listen to our guests. Over time, you build up guest feedback: what they want, what they want to see different. This project was on a property that had slowly expanded over three decades.
Q: So how did the fact that the property had been developed in bursts affect the project?
A: We knew several things. We knew we had to diversify retail. Our dining was quite popular, so we knew we needed to expand the dining concept, but with the knowledge that we wanted to create unique dining locations. We also wanted to increase the efficiency for arriving guests. That was sort of the basis of how we needed to do the project.
Q: You knew what you had to do. But you had to do it with a great story because this is Disney. How did the existing conditions contribute to the storyline you developed for Disney Springs?
A: This project was never about destroying everything we have and starting over. It was: How do we work with what we have? How do we create a story that takes everything that we have and then gives us a platform to design more?
We created a story that leveraged the existing architecture. We used that to plan the flow. And then our storyline gave us the ability to create designs that would work as one single story.
If you think about a town, everything works together, but you have different sections that develop over time. So that's how we built our neighborhood.
Q: What is the history of Disney Springs?
A: We were really inspired by many waterfront towns in Florida that have been around since the mid-1800s. These waterfront towns had businesses, they had industry, they had residents. I just think of Miami; it started as a small town and grew and grew and grew over time. Florida had cattle and citrus. We researched the history and then leveraged that great history to create our own designs.
There are stories within the stories. So the building near us is a boatwright. In the conceptual design of each neighborhood we thought of different types of business that would have existed: A marina, a float plane hangar, warehouses. We have an ice house. We have a bottling plant. Our chocolate shop used to be an apothecary.
Q: I have to ask: How does one become an imagineer?
A: I think one becomes an imagineer by first of all having a passion for telling stories.
With over 140 different disciplines in imagineering there's a lot of room for a lot of different people, a lot of skill sets. For example, architects, engineers, designers, props people, accountants, lighting people.