CELEBRATION — For a chilly Monday during a pandemic, foot traffic in Celebration’s Town Center is pretty brisk. Most of the tables at the Cornerstore Deli & Market on Market Street are full of people eating and discussing their plans for the day.
“It’s a popular town for tourists to come,” says Grace Pistilli, a manager since Cornerstone opened in 2020. “The proximity to Disney is amazing. But we still get our locals, too.”
Celebration, the Osceola County master-planned community built by Disney, was conceived of for scenes such as this: couples strolling the boardwalk around Lake Rianhard, workers coming to the Town Center on their lunch breaks. It’s a vision of bygone communities that many Americans wouldn’t recognize.
“I love the town,” Pistilli says, a resident since 2011. “I love the walking-distance restaurants at our fingertips. Shopping, I think I own every sweatshirt color that they have.”
More than 25 years after its opening, Celebration has kept its crime rate low and its property values high. But residents say they are feeling encroachment from curious tourists, other Osceola residents and development along the nearby tourist strip of U.S. Highway 192.
‘That was a lie’
The mythical history of Celebration goes something like this: When he conceived of Disney World, Walt Disney wanted to include a utopian town, where 20,000 people would “live, work and play,” according to a film presentation Disney made to sell the state on the idea. Market forces put plans on hold and the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow eventually became Epcot.
The story’s happy ending is that the development plans were revived in the 1990s, and Celebration became the realization of Walt’s dream.
“They didn’t want a city,” said Richard Foglesong, author of “Married to the Mouse” about the creation of Disney World. “I can say that with great confidence. That was a lie.”
Foglesong turned up a document, drawn up by a lawyer and edited by Walt himself, that rejected permanent residents. Disney’s concern was that residents would eventually gain voting control of the entire resort property.
But Disney did want the powers of a town and had to convince the Legislature to grant it.
“In order to exercise planning and zoning authority, only a municipal government could do that,” Foglesong said. That meant convincing the state they were building a city. “They had to say something they never intended to do.”
A sense of place
The real origins of Celebration, Foglesong said, came in the early 1980s. Oil tycoons the Bass Brothers, the largest Disney shareholders, were looking to get into land development, and Disney’s holdings in Osceola were sitting fallow.
New CEO Michael Eisner saw this as an opportunity to showcase an emerging theory of city planning called New Urbanism. “He was a fan of cutting-edge architecture,” Foglesong said.
New Urbanism was created by city planners to get away from the automobile-centric subdivisions of post-war America. It focuses on pedestrian-oriented development, with central commercial districts and a mix of housing types from apartments and townhomes to larger single-family homes.
Disney brought in New York architect Robert A.M. Stern for the design, and created The Celebration Company to manage the building of the community.
Another principle of New Urbanism is a uniformity of design, making each building look related to those around it. To that end, Celebration offered a preset selection of home styles for builders and buyers to choose from: Classical, Coastal, Colonial Revival, Craftsman, French, Mediterranean and Victorian.
Instead of big yards around sprawling ranch houses, homes were built close to each other and the sidewalk, with an emphasis on front porches.
“Life revolved around what was going on in this community,” said longtime resident Jim Siegel. “As people were walking around in the day … they’d see people sitting on their porches and stop and chat. The pace of life at that time was pretty slow.”
The developers also dictated the types of landscaping, with a focus on “Florida Friendly” plants. That and the architectural uniformity engender what New Urbanists call a “sense of place,” making Celebration feel memorable and unique.
AdventHealth, then Florida Hospital, built a large campus, becoming the largest employer. The Town Center attracted restaurants, shops and a movie theater. “The intention was that everything you needed would be in the town,” Siegel said.
Because of its unique layout and its Disney connection, Celebration attracted nationwide attention before its opening.
“I remember reading an article in the Wall St. Journal that said Disney was building a town,” Siegel said, who was living in Michigan in the 1990s when development got underway.
Siegel said the first time he set foot in the town, “I thought I was on a movie set.”
‘A real boy’
Despite a sign along Celebration Avenue that says “Town of Celebration,” the community has never incorporated. Though it was de-annexed from Disney to avoid conflicts over resident control, it is run as a Community Development District, a designation from the state without full municipal powers.
It also doesn’t have a dedicated police force and other services, relying instead on Osceola County.
Celebration could have incorporated after 20 years, but that has never happened. “The rallying cry for people who want [to incorporate] is, ‘It’s time for Pinocchio to become a real boy,'” said former CDD board member John Gebhardt.
A retired Wall Street professional, Gebhardt moved to Celebration in 2003. “What attracted my wife and I to Celebration was that it was a real community,” he said. “It wasn’t just a subdivision.”
While the CDD handles maintenance and rules for public spaces, most commercial interests in the town are governed by the Enterprise Community Development District, a five-member board elected by The Celebration Company, keeping Disney’s fingers in the Celebration pie.
Low crime, high values
Today, Celebration is home to 11,178 residents, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, spread among 4,350 homes and 1,673 apartments.
A new development, Island Village, is under construction on the west side of town. With 1,000 new homes and 300 new apartments, officials say it will be the final residential parcel in Celebration.
Siegel, who has lived in the community since 2003, says that he likes most of the ways in which the town has adjusted over the years. A freelance journalist and photographer, he notes improvements such as the library, which used to be a single room near a community pool. The county built a real one a few years ago.
It is a safe place. According to the website AreaVibes.com, which ranks community livability, Celebration’s crime rate is 68% below the national average.
From a real estate perspective, Celebration home values are some of the best in Central Florida.
In the past year, the annual median home price rose from $295,000 to $368,000, according to the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. That’s also more than $50,000 above the median for metro Orlando as a whole.
Celebration works well enough that other developers have looked to it as a model for their own master-planned communities. When Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza set out to build the town of Ave Maria near Fort Myers, Siegel was brought in to write a paper on what made Celebration so great.
But restrictive building plans mean it doesn’t have everything people want. Gebhardt, 75, said his feelings toward Celebration are “absolutely positive,” and yet he moved into Bay Hill Village in Orlando last year.
Gebhardt says that as he and his wife got older, they wanted a 3,000 square-foot single-story home with an attached two-car garage, the kind of home Celebration’s rules would never allow.
“We would have stayed in Celebration if we could have found what we wanted,” Gebhardt said.
Overrun with visitors
The movie theater closed 10 years ago, giving residents less to do. But Siegel says the biggest changes are less tangible.
“There’s not as much neighborhood kind of involvement or cohesiveness anymore,” he said. “If I can put it bluntly, the town is overrun by tourists … and by people in the surrounding area looking for something to do.”
Across Highway 192 is a vacation property known as Vacation Village. It advertises the nearness of Celebration as a reason to buy.
When Vacation Village is full, so is the Town Center, Gebhardt said. “I think their growth has fueled a lot of the appearance of growth in Celebration,” he said.
Traffic has also become a problem during the school year. Students from across the county attend the high school, which offers one of only two International Baccalaureate programs in Osceola.
Siegel says Celebration parents are reluctant to let their children walk to school as was intended.
“As a consequence, the traffic is awful at the beginning of the day and when parents come to pick up their kids,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve figured out a way to deal with that.”
The Town Center could not survive without outsiders coming in, Pistilli said.
“I would think every business in the Orlando area needs the tourists,” he said.
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