DISNEY'S LAND

How nostalgia, fantasy, and cutting-edge engineering merged into the “tireless commercial dynamo” of Disneyland.

For Snow (Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History, 2016, etc.), former editor-in-chief of American Heritage magazine, a fascination with amusement parks began at Playland in Rye, New York, and intensified when he raptly watched Disneyland, a show airing weekly on ABC that whetted viewers’ appetite for Walt Disney’s ambitious project. When Snow finally visited, in 1959, at the age of 12, he arrived with high expectations that, he recalls happily, “were met and surpassed.” The author’s admiration for Disneyland infuses his brisk, thorough history of the huge theme park, from an idea conceived by “the powerful personality of one man” to its realization as a monument to “an America where all is prosperous and convivial”—a place, as writer Ray Bradbury commented, that “liberates men to their better selves.” Snow portrays Disney as a tireless and demanding boss who was “often dissatisfied with things as he found them; his preferences changed from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour.” He was a perfectionist determined to build his park no matter who (his brother, for example, who balked at the expense) or what (problems building a scale model of the Matterhorn, for one, and installing a jungle in arid California) got in the way of his dream: “something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.” Snow chronicles in detail the process of finding a site (Anaheim, in southern California); hiring engineers, designers, architects, landscapers, artists, and an ever increasing number of genial, polite staff; building the park’s structures and rides; planning for visitors’ movements through the park, expenditures, and needs such as water, toilets, and food; dealing with unions’ demands; promoting the new destination as “a place for people to find happiness and knowledge”; and overcoming an opening described as nothing less than mayhem.

An animated history of an iconic destination.