By 1997, so much had already been written about Walt Disney's city of the future that I was hesitant to attempt anything comprehensive for WYW's first page on the concept.  In addition, Paul F. Anderson had by that time targeted EPCOT as the subject of a future Persistence of Vision story, which would have been exhaustive and mind-shattering had the magazine's publication not been indefinitely suspended!  Even in the absence of Anderson's essays, it is difficult to contribute to the public record regarding EPCOT in terms of offering something factually new.

     But this immense unrealized dream has to be included in any self-respecting (or maybe even self-deprecating) overview of WDW anomalies.  EPCOT was the driving force behind Walt's entire Florida vision, the perceived destination of his fantastic free enterprise voyage.  The whole of the WDW project, at the time of construction, was built around the notion of EPCOT falling into the middle of the works a few years later.  Of course, it never happened.  As most everyone knows, the dichotomous theme park that ultimately usurped the EPCOT acronym in 1982 bore no physical resemblance - and scarcely a philosophical one - to the concept for which it was named.  And the explanations given for this over the years have been almost as varied as the range of rough drafts that broke EPCOT down into a bankable enterprise instead of the incredible, far-reaching gamble originally envisioned by the "world's master showman."

     Walt Disney had been messing with matters of space planning, crowd flow and infrastructure for decades leading into the early 1960s, which is when colleagues first remembered him walking around with books on city planning.   The Disney Studios, the CarolWood Pacific Railroad, Disneyland and CalArts were some obvious examples where his hand could be seen in the development of real-life environments which would be inhabited, whether for a few minutes or a full day at a time, by real-world people.  His first public mention of plans for an actual city, however, came only thirteen months before his death.  At a November 15, 1965 Florida press conference (where he confirmed that Walt Disney Productions was the "mystery industry" that had purchased over 27,000 acres of land southwest of Orlando), he spoke of both "a model community" where the employees of his development would live and a "city of tomorrow."  But the public's interest at the time was focused on Disney's plans for a theme park and recreational facilities, not on vague references to futuristic cities.
   
     So with thousands of Florida politicians and businessmen calculating the economic windfall that WDW Phase 1 would cause their respective communities and corporations, Walt Disney returned to California to spend his final year working on the one aspect of his new endeavor that could set his company back by untold hundreds of millions.  While many of his key WED personnel were focused on Disneyland's upcoming Pirate attraction, Tomorrowland overhaul and/or the relocation of 1964-1965 New York World's Fair exhibits from Flushing Meadows to Anaheim, he set up a separate team of designers behind a locked door at the studio to work on nothing but the utopian guts of his Florida Project, to plan the conversion of Herb Ryman's stunning concept painting (above) from canvas to steel.  This was to be EPCOT, which stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it had Walt's full attention.  In October 1966 he made a film, also entitled "EPCOT," in which the basic principles and designs of this community were outlined.

     EPCOT's signature visual feature was its 30-story hotel structure placed in the dead center of the city's elliptical layout.  This spatial configuration,, a.k.a. "the radial plan," looked like an eyeball drawn by H.R. Giger.  It was basically an extension of the hub principle employed to success at Disneyland and was closely related to Ebenezer Howard's garden city and Victor Gruen's cellular metropolis of tomorrow - a circular city with businesses and community gathering spots positioned with increased density toward the central point.  Everything would radiate out from there like spokes on a wheel.  Shopping districts, office buildings, convention centers, the hotel and a transportation center would sit at the heart of the community under a common roof, completely enclosed and climate-controlled.  Along the perimeter of this core would sit high-density apartment buildings, home to some of the city's workers.  Just beyond these structures would be an expansive green belt upon which would sit community buildings, schools, churches, sports and recreational complexes for EPCOT's residents.  Further out still, surrounding the entire development, would lie the low-density neighborhood areas.  Here houses would back up against broad parks where children could play safely, free from traffic.

     The purpose of this city, in Walt's words, was to "build a living showcase that more people will talk about and come to look at than any other area in the world."  It was designed for a population of 20,000 who would live, work, learn and play primarily within EPCOT or other parts of Walt Disney World.  And the entire complex would be charged with the daunting task of continually forecasting American urban and home life 25 years into the future.  American industries would be constantly updating the technologies in both the commercial buildings and the homes, and those industries would be heavily relied upon as financial partners in the venture.

     EPCOT's transportation system would consist largely of two technologies that Disney had already been using or developing at the time: the monorail and the peoplemover.  The monorail would run straight through the center of the city with a station directly below the hotel.  In this "transportation lobby," there would be connecting service to all parts of the community via the peoplemover.  This system would radiate from the central lobby on 20 separate tracks to the furthest extremes of the low-density residential areas, with intermittent stations (vs. stops, for the peoplemover never stops).  It was projected that residents would only need their cars for making long trips, not for commuting or shopping.  While EPCOT contained plenty of roadways, they were all set up to flow effortlessly in counter-clockwise circles, both large and small, as a result of master-planning.  Industrial automotive vehicles would be relegated to streets and parking spaces below the center of the city to keep things practical and looking pretty.  It was even predicted that "nowhere in Disney World will a signal light ever slow the constant flow of traffic." What fun would predictions be if they all came true?

     The term "center" in the name of this new theme park, though no longer used today, was a crucial part of the company's strategy at the time.  From the beginning, Walt Disney World was built with EPCOT in mind, and even the development of Phase 1 had employed a variety of new systems and processes.  From the modular construction techniques used in building the hotels to the water hyacinth waste treatment program, Walt Disney World was a sort of testing ground.  And now the company purported that WDW was EPCOT and had been EPCOT all along, and EPCOT Center was where the "new materials and new systems" of WDW/EPCOT would be shown to the public.  It was a fairly daring rationale to put forth to anyone who remembered Walt Disney's film or had seen the initial intended scope of Project Florida.  But the company was doing just that, straight-faced and free of concessions.

     The approach had an inherent flaw about which, strangely enough, journalists failed to question Disney management during EPCOT Center's construction and opening.  It was that while WDW had dabbled in a handful of experimental processes, none of the cornerstone precepts of EPCOT the city had been applied to development of WDW since 1971, and precious few were being built into EPCOT Center itself.  On-property transit for employees from parking lots to their work locations was handled by fossil fuel-burning buses rather than clean, electric Peoplemover systems.  The majority of connections for on-property resort guests was also handled by bus instead of monorail.  The "pedestrian is king" concept never truly caught on.  Traffic lights did, of course, catch on exponentially since working roadways into a constant circular flow was apparently too costly.  And the company's highly-touted utilidor concept was only employed one more time on property, in EPCOT Center, and only below a small portion of the park's Communicore area.  The Magic Kingdom's AVAC trash-collection system was never replicated in another park.  In short, all of those forward-looking concepts that were to have been integral to WDW were phased out over time.

     In 1990 ABC's Chris Wallace interviewed Walt Disney Attractions President Dick Nunis for a Prime Time Live segment on WDW.  During their conversation, Wallace asked Nunis about EPCOT, the city that never materialized.  Nunis, who had years earlier suggested that the EPCOT plans Walt left behind were sketchy at best, responded by asking, "isn't this a city?"  He offered by way of example the fact that thousands of guests spent the night on WDW property every evening, and they were real people.  Using Nunis' logic, guests at WDW hotels had become the citizens of EPCOT, an extension of the theory that WDW was EPCOT.

   You can read much more about Walt Disney's EPCOT at Waltopia.com