History
In 1991, Disney announced plans to build WestCOT on the site of Disneyland's parking lot. It was to be themed around a Utopian vision of the future, similar to EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World, and would have been the first Disney theme park to contain hotels within the park.
Several issues arose that would ultimately lead to the project's cancellation. It required a significant land acquisition, though residential areas built around Disneyland caused land prices to skyrocket, and thousands of residents would have needed to be relocated. Residents claimed that the park's light pollution would be too much to bear at night, and that the replica of Spaceship Earth would have become an eyesore. With estimates hovering close to $3 billion and the company's significant financial problems with the recently-opened Disneyland Resort Paris, the project was scrapped 1995. CEO Michael Eisner held a three-day executive retreat in Aspen, Colorado to come up with a new idea, and from that meeting of about thirty executives came the idea for a California-themed park. That project became Disney's California Adventure, which opened in 2001 on the property that WestCOT was to occupy. While Disney's California Adventure initially cost $650 million to build, problems with attendance and interest led Disney to spend an additional $1.1 billion to overhaul the park from 2007–2012, in addition to $100 million already spent on changes since its initial opening.
The idea of building a resort hotel within a theme park was later implemented with the Tokyo DisneySea Hotel MiraCosta, which opened in 2001.
Read more about this topic: West COT
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)