Tom Lewis lives in a dream. The dream is Celebration, Fla., the traditional community Disney built on 5,000 acres on the far southern end of Walt Disney World property. It is a dream in which Lewis has been wide awake since its inception and on through to the last detail – right down to the cocoa-brown Victorian farm house with the wide front porch he and his wife, Cynthia, built in the town.
And it’s a dream he has lived for more than a dozen years since signing on for his "fourth career" – originally as director of residential development for Disney Development Co.
It began while Peter Rummell was head of Disney Development. Lewis, BS 61, Arch 61, M Arch 66, remembers the late-night conversations with Rummell that led him to join Disney.
"Peter was in Paris working on EuroDisney – now Disneyland Paris – and he said, ’You have a chance to be a part of the most significant planning and development work that’s ever been done.’ I had no idea what he meant," Lewis says.
It was 1987, 15 years after Walt Disney World opened, and at the time Disney was evaluating its property holdings in Orlando, Fla., to determine how much land and infrastructure was needed to finish the buildout of the Walt Disney World resorts. Lewis says Rummell believed there would be some land left over, and the potential was there to use it in a community-development project.
Once they saw they had the land, step two was to decide what to do with it. The first option was to hold it, but in Florida, you don’t hold land because it will be harder to develop tomorrow than it is today," Lewis says. "The second option was to sell it, but they realized by the time they put enough restrictions on it for use, it was devalued. The third option was to develop."
With Rummell's idea, Lewis and Rummell began to fashion the concept of a multi-use planned community.
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