Sunday, July 17, 1955, was a messy day for Walt Disney. After nearly a decade of obsessive planning, eleven months of frenzied construction, and nine months of televised progress reports, Disney's mental map of the world was ready to be born in Anaheim. Walt's soothing fireside chats had involved millions of TV tray-clutching families in the building process and now this shared vision of paradise regained was about to be realized. In an act of Promethean audacity, Disney's imaginary world had been etched upon the land and embedded in the public mind. It was a dream come true: a fabricated land of neatly packaged regions that would become the key symbolic landscape of modern America and the best known and most copied place on earth. Although Disney's rage for order and reassuring architecture would resonate throughout America and much of the world, Disneyland itself had a difficult and untidy birth.
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