Disney's Main Street USA: History, Elements & Design

Introduction

A staple of Disney theme parks is the Main Street USA zone. This section features prominently in all of the parks, usually coming right after the entrance. Key services like Guest Relations are located here — in the case of Guest Relations, inside the "City Hall" (HK Disney Source, 2014). There are a number of elements to the Main Street USA exhibit, and these will be discussed along with the zone's history. In particular, this paper examines how the different elements of Main Street USA work together. The concept has proven to be enduring, even across cultures, because of its magical portrayal of idealized American life, which draws heavily on Walt Disney's own childhood experiences.

History and Background

Main Street USA is a concept rooted in early 20th-century America. Many towns grew up around a central thoroughfare that often became known as Main Street. These towns were small, and in much of the country served as the focal point of rural life, providing services for the surrounding agricultural areas. Over time, Main Street USA evolved into something of an ideal rather than a specific place (Wasserman, 2012). That ideal revolved around values of simplicity, honesty, and a less complicated world — perhaps the idyllic world of childhood. The concept is especially associated with the Midwest, though similar scenes can be found in agricultural regions across the country.

Walt Disney devised the concept of Main Street USA as part of his theme parks, starting with the original park in southern California. Walt had grown up in a town called Marceline, Missouri, around the turn of the 20th century, and it was his childhood memories of that town around which the idea of Main Street USA was built in the Disney context (Younger, 2010). His vision contributed to the idyllic view of Main Street USA that is common in popular culture, though Disney was by no means the only person to hold this idea. Even today, Marceline has only about 2,000 residents, making it entirely representative of the small rural town where life is simple.

Disney felt that his childhood experiences would be relatable to patrons. Since he was seeking with Disneyland to create a magical place for children, and his own memories of Marceline were magical to him, he naturally conceived Main Street USA as a means of conveying that magic to other generations. The fact that many Americans shared this ideal of a simpler time gave the concept resonance across a broad spectrum of guests — Main Street USA was one aspect of the Disney parks that was as powerful for parents as it was for their children.

The second purpose of Main Street USA was to serve as a means of honoring the Disney creative family — not so much the fictional characters but the performers and producers who brought Disney to life. Many members of the Disney team, especially during the early days, have over time been memorialized in the windows and shopfronts along Main Street USA.

The Railroad

One of the defining elements of Main Street USA is the railroad. Because the zone is based on the ideal of an early 20th-century American town — much of the design is actually based on Fort Collins, Colorado, rather than Marceline (Younger, 2010) — the railroad is a prominent feature, as this era predated the automobile as a mass-market product. At the time, horseback riding and railway travel would have been the most common means of transportation for most people. The railway was critical to opening up the American West and is therefore a particularly important symbol of this era and the Midwestern concept.

As a child, Walt could hear trains from his home, and his father had a history of working on the railroad, making this a particularly powerful symbol for him — one that needed to be incorporated into the park, especially since by the time Disneyland was being completed, not only did everyone have a car, but air travel was becoming commonplace as well. The railroad was especially quaint, harkening back to those simpler times. The Main Street USA layout includes a railway station, and a narrow-gauge railroad departs from there, circumnavigating the entire park. Initially, this was a live steam railway, adding to its historic authenticity.

The railroad also carries with it the promise of magical transportation. There is a certain romance to train travel — note that it is used as recently as the Harry Potter series to communicate a bridge between the real and fantasy worlds, which is essentially the same purpose it serves at Disneyland.

Conclusion

There is considerable power in Main Street USA as an entrance point, and the Walt Disney Company has maintained it as the focal point of almost all its park entrances ever since. Even in foreign countries, where the metaphor and its connotations can be quite different — and where today's parents may be Gen-Xers who grew up in 1970s suburbia — there is power in these images as a sign of a lost world. Most of Disney's themed lands are fantasy worlds, and Main Street USA essentially asks guests to enter a fantasy world by first offering them something familiar and yet fantastical at the same time. The time-travel connotations are no accident: when you enter Main Street USA, you are being transported into Disney's world, and that makes it a particularly effective entrance to everything that follows.