Main Street Disney

For people's images of Disney's Main Street, follow the link to Google Image Search.

The greatest ingenuity was lavished on Main Street. Disney wanted it to have a dream-like character, which he achieved by scaling every brick and tile and gas lamp down to five-eighths actual size. But it also had to accommodate functioning shops. So the ground floor is ninety per cent full size, the second is eighty per cent, and the third is sixty per cent. It has the toy-like quality that Disney was after, but it also accommodates the cash-generating shops, and the apartment that Disney had made for himself above the fire house. . . .

Disneyland is almost as much part of the conventional demonology of the metropolitan intellectual as suburbia. It is inevitably presented as the epitome of the lifeless and the slickly commercial. Yet it is by no means clear that the technological spectacle of the world's fairs has anything qualitatively different to offer. And the struggle by cities all over Europe to permade Disney to choose them as the site of the first Euro Disney, with inducements worth millions of dollars, suggests that Disneyland is not entirely unpopular. The comparison is kitsch, but there are clear parallels between classical shrines, Mayan temple sites and pilgrimage centres tended by a priestly order with Disney. It has become a safari park to preserve the endangered remains of the city. Sudjic 1992, 207