Paris Disneyland, Its Origin Story

Brand emergency revealed at a chance meeting with Disney architects

We made our first visit to Paris in the early 1990’s, and like typical Americans we were hungry at 6:00 p.m. So, my wife and I climbed Montmartre and stumbled into a huge but — at that unfashionable hour — nearly empty restaurant. In fact, there was only one other couple dining there besides ourselves.

It turns out they were Americans, too. Architects from San Francisco. Paris Disneyland was about to open and the two of them had been flown over, they confided, for an “Emergency.”

“What?” we inquired.

The entrance to Disneyland, everyone knows, looks like the Golden Age of America filtered through Walt Disney’s childhood. A Midwestern American town in the 1890’s. The era and Indiana atmosphere of the Broadway hit “The Music Man.” Ice cream socials and buggy rides.

But, alas, that part of Paris Disneyland had been given over to Italian subcontractors. And the feeling among the Disney folks was that instead of turn-of-the-century Indiana, the Italians had done their own thing. Something more like Chicago in the 1930’s, Al Capone and the Untouchables.

“Zut alors!” Here was an emergency! So, the California architects has been flown over to “make things…