As we continue to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Disneyland this month, I felt it would be nice to take a moment to look at where Disneyland is located.
Walt looked at many different locations and finally decided on Anaheim.
Anaheim was not the first choice for Walt’s Disneyland.
Nor was it the second choice or really even the tenth. Land that was considered included a pistol range in Chatsworth, a coastal spot in Palos Verdes, a huge 440-acre plot in La Cañada, a parcel in Calabasas, and even areas in Riverside and San Diego counties.
Anaheim is a city in Orange County, California, and is considered part of the larger Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The word Anaheim is a combination of “Ana” after the nearby Santa Ana River and “heim,” a Germany word meaning “home” so it was a “home by the river.” Anaheim was founded in September 1857 by 50 German-Americans who had all originally come from San Francisco. The city was later incorporated in 1878.
The new owners intended to use the land to make wine as the Anaheim Vineyard Company. From 1860 to 1885, Anaheim wineries produced more than 1.25 million gallons of wine annually. In 1885, a strange disease attacked the vines and, within five years the 2 million vines that made up this huge vineyard were dead.
Citrus trees were planted and proved more successful thanks to the local hills which protected the fruit against the cold winds coming down from the mountains.
Other crops that prospered in Anaheim included walnuts and chili peppers.
Processors and growers included Anaheim Orchid, Anaheim Supreme, Balboa, Blue Vase, Pride of Anaheim, Siren, Hi-Class, and many others. The Southern California Fruit Growers Exchange, which was later renamed Sunkist, was organized in 1893.
Rudolph Boysen was Anaheim’s first park superintendent from 1921 to 1950 and he created a hybrid berry that Walter Knott later named the “boysenberry” in Boysen’s honor, which was sold and served at Knott’s Berry Farm in its famous pies.
Anaheim marked its Centennial in 1957 with a year's worth of activities, culminating in a week-long “Centennial Celebration,” which featured a beard contest, “Old Fashioned Fashion Show,” giant square dance, time capsule burial in City Park, and a grand ball with the coronation of a Centennial Queen. A highlight of the festival was the nightly performance of “Centurama,” an elaborately staged pageant of Anaheim history with a cast of 1,200 residents.
It was a final hometown celebration before the city was radically transformed by the popularity and success of Disneyland into a more modern metropolis.
In the mid-1950s, Anaheim was a small, quiet, simple, rural community and before Disneyland, agriculture was the primary industry.
A postcard from Anaheim in 1950 touted the city's simple and quiet environment.
In 1955, the city had a population of roughly 15,000 people. Today, the population is more than 345,000.
In the early 1950s, it was four square miles. Today it is approximately forty-two square miles.
In 1955, the year Disneyland opened, 3,300 more acres were included within the city limits. By the end of that year, Anaheim was four times the size it was in 1953, when Walt first started looking at the area.
The success of Disneyland spurred other businesses to build or relocate to Anaheim, as well as a rapid growth in new homeowners wanting to live in the shadow of the magic kingdom.
As Anaheim’s city manager from 1950 to 1976, Keith Murdoch remembered the situation at the time that the city was as interested in having Disney as much or more as Disney was in having a location in Anaheim because the city was looking to raise its profile and attract some major businesses.
“We were looking to improve the economic status of the city by attracting new industries,” he said. “We looked at Disney as another industrial opportunity.”
On August 19, 1966, the Disney Company received the “Chain of Title” from the First American Title Insurance & Trust Company, tracing Disneyland from the original land grant to the present.
Disneyland was located on parcels of land in the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, which had been under the jurisdiction of the King of Spain in 1769. After becoming part of Mexico, the area was given to Juan Pacifico Ontiveras in 1837.
After California became part of the United States territory, the government officially confirmed that the land belonged to him. He later sold 1,165 acres, at $2 per acre, to the founders of Anaheim in 1857. Nearly a century later, that same land would cost Walt more than $4,000 an acre.
In June 1953, Walt hired the Stanford Research Institute to make two surveys. One would find the ideal location for Disneyland. The other would determine the economic feasibility of building Disneyland. Disney paid $23,000 for the site study and a four month feasibility study.
Charles Luckman, one of the architects that Walt had hired to build the never-built Mickey Mouse Park in Burbank, recommended Harrison “Buzz” Price, who was the head of the Los Angeles office of SRI, to Walt. The project manager was C.V. Wood Jr., but it was Price who was the “numbers” guy.
By late August, Price had narrowed down the potential areas, but also concluded that Los Angeles was becoming increasingly decentralized and land too expensive for any area there to be viable.
In addition, Walt had immediately ruled out any location near the beach since it could take as much as half his potential audience away from visiting his venue as they romped in the Pacific Ocean for free. Walt also feared that dripping wet swim suit clad guests might then stop off at his entertainment enterprise.
Price pointed out that Orange County seemed to have the best climate in terms of extremes of temperatures as well as being the area where the center of population seemed to be moving especially with the new Santa Ana Freeway then under construction that would supposedly be finished late in 1954.
In addition, Price had to take into account a good location for television transmission because Walt intended to broadcast from the park. One of the restrictions was that obstructions, such as power lines, couldn’t be in direct line from the park to the antennas atop Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains.
Anaheim City Manager Keith Murdoch working with Earne Moeller, the manager of the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce, outlined two possible sites. Both sites were mainly orange groves with very few buildings.
On a Saturday, on the way to the first site, Walt passed a Catholic cemetery that had fallen into disrepair and was unkempt. He immediately rejected the site, not wanting Disneyland visitors to drive by it despite assurances that the city would clean it up. He liked the second site and decided to put down a deposit on some of the land.
Afterward, Walt and his team on their way back to Burbank stopped at Knott’s Berry Farm for lunch and had an enthusiastic discussion about the possibilities of that site.
Unfortunately, at a nearby table was a realtor from Garden Grove who listened intently to the conversation and then, on Sunday, obtained options on some of the key parcels in hopes of making a fortune.
That killed the deal on Monday morning and Walt forfeited his deposit. Murdoch searched and found two other locations, but both of those failed to materialize.
Finally, a clever Murdoch found a block of land held by only seventeen owners who were thinking of selling the land to a housing subdivision. The only problem was that Cerritos Avenue, that went from Harbor Boulevard all the way to the Pacific Ocean, ran right through the middle of it.
With willing property owners the street could be closed and abandoned. The area was very close to one of the pins that SRI had put on a map of potential sites.
“If you can close that street, we’ve got a deal,” Walt told Murdoch.
The street was closed. The orange growing business was going through hard times and the owners welcomed this opportunity to get out. For the most part, they knew it was Disney that was buying the land and they felt they were getting a good price.
The price would be relatively inexpensive at an average of $4,500 per acre. The total cost for just the land was $879,000. The purchase of the land by Disney would not be announced officially until May 1954.
Walt liked the cooperative nature of the Anaheim government and the growth possibilities of the area. He felt that it would be a good home for his park and he was right.
A 1955 postcard shows the berm in front of Disneyland Park and the Main Street Railroad Station.
Unfortunately, the official public groundbreaking ceremony, scheduled for August 25, 1954, was cancelled two weeks earlier because of the threat of a protest demonstration by a handful of local residents led by two Garden Grove businessmen that might have stalled the annexation of the land Disneyland was on.
On January 5, 1955, the Disneyland plot of land officially became part of the City of Anaheim and had access to all of the necessary city infrastructure from sewage to garbage collection and more.
Ron Dominguez started working at Disneyland in 1955 when he was 19 years old, and later became the vice president of the park. In 1985, during Disneyland’s 30th anniversary celebration, I interviewed him about his unique connection to Anaheim and Disneyland.
He was born and lived on the property that became part of the original Frontierland and Adventureland. Here are Ron’s memories:
“In the late 1890s, my maternal grandfather came here from Perry, Iowa and purchased thirty acres of Orange County land. His name was Wyran Knowlton and at first, he planted a walnut grove, then, in 1910 changed the walnuts for oranges.
“In 1920, Knowlton’s daughter, my mother Laura, married Paul Dominguez, who was part of the family that had the Bernardo Yorba enormous land grants in Southern California. My folks built a house there in 1925.
“I was born in that house in 1935. After I had spent years of weeding and tromping through my family’s orange grove, I was surprised to hear my parents talk about selling the property to a man who had driven by in a convertible a couple of times. That man was Walt Disney. People had made offers for our land since 1951 or so but my mother was never really interested.
“Selling those 10 acres was real emotional for my mom who had struggled to hang on to our house and land and make the groves pay after her dad died. She definitely did not envision that it would ever become part of a magical kingdom.
“The two real estate men who put the deal together were personal friends of the family. They assured her that she was selling to a quality organization. Walt invited us all up to the studio to see a presentation so we could see it wasn’t going to be a typical dirty amusement park. He was very convincing. She finally agreed to sign the necessary papers and we were the last of the original seventeen families to move out.
“I can remember the bulldozers uprooting the nearby orchards starting in July and we didn’t pack up until August because our new house wasn’t ready yet. When we left, we were stepping around ditches and holes because work was already being done.
“Before we moved out, we met Earl Shelton who was the Disney coordinator of construction and I later contacted him to set up an interview for a job. He had been always gently pushing us to get out of the house so his construction crew could start some work there.
“I had graduated Anaheim High School and was at the University of Arizona and my parents kept telling me about all these lines of people along West Street where the personnel office was located looking for work at Disneyland. I think they began interviewing in January 1955.
“I told my parents to get in touch with Earl to see if he could get me an interview when I came home in early May. I got a job as a ticket taker at the front gate. I was 19 years old.
“One story I always loved about the opening was told to me by Ken Anderson. He told me that the 20,000 Leagues exhibit was built from scratch in just two weeks. He and two other artists were up all night painting the giant squid the night before opening. Walt was walking around checking on things and donned a mask and painted part of the squid himself.
“The original plan on opening day was to stagger the arrival of guests so there would be a smooth and orderly flow. The tickets all had a specific time so we could spread out all the arrivals.
“I was told a crowd management firm had been hired to help but everyone all showed up early. Everyone wanted to come early to see the movie stars and to see what Walt had done after seeing it being built on all those television shows. It was exciting to see celebrities come in through the front gate, to have them come to my hometown.
“On that first day, several rides broke down and only a few restrooms were working. Walt himself was seen running toilet paper to some of them. But despite all the snafus, the magic feel of the place rubbed off on people at the very beginning. It was a really hot day and it was a madhouse.
“I was a Ticket Receptionist at the Main Gate for only two weeks, then I was transferred to the trains. After the summer, my boss 'Doc' Lemmon said to me, 'You ought to stick around. This place is here to stay. You should get in on the ground floor.'
“I am glad I took that risk. I spent the first winter working on the Mule Packs and the Stage Coach in Frontierland. Within that first year of joining Disney, I had been trained on every attraction and became a temporary supervisor of Main Street, U.S.A.
“Somebody thought I looked a little like actor Fess Parker, and I ended up playing Davy Crockett on the Mike Fink Keel Boats for awhile. We had real jousting contests, trying to knock the other guy into the water. I took my share of dunkings.
“Our house was located near to where the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean is today. Our house and another house from the property were moved behind Main Street and put together and became the administration offices for the first few years. It had to be torn down in 1958 because of the building of the Grand Canyon Diorama back there.
“They gave me a big sledge hammer and took some publicity shots of me pounding away on my old house. It was very solidly built and took a lot of effort by a construction crew to get it finally down.
“A third home from the original property was moved over to West Street to become the Casting building. That’s where I had my interview.
“A house on The Disneyland Hotel site was moved behind the Park for use by the landscapers. The only house from the original property still standing is the one that the Popes lived in when they were handling all the horses at Disneyland for the Pony Farm.
“I’m glad my parents decided to sell. Business was always slow at the fruit stand anyway.
“There's something from my old orange grove, from that original property, that is still at Disneyland, a palm tree [the fat tall tree that punches through the boathouse of near the Indiana Jones Fastpass area]. For a long time it was in the queue for the Jungle Cruise. Walt agreed to save it as part of the deal for buying our property. He was a sentimental guy like my mom and he saw how important it was to her. Besides he needed all the trees he could get. It is a Canary Island Date Palm and it was planted in 1896 as wedding gift to my grandparents from the area's first botanist.
“Life is funny. My daughter married the great-grandson of the guy who gave my grandparents the palm tree. Today at Disneyland, it is called the Dominguez Tree.”
