Disneyland

Disneyland is a theme park located in Anaheim, California. It is also shorthand for the Disneyland Resort, which includes the theme park.

History

The beginning

Walt Disney began to think about building a theme park as far back as the 1930s, when taking his two young daughters to a typical amusement park of the day. Sitting on a bench while they rode the rides, he started wondering why someone couldn't come up with a park which an entire family could enjoy together. It was not, however, until 1954 that he was able to begin work in earnest.

Construction began on July 16, 1954. Meanwhile, the Disneyland TV show was already promoting the park to viewers across the nation.

Opening day

July 17, 1955, the day Disneyland opened to the public, became known as "Black Sunday". 11,000 tickets had been distributed to sponsors, suppliers, and employees, but some were copied or forged, and some people brought in entire families on a single ticket. The official attendance for the day was 28,154.

The park was not prepared to handle a crowd of that size. Every operating attraction experienced some sort of breakdown during the day. A plumbers' strike shortly before the opening had forced Disney to choose between having either working restrooms or working drinking fountains. The hot sun partly melted the asphalt on Main Street, trapping some visitors' shoes.

The next day's newspapers gave a nearly unanimous verdict: The park was a total disaster, an unmitigated folly, doomed to close soon.

The early years

However, thousands of people had already made plans, and Disneyland enjoyed strong attendance for its first month. The crowds dropped off after that, though. In the winter, setting the pattern for the next few years, attendance was so low that there were doubts as to whether the park would survive.

In the meantime, Disney's park designers, or "Imagineers", had plenty more ideas for new attractions. They were also climbing a steep learning curve as they quickly discovered what worked and what didn't. The result was a park in a constant state of flux almost from the moment it opened. Indeed, Walt Disney's intention was for the park to never be "finished", but always adding new features.

Stagnation and the Eisner era

After Walt Disney's death, work on Disneyland slowed to a crawl. In 1984, having seen five successive years of declining attendance at Disneyland, and with the movie studio floundering, Michael Eisner was brought in to be the chairman and CEO, and Frank Wells to be the president and COO.

At first, Eisner was seen as a revitalizing force.