Orlando, Florida: Fantasy's Reality

Orlando, the boomtown of the South, is growing on the model of Disney World: a community that imitates an imitation of a community

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When word got out that a corporation that earned $703 million in 1989 had appropriated money that could have helped the poor, the public outcry could be heard all the way to Future World. The Orlando Sentinel called Disney the "grinch that stole affordable housing." Disney kept the money, but the controversy forced the company to promise it would not apply for the bonds in 1991.

Disney's image has also suffered from several unpleasant illegalities. Last year it was fined $550,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency for sewage violations and for improperly storing toxic waste on its property. The company made headlines in 1989 when -- in an effort to stop vultures from pecking out the eyes of tortoises on Discovery Island -- Disney employees apparently trapped and beat some of the scavengers to death. Federal and state officials charged the company that animated Bambi with 16 counts of animal cruelty. Disney agreed to give $95,000 to local conservation groups; the charges were dropped.

"Walt Disney was the messiah," says Bob Ward, designer of Universal's 444- acre theme park. "Disney saw the future, and it was the themed environment." Ward may be right, but even Disney planners are sometimes surprised by the infectiousness of their founder's idea. Everyone might have been less surprised had they observed the Magic Kingdom's effect on a small ^ corner of nature. When they were creating the theme park, Disney planners turned an island on one of the property's lakes into a semitropical jungle and bird sanctuary, a place of bamboo and palms, of plants from Central and South America, India, China and the Canary Islands. The intention was to populate the island mostly with lifelike robot birds, with a few real ones thrown in for charm's sake. But the living birds attracted hundreds of others, which flew in from all around the region.

Now there are no robots on the island, only a colorful, noisy bird colony. Like Orlando, it is thriving, out of the reach (almost) of predators, deep in Disney World's embrace.

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