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Orlando offers hope for spiritual immortality too. Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group that plans to bring the Gospel to 6 billion people worldwide by the year 2000, is moving its headquarters from San Bernardino, Calif., to the area. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which owns a ranch in rural Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties 10 times the size of Disney's property, wants to build a community for 10,000 families.
Even Tammy Faye Bakker, the wife of defrocked televangelist Jim Bakker, has moved the vestiges of their New Covenant Ministries to a warehouse on the outskirts of Orlando; Tupperware salespeople once used the place to hold inspirational meetings. Standing in a sanctuary with pink walls, a pink rug and large brass giraffes around the altar, she reveals that Disney World holds the secret of her intended comeback. "The spiritual person and the person who wants to have fun, it's the same thing," says Bakker, who helped her husband build Heritage USA, the giant Christian theme park in Fort Mill, S.C., that went under. "When you're in Disney, you have hope that things can be better. And when we know God, there's always hope for a better place, which is of course heaven."
While Orlando's entrepreneurs sell instant Edens, Orlando residents are finding that their earthly garden is being turned upside down. The last orange grove on Orange Avenue was knocked down in 1977. A tourist's only glimpse of the crop that once supported Orlando's economy is likely to be the miniature orange trees "that really bear fruit" sold in souvenir shops. In the past 20 years at least four of the city's main thoroughfares have become cluttered with fast-food joints, gift shops, motels, hotels and gas stations that mount a neon assault ($2.99 FOR MICKEY MOUSE!) on passersby. On some strips, condominiums and steak houses have been put up a few yards from pastures where cows are still grazing.
"It's ugly, it's awful, it's appalling," says Sentinel columnist Morris. "You live here every day as a Floridian with a tremendous sense of loss." The former mayor of Orlando, Carl Langford, chose to retire somewhere else. "I spent 30 years of my life trying to get people to move down there, and then they all did," he says from his new home in Maggie Valley, N.C.
Orange County commissioner Bill Donegan, who grew up in California, sees signs that Orlando could become the next Los Angeles. Traffic on Interstate 4, which runs through the heart of the city, slows to a long standstill at rush hour. A regional planning group has said the highway will need 22 lanes by the year 2000; it now has six. A beltway that will run from the airport around the city is being started just as the head of Disney Attractions, Dick Nunis, is beginning to talk about the need for a second such artery. And so far, no one can agree on where, or even whether, to build a public transportation system for the metro area.