The Happiest Place on Earth
Disneyland
Anaheim · Disneyland Park & California Adventure · California
Disneyland
California, USA · Anaheim · Disneyland Park & California Adventure
5 places pinned — click any one for its story.
The place
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, on 160 acres of Anaheim orange grove, and the opening day was a disaster — counterfeit tickets, a heat wave that softened the fresh asphalt, drinking fountains that did not work because of a plumbers' strike. Walt Disney called it Black Sunday. Within seven weeks a million people had come through the gate anyway, and the theme park as a form was invented.
What makes the place work is stagecraft rather than scale. The berm around the perimeter hides the outside world. Main Street's buildings shrink floor by floor so the street feels longer walking in and shorter walking out, tired, at the end of the night. The castle is only 77 feet tall. Every land has its own soundtrack, its own smell, and its own trash cans, and you cannot see two lands at once. Underneath it all runs the same idea Walt kept repeating: the guest should never be reminded where they actually are.
It is the only Disney park Walt himself walked, and the only one he supervised from the first stake in the ground — which is why Anaheim, not Orlando, is the one that still feels hand-made.
Places I visited
History & facts for each spot — with a “then & now” archival photo where one exists. Every one has its own page; open it for the full write-up and all the photos.
The little castle at the end of Main Street — only 77 feet tall, deliberately built with forced perspective so it reads as far bigger than it is. Modelled loosely on Neuschwanstein, it has been the hub of the park since opening day in 1955 and is the smallest of all the Disney castles.
Full history & photos →Walt Disney's idealised turn-of-the-century American main street, based on his boyhood Marceline, Missouri. Buildings step down in scale as they rise — full size on the ground floor, then 7/8, then 5/8 — to make the street feel longer and the castle further away than it is.
Full history & photos →The world's first tubular steel roller coaster, opened in 1959 and built at a 1:100 scale of the real Matterhorn. Walt saw the mountain while filming in Switzerland and had it dropped into Anaheim; climbers still scale the outside on holidays.
Full history & photos →The park's answer to the space age — rebuilt several times as the future kept arriving. Space Mountain, a coaster run almost entirely in the dark, opened in Anaheim in 1977 and periodically turns into Hyperspace Mountain.
Full history & photos →The second gate, opened 2001 across the esplanade, on what had been Disneyland's parking lot. Rebuilt over the following decade into Cars Land, Pixar Pier and Avengers Campus after a lukewarm start.
Full history & photos →
My photos
