Frommer's EasyGuide to Walt Disney World and Orlando 2014 by Jason Cochran

Author:Jason Cochran [Cochran, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781628870411
Publisher: FrommerMedia

Preserving a Legend

My great-grandfather was a professional photographer from Atlanta. When I was a boy, some of his favorite Kodachrome slides, shot in the 1950s, depicted a group of coquettish women water-skiing across a lake in a pyramid formation, balancing on each others’ shoulders. They waved at the camera. What a bountiful place! This was Cypress Gardens an hour south of Orlando, which opened in 1936 and started the world thinking about Central Florida as the seat of a new kind of tourism. It’s impossible to overestimate its effect on tourism. In 1963, it tied the Grand Canyon as America’s number-one tourist attraction—the same year, Walt Disney came to scout for land of his own. The Shah of Iran and Elvis water-skied there, Johnny Carson and Mike Douglas shot show there—it lured generations of America to experience the languid junglelike land of parrots, alligators, and heavy orchids that was Florida. Distant Interstates and Disney siphoned away business, and Cypress Gardens became a honky-tonk carnival of cheap rides and country music concerts before failing outright. Legoland’s European parks incorporate gardens, and its new Orlando property (see below) leases 30 acres what remained of the old gardens—and did away with the wandering Southern belles and the obsolete celebration of antebellum plantation life—but for a glimpse of what things were like in the glory days, see Esther Williams’ jaw-dropping heli-water-ski production number in MGM’s “Easy to Love” (1953).

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