KCET has new intel on Disney California Adventure's under-construction entry plaza, Buena Vista Street, which will feature a no doubt magical mashup of twenties and thirties Los Angeles tropes. (Actually, it sounds a little Lynchian to us: "Everything was reinterpreted to give Buena Vista Street its own unique nostalgic scale?All were meant to reflect the optimism of the times and the diverse background of the population," according to Imagineer Coulter inn.") The park has already unveiled Pan Pacific Auditorium-inspired turnstiles (the Plummer, Wurdeman & Becket building at the current Pan Pacific Park site burned down in 1989), and will also be getting Red Car-inspired trolleys and a recreation of the Carthay Circle Theatre (the original, in Carthay, was demolished in 1969).
Just past the gates, Buena Vista Street will have a "mom-and-pop feeling with living quarters above small retail shops, like Silverlake or Atwater Village"; farther into the park, it'll feel more like an old Wilshire or Westwood commercial district, with a Bullocks Wilshire-type department store at the end of the street. The two sections of the street will be divided by the Disneyland Monorail's elevated track, which is currently modeled on the Golden Gate Bridge, but which will get a makeover to look more like the Glendale-Hyperion Bridge between Silver Lake and Atwater Village ("Built between 1927 and 1929 out of steel-reinforced concrete, the viaduct dates from the same period that Walt Disney and his brother Roy opened the Walt Disney Studios just a half-mile away at 2725 Hyperion Avenue in Silverlake.").
Buena Vista Street should be opening sometime this summer.
· How Disney Imagineers Recreated '20s and '30s L.A. in 21st-Century Anaheim [KCET]
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