Biography | Walt Disney — The Castle Drawbridge Opened on Live Television

People treat Disneyland as if it opened in a single calm morning.

The date the company keeps is a press preview that ran live to the country.

On 17 July 1955 Walt Disney dedicated the park on 160 acres of former orange grove in Anaheim, at the castle that still closes the view down Main Street.

ABC carried Dateline: Disneyland for ninety minutes. Estimates of the audience ran as high as ninety million.

The 17th was an invited preview. Counterfeit tickets and extra guests pushed the crowd well past the planned list; later accounts put more than twenty thousand people on the grounds.

The public ticket windows opened the next day, 18 July. The company has celebrated the 17th ever since, because that was the day Disney read the dedication at Town Square and children were sent across the castle drawbridge for the cameras.

Sleeping Beauty Castle stands seventy-seven feet. Herbert Ryman designed it to look taller by shrinking the details as they rise, a stage trick borrowed from the studio.

UPI the next morning called the project a seventeen-million-dollar mix of amusement park and world's fair. Asphalt was still soft in places. A gas leak put flame on the castle. The Mark Twain took on more passengers than the deck was meant to hold.

Disney staff later nicknamed the day Black Sunday. The park recovered in weeks. Within a month the company was reporting more than a million visitors.

This is the only Disney park Walt walked as a finished place. The pin is the castle, not the parking lot and not the later hotels.

A visitor still crosses a moat to Fantasyland. The orange trees are gone.

Photo: Tuxyso, 3 September 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.