https://www.orlandosentinel.com/travel/ ... story.html
And this:By the early 1960s, Walt Disney was looking to expand with another park easily accessible beyond the West Coast. St. Louis seemed a good choice, and not just because of its geographically central location or because Disney grew up in Missouri.
St. Louis was booming in the Camelot years. The Gateway Arch was under construction, opening in 1965. And Busch Stadium was being built a few blocks away, bringing both football and baseball downtown in 1966.
Plans called for "Walt Disney's Riverfront Square" to cover two blocks in the heart of downtown, just a few blocks from the Arch grounds and the Mississippi River.
St. Louis isn't blessed with California-like weather, so Disney's plan called for a five-story indoor park. Some of the rides planned for St. Louis eventually became fixtures at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, including the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
Disney was willing to pay for the rides and attractions, but wanted St. Louis' redevelopment corporation to pay for the building. The corporation declined to do so.
The Arch, the Cardinals and other attractions make St. Louis a popular tourist attraction today, with an estimated 21 million yearly visitors. Walt Disney World draws about 52 million annual visitors.
Disney officially backed out in 1965.
https://www.stltoday.com/business/colum ... d084b.html
Walt's plan was always to build Disney World (and EPCOT) in Florida, no matter if St. Louis was built or not. Had the leaders there been willing to take a greater risk, we would now have had a indoor park in St. Louis too. Maybe over time it would have expanded over its two original city blocks, but would of course never have been as huge as Disney World. Then again, Disney World was probably never meant to be as big as it ended up as. From Business Insider:Leaders of Civic Center Redevelopment Corp., which controlled the land, agreed to pay for the building that would house Riverfront Square, but balked when they found out the cost of the building Disney wanted. Disney was only willing to pay for things like rides and movies, not for any part of the structure. A memo said that on one of the floors, Civic Center would have spent $9 million to build walls, floor pits, and so on, while Disney's installation costs would have been just $4 million.
Disney may have had another reason for not wanting to commit a lot of money to St. Louis: Even as he was courting civic leaders here, he was acquiring land in Florida for what would become Walt Disney World.
Included was an industrial park covering 1000 acres. With the majority of Walt's plans skipped, the company suddenly had a lot of land available to do with as they pleased.We found the nearly half hour video Disney produced for Florida Legislators to get permission and rights for his project. In it, Disney laid out his big ideas for his massive Florida project.
Called "Project X," Walt's Florida expansion was meant to be much more than Disney World. Forget the theme park. Florida wasn't about Disney World, though it was a small part of the picture.
The theme park and all the other tourist facilities—hotels, motels and recreational activities—were meant to fill one small part of Disney's Florida project. This part alone is five times the size of California's Disneyland.