for example, main street represents a small town’s downtown in middle america before white flight to the suburbs occurred.

by ‘white flight,’ i’m referring to the decades following the civil war when newly freed blacks flooded into northern cities like chicago, new york, and washington D.C. as blacks settled into the core of the urban areas, the white population fled to the suburbs (this is how suburban development began in the united states). white flight occurred earlier back east; this displacement did not reach california, for example, until the 50s after world war II.

main street U.S.A. recalls a time when the white majority still lived downtown. this is evident in walt’s show standards for the land; it was disneyland policy for the first decade of the park’s existence that blacks were rarely hired, and if so were never, ever cast in “face” positions (only foods, janitorial, etc.). only after boycott pressure from the NAACP in the late sixties did disneyland relent, but blacks were still held from “face” positions on main street well into the 1970s.

whatever one thinks about this policy, that fact is that main street U.S.A. was consciously designed to represent a time in our nation’s history when there was very little racial diversity in small town america, or in any town out of the south, for that matter.

new urbanism’s success at targeting middle-class whites can be seen in their demographics; disney’s celebration hovers at about 98% caucasian, at seaside it’s about 95%. again, this is not due to any exclusionary covenants—i simply think that the nostalgic vision of these places (and the times and places they seek to re-create) don’t appeal to other groups, predominantly.

the grove, although more diverse in its labor pool (being in los angeles, of course), still felt very “white”—being designed to evoke the same type of nostalgic vision.