Main Street, U.S.A.

Main Street, U.S.A. is the entry land of Disney's "castle parks": a turn-of-the-twentieth-century American small-town street that guests walk down, between the entrance and the castle, at the start and end of every visit. Lined with shops and restaurants rather than rides, it works as the parks' opening credits, setting period, scale and mood before the other lands branch off the central hub. Main Street was one of the original lands of Disneyland in 1955, and a version has opened with every castle park since: the Magic Kingdom in 1971, Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, Disneyland Paris in 1992, Hong Kong Disneyland in 2005 and Shanghai Disneyland in 2016, the last two under variant forms discussed below. The two American versions have their own articles at Main Street, U.S.A. (Disneyland) and Main Street, U.S.A. (Magic Kingdom).

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Concept and design

Walt Disney modelled the street on the small-town America of his boyhood — above all Marceline, Missouri, where he lived from 1906 to 1911 — idealised into everybody's hometown rather than copied building by building. His designer Harper Goff brought a second hometown into the mix: Goff showed Walt photographs of his own childhood home, Fort Collins, Colorado, and features of Fort Collins, including its city hall and bank building, were worked into the street. The buildings use forced perspective, each upper storey built slightly smaller than the one below, so the street feels taller and the castle farther away on the way in — and, by the same trick, the exit feels closer at the end of a long day. Upper windows carry painted credits naming Imagineers, executives and friends of Walt Disney as the street's shopkeepers and professionals. Every version except Tokyo's and Shanghai's is entered beneath a railroad station.

Disneyland

At Disneyland, Main Street opened on July 17, 1955, running from Town Square — with City Hall, the fire station containing Walt Disney's own apartment above it, and the Opera House, later home to Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln — to the hub in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Horse-drawn streetcars, the Main Street Cinema and shops such as the Emporium established the template every later park inherited. It is the most intimate of the Main Streets, built at the smallest scale, and the only one Walt Disney himself walked down.

Magic Kingdom

Florida's Main Street opened on October 1, 1971, recognisably the same street rebuilt at a larger scale: the buildings stand taller, in part because the park's utilidor tunnels raise the whole street a level above the Florida ground. Its architecture also reaches beyond the Midwest, blending in eastern seaboard influences, and it sits directly beside Liberty Square, an arrangement unique to Florida, so guests step from the early-1900s street straight into colonial America. Casey's Corner and The Crystal Palace anchor its hub end, and the Walt Disney World Railroad still boards above its entrance.

Other parks

Tokyo solved Japan's rainy climate by renaming the land and roofing it: World Bazaar, opened April 15, 1983, keeps the American street but covers it with a glass Victorian-style conservatory canopy, and replaces the railroad station entrance with open arches. Paris kept the street open to the sky but hedged against the same weather differently, with two long covered arcades running behind the shops the length of the street: the Liberty Arcade, telling the story of the Statue of Liberty, towards Frontierland, and the Discovery Arcade, celebrating nineteenth-century inventors, towards Discoveryland. Hong Kong's Main Street, opened in 2005, is a near-replica of California's in layout and scale, adapted to its own park. Shanghai departed furthest: it has no Main Street, U.S.A. at all, but Mickey Avenue, opened June 16, 2016 — a shorter, character-led entry street where Mickey Mouse and his friends, rather than an idealised 1900s town, are the residents guests are introduced to first.

See also

• Main Street, U.S.A. (Disneyland)
• Main Street, U.S.A. (Magic Kingdom)
• Main Street Cinema
• Main Street Electrical Parade
• Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln
• Liberty Square