Buena Vista Street
Buena Vista Street is the entrance land of Disney California Adventure at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. Opened on June 15, 2012, it replaced the park's original Sunshine Plaza entry and depicts Los Angeles in the 1920s and early 1930s, at the time Walt Disney arrived in California. The land forms the park's main street, running from the entrance turnstiles to a central plaza dominated by a recreation of the Carthay Circle Theatre.
Where the original entrance relied on a stylised postcard mural and a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, Buena Vista Street was designed as a lived-in neighbourhood, with period shopfronts, a working trolley line and background details drawn from Disney's own early history in the city.
History
Disney California Adventure opened in 2001 with Sunshine Plaza, a broad entry area whose most distinctive features were a large sun sculpture and the sounds of California popular music. Criticism of the park in its first decade frequently began at its entrance, which offered little of the sense of arrival provided by Main Street, U.S.A. at Disneyland Park.
Buena Vista Street was the first element announced in the park's 2007 redesign and the last to be completed. Work required the removal of the Sunshine Plaza structures and a reworking of the entrance itself, whose turnstile building was given streamlining and tilework inspired by the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. The land opened together with Cars Land on June 15, 2012, the day the expanded park was rededicated.
Design and theme
The setting is Los Angeles shortly after Walt Disney's arrival by train from Kansas City in 1923, with a suitcase and, in the familiar account, forty dollars. Architecture mixes Spanish Colonial Revival, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne styles then current in the city. Street names, shop names and window inscriptions refer to people and places from Disney's early career, including the Hyperion Avenue studio where Mickey Mouse and Snow White were developed.
Near the entrance, the Storytellers statue shows a young Walt Disney with an early Mickey Mouse standing on a suitcase. It was placed as a counterpart to the Partners statue of Walt and Mickey in Disneyland, representing the beginning rather than the culmination of his career.
Attractions and venues
The Red Car Trolley ran along Buena Vista Street and onward into Hollywood Land, using vehicles modelled on the Pacific Electric Railway cars that once served Los Angeles. The trolley service ended in February 2025, although its tracks and overhead wires remain part of the street scene.
At the far end of the street stands the Carthay Circle Theatre building, modelled on the Los Angeles cinema where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937. It contains the Carthay Circle Restaurant and a lounge, rather than a cinema. Other locations include Elias & Co., the land's main department-store shop, named for Walt Disney's father; Oswald's, a service-station shop referencing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit; Mortimer's Market; and the Fiddler, Fifer & Practical Cafe, whose name refers to the Three Little Pigs cartoon. Clarabelle's Hand-Scooped Ice Cream occupies part of the same block.