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Theme Park Evolution
Destinations · July 8, 2002

Not another theme park.

That's the first thing I thought when I saw the enormous construction site rising out of the scorched sawgrass fields in Orlando two years ago.

The last thing we need here is another theme park.

Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against rollercoasters. It's just that I remember the Magic City two decades ago, when there seemed to be more orange groves than people, and I kind of miss it. Instead of tearing out more fruit trees to build a new water slide, or plowing over palmettos to make room for another motel, I wonder why they don't use the land they've already developed.

Turns out the Gaylord Palms Orlando Resort, which opened earlier this year, isn't just another theme park. It's a theme park designed to look like a convention hotel.

A very big convention hotel.

We're talking 400,000 square feet of convention space, including a cavernous 178,000-square-foot exhibition hall, with three ballrooms, plus 1,406 guestrooms. And a very big pricetag: $385 million.

To get an idea of the scale and expense involved in building the Gaylord Palms, it helps to take short drive from the property down International Drive and to pull over about half a mile out. Turn back and take a look. If you think an alien mothership has landed somewhere just shy of Disney World, well, you're not that far from the truth. The property towers above the undeveloped land around it, overshadowing the untamed Central Florida flatland as if it were a visitor from another planet.

Now come closer.

Step inside the hotel, and you'll see why the Gaylord Palms deserves to be called a theme park. The glass-domed facility is divided into sections that, according to its brochure, are meant to encapsulate "the Sunshine State spirit, excitement, adventure and architecture." There's an area that resembles historic St. Augustine, one modeled after Key West and another that pays tribute to the Everglades.

For me, the full-scale models and facades of Disney's Epcot has always embodied what I think of as Orlando's artificial reality. Whether it's a Native American totem pole or a Chinese wall, the replicas are designed to look like the real thing in every respect.

But St. Augustine, Key West and the Everglades did not look like the real thing.

They looked like what someone who had never been to Florida thinks they should look like - a step removed from artificial reality, they are someone's impression of an imitation. A second-generation photocopy where the photocopier got creative.

Key West, for example, doesn't have a captured pirate ship pulled up to a dock on which people can order cocktails and finger food. There's no beach worth mentioning, either. The Southernmost City is a hot, sensual destination at the end of Highway One where people go to lose themselves. The Gaylord's Key West is an air-conditioned, sanitized place where people go to find each other after a conference.

The Everglades are all wrong, too. Not enough mosquitoes, not enough alligators. The mechanical lizards that rise and fall under the ersatz swamp are a nice touch, but if one of the beasts got that close to any South Florida resident, there'd be hell to pay. Ditto for St. Augustine: they got the Spanish ruins right but the spirit of the oldest permanent European settlement on the North American continent is in its charming downtown, with its bohemian coffee shops, brew pubs and shops hawking tourist memorabilia.

I asked several project architects about how they developed these attractions. I was told that they dispatched a photographer to these places. They used the images as inspiration, but ultimately they designed the areas based on what they thought they should look like. Some of the planners admitted that they hadn't been to the Keys, the Everglades or even taken the short drive from Orlando to St. Augustine.

I think it's brilliant.

Sure, it would be great if these attractions looked more like the real thing. But what's the point? If visitors want the convenience of attending a meeting one afternoon and then "exploring" a swamp that evening before enjoying a medium-rare porterhouse at the Old Hickory Steakhouse, how much harm can a little distortion do?

In fact, the difference between the real thing and the imitation is so noticeable that the Gaylord Palms could become a destination unto itself for residents of the Florida Keys like me who want to see what non-Conchs think we live like. It might be a big hit with sociologists, or even people who have already been to all three places and want to see it again, virtually.

As an admitted purist who thinks a healthy orange grove is better than the most clever theme park - and who would have probably preferred that the dry prairie over a new building - I see some good in this.

If guests experience this prefabricated version of Florida and wonder what the real thing is like, then maybe it will pull them out of the climate-controlled comfort of the Gaylord Palms, and into an even more fascinating world than the one they left behind.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla.