This Day in American History: Disneyland Opens
- ForAmerica
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1955, a 160-acre orange grove in Anaheim became the Happiest Place on Earth -- and changed the American vacation forever.
On July 17, 1955, Walt Disney opened Disneyland to an invitation-only crowd of about 11,000 guests -- though several thousand more got in on counterfeit tickets, swelling the number closer to 28,000. The $17 million park was a personal gamble: Disney had spent years dreaming up a clean, family-friendly alternative to the seedy amusement parks and carnivals of the era, eventually assembling his own design studio, WED Enterprises, to build it. His brother Roy secured financing from ABC in exchange for a weekly television show that would promote the park to the largest generation of children America had ever produced.
The opening-day broadcast, hosted in part by a young Ronald Reagan, aired live on ABC and was watched by nearly half the country. It did not go smoothly. Record-breaking heat, a plumbers strike that left drinking fountains dry, wet asphalt that swallowed womens high heels, and a gas leak that shut down Fantasyland earned the day its nickname among Disney employees: Black Sunday. Walt Disney was reportedly furious backstage, and thrilled anyway. When the gates opened to the paying public the next morning, visitors were already lined up by 2 a.m.
Disneyland drew a million visitors in its first ten weeks. Seventy years later, the park Walt Disney built on a bet has hosted hundreds of millions of guests, spawned a global network of Disney resorts, and become as recognizable a piece of American culture as anything this country has exported.
Also on this day:
1821 -- Spain formally cedes Florida to the United States.
1862 -- Congress passes the Militia Act, and Lincoln signs it, opening the door for Black Americans to formally serve in U.S. military service for the first time.
1898 -- Spanish forces surrender to U.S. troops at Santiago, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War.
1941 -- Joe DiMaggios record 56-game hitting streak comes to an end in Cleveland.
1975 -- American and Soviet spacecraft dock together for the first time in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
A messy opening day, a stubborn dreamer, and 160 acres of orange groves, and 70 years later, its still the happiest place on Earth.
Source: HISTORY.com, PBS American Experience, Disney
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