Orlando has the greatest concentration of hotel rooms of any city in the world. That fact is an apt tribute to the imagination of a man who started buying up land around a sleepy railroad town in the late 1960s. This man was tired of attracting millions to his gleaming amusement park, only to watch them leave at the end of the day to spend money in other people's hotels and restaurants. Every vacationing family has thousands of dollars to spend, and this man wanted to build a place where he could have them all.
Walt Disney did not live to see his vision for Disney World come to fruition. The inheritors of his dream did, though, and they boiled his plan down to two simple steps: First, create the semblance of a perfect utopian community. Then, charge admission.