Westcot Center and Port Disney | The history of two canceled Disney theme parks
Westcot Center and Port Disney were canceled Disney theme parks in California in the 1990s; discover why they never got built.
In the early ’90s, Disney publicly announced ambitious plans for two new theme parks in California — Port Disney in Long Beach and Westcot Center in Anaheim — but openly admitted they would only build one of them. The company ended up building neither.
Port Disney in Long Beach
On July 31, 1990, Disney revealed its Long Beach option, as reported the next day in the Los Angeles Times. The project, called Port Disney, would cost $2 billion (later reported as $2.8 billion), comprise 350 acres of land, and include:
- a theme park called DisneySea
- five hotels
- an aquarium
Concept art for DisneySea, as described by the LA Times, featured “sketches of a vibrant shoreline with tropical reefs, teeming tourists, and circular structures rising like bubbles from its midst.”
Port Disney would have been about 25 miles from Disneyland. That’s roughly eight miles shorter than the distance between Disneyland and Universal Studios Hollywood. Three decades later, no such comparable Disney business model exists. All Disney parks within the same state reside in close proximity to one another.
What was Disney’s other option? Well …
Westcot Center in Anaheim
On May 8, 1991, Disney unveiled its alternate plan for Anaheim, again reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Estimated at $3 billion, the project would include:
- a new theme park called Westcot Center
- two new hotels called Westcot Lake Resort and Magic Kingdom Hotel
- Disneyland Center, a shopping and dining district
- Disneyland Plaza, the outdoor square between theme parks
- Disneyland Bowl, an amphitheater
- new parking structures
- a “people-moving system” to connect parking and theme parks
Westcot Center would be “patterned after” Florida’s Epcot, the LA Times reported. The park would feature a gold sphere called Spacestation Earth and internationally themed thrill rides.
Imagineer Tony Baxter served as creative lead for Westcot. He reflected decades later in episode 4 of “The Imagineering Story” on Disney+. Baxter shared that Imagineers would have integrated globally themed hotels into the park’s design. It’s unclear if these would have been encompassed within, or in addition to, the aforementioned Westcot Lake Resort.
On Dec. 12, 1991, Disney chose Anaheim over Long Beach as the location for its next California-based theme park. Still, though, Disney used hypothetical verbiage. The next day, the LA Times quoted a Disney executive as saying, “We have not made a final decision to build in Anaheim.” Rather, the announcement, the Times wrote, was that Disney “wants to build” in Anaheim rather than Long Beach. This was still a maybe.
Introducing California Adventure
On Jan. 30, 1995, Disney conceded that Westcot and most of its surrounding additions were canceled, chronicled in the Los Angeles Times. The company would move forward with a downsized concept. On July 17, 1996, they revealed this concept to be Disney’s California Adventure. Disney expected to spend $1.4 billion on the park’s construction.
The park opened on Feb. 8, 2001, infamously underwhelming and later requiring a $1.1-billion overhaul. The tale is recounted in detail in episodes 4-5 of “The Imagineering Story” on Disney+.
Despite the previously announced plans, Disney never built Westcot or the amphitheater. The company scrapped the announced hotels in favor of other themes, while Disneyland Center survived as Downtown Disney. We can only assume the “people-moving system” became the trams traversing between the parking structures and the Esplanade.
In contrast, the Long Beach project — or, at least, its name — got a second lease on life as Tokyo DisneySea, which opened on Sept. 4, 2001 as the second theme park at Tokyo Disney Resort.
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