Just beyond James Maharg's back yard in Gladstone, a work
crew has secretly been picking apart an extraterrestrial flying
machine and packing it into crates bound for Florida. It's
yellow and red and it looks, in the words of one witness, "like
something out of Jules Verne." It looms taller than most of the
houses and businesses in the neighborhood. And it's news to
Maharg and his neighbors. They found out just last week that
Walt Disney World had hired a Gladstone company for the theme
park's biggest facelift in 20 years. It is one of at least three
area businesses helping on the project.
"I didn't notice a
thing," said the astonished Maharg, a retired meatcutter who
lives on Northeast 76th Street. "But this is a quiet
neighborhood - people tend to mind their own business here."
That suits Disney's park designers just fine - as it does the
companies they hired to build futuristic contraptions for a
revamped Tomorrowland in Disney's Magic Kingdom. For them the
project is top secret.
Disney says it
never discusses the details of projects it assigns to other
companies. And it says the companies can lose those contracts by
talking about them. "We can't comment," said Allen Supplee, the
project manager at A. Zahner Sheet Metal Co., the general
contractor. Neither can the other area companies, in cluding
Goens Brothers Painting Inc., on whose property the spaceage
creations were assembled. But an artist who constructed neon
lights for the contraptions described in blueprints as "biomes"
- could hardly control his excitement.
"They were lit up a
few nights ago," said Greg Garnett, a neon specialist at KC Sign
Express Inc. in Overland Park. "They looked like spaceships."
Garnett isn't sure what a biome is. But it's part of what Disney
engineers envision as an "alien landscape," he said. Disney
engineers told Garnett they wanted his lighting to provide an
eerie effect. "Remember growing up in the '50s? Remember all
that sci-fi stuff? This is it," said Garnett. "This is real Buck
Rogers-style, real futuristic and overblown." |
