'Black Sunday': Disneyland's Chaotic Opening Day

On a Sunday in July 1955, Walt Disney stood at the gates of his dream and welcomed the world — and the world showed up twice over. Disneyland, the $17 million theme park he had built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, was opening with a televised press preview. Disney had planned for about 15,000 invited guests. Roughly 28,000 people got inside. Counterfeiters had forged the $1 admission tickets, and one entrepreneur reportedly set up a ladder and charged $5 a head to climb over the fence.

The broadcast was enormous. ABC aired the opening live, co-hosted by Ronald Reagan, Art Linkletter, and Bob Cummings, and an estimated 70 million Americans watched from home. But inside the park, it was a mess. The temperature hit 101 degrees. A local plumbers' strike had forced a choice between working drinking fountains and working toilets — Disney chose the toilets, so the fountains ran dry, and since Pepsi sponsored the park, some guests grumbled that the whole thing was a plot to sell soda. The asphalt had been poured that very morning and was soft enough for women's heels to sink into it. Several rides broke down. Vendors ran out of food and drink. Staff who survived the day would call it "Black Sunday."

None of it had been inevitable. A few years earlier, skeptics had dismissed the whole idea as "Walt's folly" — amusement parks in the 1950s had a seedy reputation, and bankers doubted a family park could work. Disney had borrowed against his life insurance and sold off vacation property to help finance the project, while his brother Roy, the studio's financial head, worried it could ruin them. What Disney wanted, as his dedication that day put it, was a place for children and parents to have fun together: "To all who come to this happy place: welcome."

The park recovered within weeks. The public opening came the very next day, Monday, July 18, when crowds began lining up at 2 a.m. The first person to buy a ticket and walk in was David MacPherson — ticket number two, since Roy Disney had pre-purchased number one. Within its first year, Disneyland was a runaway success, and the sprawl of hotels and neon that grew up around it would eventually push Disney to buy a far larger parcel of land in Florida for Walt Disney World.

Opening day was a disaster, but the idea behind it was flawless. Disneyland invented the modern theme park — the immersive, spotless, storytelling-driven escape — and its DNA is in every park built since, from Florida to Tokyo to Paris. Decades of anniversaries later, the castle still stands at the end of Main Street. "Black Sunday" became a footnote; the dream won.

Photo: Melissa Hillier, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons). The castle is shown as it appears today.