Why This Disney Hotel Had Birds In Its Lobby

One of Walt Disney World’s hotels is set to get a new bird-themed attraction. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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On Monday Disney will open a new bird-themed bar in one of its flagship hotels. This is the inside story behind the birds which once flew inside it.

Disney’s hotels are famous for being over the top. Its Hotel Miracosta in Tokyo is a painstakingly-accurate recreation of a Venetian palace whilst the Newport Bay Club in Paris looks like a New England mansion. However, one of their counterparts in the United States wasn’t just more escapist than its predecessors when it opened in 1988, it was a whole new world.

Its origin dates all the way back to September 1984 when business luminary Michael Eisner became chief executive of the Walt Disney Company. Back then Disney was a shadow of what it is today but thanks to Eisner’s magic touch it soon became a media giant. In an interview at his office in Beverly Hills he explained to this reporter that after he joined Disney there were at least “50 different things we did to upgrade the business strategies of the company that had not been upgraded in the 18 years since Walt had died.”

High on the list was bringing Disney back to its roots of hand-drawn animation yielding beloved favorites like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. Eisner then commissioned theme park rides based on them and merchandise to sell there so the films acted as promotion for Disney’s resorts which in turn drove the sale of toys that would fuel kids’ interest in the movies.

Eisner capitalized on this spellbinding cycle by building theme parks based on movies and animals at Walt Disney World in Florida along with others in California, Paris and Hong Kong leading to Disney becoming the world’s most-visited operator with 145.2 million guests last year according to the Themed Entertainment Association.

“We made an early deal with George Lucas to put Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the parks as Disney had not created enough big projects during the previous 18 years. But moving forward we concentrated on reinvigorating animation, particularly musical animation. So in time, we had a lot of recent movies, whether it was Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King or whatever to translate to the parks.

“We built 80 buildings with world class architects to attract world’s attention and treat our guests with respect. Growing up in New York City, gave me an appreciation of great architecture. We continued to develop our company in Europe and Japan. We started out negotiations in Shanghai. We opened in Hong Kong. We built 30,000 hotel rooms in Florida in high-quality hotels, when they originally had two.”

The two hotels that Eisner was referring to are the south seas-themed Polynesian and the Contemporary, a futuristic ‘A’ shaped building with a monorail track running through it. Although the former is famously escapist while the latter has an iconic shape, neither is renowned for being luxurious. Eisner wanted to ensure that Disney World’s next hotel made a name for itself and it took more than the wave of a magic wand to do it.

Based on the grand seaside resorts of the Victorian era, the Grand Floridian opened in July 1988 and looks like it has come straight out of the pages of The Great Gatsby. Sitting on the sandy shoreline of a man-made lake, the sprawling structure has white clapboard walls and red shingle roofs dotted with dormer windows.

Porters wearing white waistcoats and straw boater hats stroll down the squeaky-clean paths while ragtime music plays from hidden speakers. The paths weave through the immaculate gardens which lead to lodges housing the guest-rooms. Their automatic doors are amongst the few giveaways that it wasn’t actually built more than a century ago.

Inside the hotel’s soaring lobby an enormous wrought-iron chandelier hangs from a stained-glass domed ceiling. It illuminates an atrium adorned with acres of marble, flowery carpets, potted palms, a caged elevator and a white wicker Chinese-style birdcage. In the hotel’s early days it was home to exotic birds but they have long since gone. They aren’t the only ones.

For decades, an elderly local resident famously hung out in the lobby and a brass band played from the mezzanine floor adding to the olde worlde feel. Although the pandemic put paid to band, it hasn’t diminished the atmosphere.

Children’s toys from the turn of the century are on display in the lobby while embroideries and historic navigational maps of Florida hang in frames on the walls. The period theme continues in the rooms with lacquered wooden furniture, old-fashioned oil paintings and lights in the style of brass oil lamps.

“You’re being taken back to the 1900s where the Rockefellers and the Edisons had these mansions and estates in Florida. The theming is influenced by several different Victorian themes but primarily the Key West area of Florida, this is the style one would find in the south part of Key West or Palm beach.” said the hotel’s then-general manager Kent Mitchell in an interview with this author in 2006.

The hotel’s extravagant exterior was down to acclaimed architects WATG which was also behind the design of Atlantis in Dubai, the Venetian in Las Vegas, the Palace of the Lost City in South Africa’s Sun City as well as numerous Mandarin Oriental, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Fairmont properties.

WATG’s inspiration for the Grand Floridian came from visiting actual period properties like the Belleview Inn in Clearwater, Florida, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan and the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. It worked on the Grand Floridian with Disney’s design wizards who are known as Imagineers due to their imaginative use of engineering.

They carefully chose all of the artefacts and decor in the hotel, right down to the decorative balustrades and wooden designs which are known in the trade as millwork.

“The millwork in the hotel is what we call a gingerbread balustrade millwork and in the main building there is 65 miles of it,” said Mitchell. “There are also multiple patterns in the fabric and carpet which may seem almost overbearing to us today but it was very much a Victorian trait to show wealth through unique patterns.”

He added that “in the lobby there is an Asian influenced birdcage that was actually constructed in Spain and the theme behind that is that in the Victorian era a lot of wealthy people would have ornate birdcages inside the homes.” Leaving no stone unturned, Disney’s Imagineers even hand picked the birds to go in it.

After they were removed, the cage stood empty for years until recently when it was removed as part of a minor renovation of the hotel’s lobby. In its place stands a similar-looking mahogany structure incorporating a bar which is due to open on Monday. In a nod to its previous inhabitants it will be called The Perch so although the birds have flown the nest, their legacy lives on.

Additional Reporting by Chris Sylt