How the Disney dream died in Celebration

There once was a place where neighbours greeted neighbours in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch swings provided easy refuge from the cares of the day. The movie house showed cartoons on Saturday. The grocery store delivered. And there was one teacher who always knew you had that special something. Remember that place?

Then winter came and a chill wind blew. People lost their jobs, families foreclosed on their homes. One morning you woke up and turned to greet your neighbours but found they had gone. The movie house closed. The quiet of those early twilights was shattered by news of a brutal murder right in the centre of that place followed just days later by a man killing himself after a shoot-out with police.

That's not what is meant to have happened to the script of Celebration, the magical "American home town" that Disney built in Florida 14 years ago. The first paragraph of this article is lifted verbatim from the town's original sales brochure from 1996, written by Disney's famous "Imagineering" team. The words were matched in visual form by the new town's seal, which was stamped on everything from storm drains and mugs to golf towels. It showed a little girl with a ponytail riding a bicycle past a wicket fence and an American oak with her dog running dutifully behind her.

That was what Celebration was meant to be. A small-town idyll built to the Disney corporation's lauded high standards. It would be imbued with nostalgia for the prelapsarian America, and it would capture the sense of community that Walt Disney spent his whole life trying to distil, bottle and sell.

So how to make sense of the events of the last 10 days? The news that Celebration – population 11,000 –had suffered its first murder with the bludgeoning to death of a 58-year-old retired teacher? Followed less than two days later by the sight of a Swat team in an armoured car staking out a house, which ended with the homeowner's suicide? How do you fit these events into the Disney dream?

Walking around the centre of Celebration – they call it "downtown" though it's not much more than a village square – is like stepping on to the set of The Truman Show, the film in which Jim Carrey plays a man trapped inside an invisible urban bubble. There are shops with names such as Day Dreams selling Barbie dolls, the streets are lit by olde worlde lanterns and you are followed everywhere by muzak from the 40s and 50s piped out of speakers hidden beneath palm trees. Jingle Bell Rock, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, Oh Come All Ye Faithful – the theme is unrelentingly Christmas.

The town centre is steeped in that great Disney aesthetic: the art of deception. The 40ft Christmas tree has plastic needles. The ice rink in the central square is a sheet of white plastic. At first glance the snow that falls on the hour, every hour on winter evenings looks as convincing as fake snow could, until you realise the artifice is double-layered: it's not artificial snow but shaving cream. Spend enough time in an environment like this and you could become seriously paranoid. Is that snow on the roof fake snow or is it cotton wool? Has the gaggle of ducks waddling across the street been put there for show? Is the sign by the (man-made) lake that says "It is a violation of Florida law to feed or harass alligators" genuine, or an elaborate joke? *

But of course that's what Disney's all about: the stitching together of reality and fantasy so finely that you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins. It's precisely because of this promise to fuse real life with dream life that Celebration has been so wildly successful. When Disney held a lottery in 1995 for the first 474 homes, almost 5,000 people scrambled to be part of it.

Dan Rudgers was one of the lucky bidders – he still lives in the townhouse that he won. Like many of the first generation of residents, he is, by his own description, a "Disney freak". As a child he was a Mouseketeer, spending his afternoons watching the Mickey Mouse Club on TV. "Those programmes, they were like a prolonged commercial for a place like Celebration. I guess I was brainwashed," he says.

Why he was so drawn to live here? "I think it was because of the way Disney does things. You knew the parks and the streets would be clean, the grass cut, all the houses would look the same, it would be family-oriented and everything would work just right. A lot of people wouldn't like to live in that sort of place, but for me . . ."

Rudgers throws his arms out wide and looks up. "For me, well, it's the great Mickey in the sky." When Rudgers moved into Celebration he became the flip side of the reality TV fad in contemporary broadcasting. Instead of importing real life into the small screen, he took Disney's fantasised vision from television and made it his reality. He had become part of the show.

Which is why news of Celebration's first murder was so incongruous and shattering. There was nothing Disney, nothing magical, about what happened in Idelwylde condominiums, just a block from the town's central square. On 29 November Matteo Giovanditto was found bludgeoned and strangled inside his apartment where he'd lived with his chihuahua.

On Monday police arrested a suspect, a transient man who lived in a town near Celebration. He told detectives that he'd been taken back to the apartment by the victim and had fallen into a rage after Giovanditto made sexual advances. He struck him with an axe that he'd found in a cupboard.

The events were so starkly at odds with the town's seal of that little girl on the bicycle that you might think they would inspire a degree of soul-searching in Celebration's residents. Far from it. The murder merely appears to have reinforced their commitment to Disney's original ideals.

"One murder in 14 years! Where can you go in this entire planet and find this type of statistic? Tell me," says Jodi Meyers, who lives on the same street as Giovanditto's apartment. She's an estate agent selling Celebration homes and thinks the murder and the suicide shoot-out that followed so soon after it will have done nothing to dent the town's reputation.

"A couple of days after the murder I got a call from a man up in New York who said he'd seen it on the TV news. He said: 'That's a great little town. One murder in 14 years, that's a good record. I want to buy a condo down there.'"

Walt Disney always had a dream to build a model town. It was part of his master plan to create a new magic kingdom in Florida. How he came to put the plan together is the stuff of Disney legend – the numerous trips he took in private jets disguised so that no one would spot him, the front companies he set up to buy the land also incognito, the 30,000 acres he acquired before anyone noticed.

Less well known is that it was all part of his messianic desire for total control. Disney managed to persuade the local authorities to grant him absolute power within the confines of his new empire, including the ability to raise taxes and run the roads and public amenities. In effect, he had created a private Disney government.

Rick Foglesong, a Disney watcher of long standing at Rollins College in Florida, calls it "the Vatican with mouse ears". "Walt Disney was an authoritarian. Yes he was an artist, but he was also a control freak. People tend to see the Disney creativity, they often miss the centralised control that lies behind it." Disney died in 1966, before his aspiration of creating his own community could be realised. But when Celebration finally came into being it bore many of his hallmarks.

At its core was nostalgia. While inner cities across America were in the grip of the crack cocaine epidemic, and middle-class Americans were fleeing to increasingly isolated and alienating suburbs, Celebration was conceived as a return to the glory days of America's pre-war small towns. As the authors of Celebration, USA, have put it: "The heirs to Disney's empire were designing the place where Walt had wished he'd grown up."

The planners did a trawl of the most picturesque southern towns – Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans – and borrowed the best from them: town squares, verandahs, gables and front porches. Then they boiled all the ideas down into a pattern book that dictated every detail right down to the plants that could be grown in the yards. There were only six house styles permitted, and only a limited range of colours – white, blue, yellow, pink and buff, all in pastel shades. Though Disney sold most of its stake in Celebration to a property management company in 2004, the Disney spirit very much lives on.

The extent to which the Disney corporation went to control the warp and weft of Celebration speaks to one of the central paradoxes of modern American life. For a country that prides itself so fiercely on its untrammelled individualism and freedom, it has a strong streak of conformism.

But in its own terms it worked. People came to live in Celebration, and stayed. First-generation Disney obsessives have given way to their second-generation offspring. Crime, until this month, was rare. Last year there were only three robberies reported.

Yet Celebration has not been immune from the devastating economic collapse in America. As a symbol of its economic ailments, a couple of days after Thanks- giving, its cinema, a striking mock art deco building by the lake, shut down.

Florida has one of the highest rates of foreclosures on its homes, and though Celebration has been less pummelled than many of the state's towns, it is still hurting. In the last six months, 106 properties have been sold in the town. Of those, 44 – more than 40% – were foreclosures.

One of those foreclosed houses is a townhouse in Yew Court, a tiny cul-de-sac about half a mile from downtown. It has a colonnaded porch and neatly trimmed topiary, but several aspects of the house are definitely in breach of the Celebration pattern book. Its windows are pockmarked with bullet holes, and its wooden shutters are askew and also riddled with gunfire.

Earlier this month, its occupier Craig Foushee barricaded himself in. When a Swat team arrived he opened fire. Fourteen hours after the drama began, the officers used tear gas to gain entry to the property only to find Foushee already dead by his own hand.

Foushee, a transatlantic jet pilot, had been having a bad year. His wife was divorcing him, the security business he ran as a side interest had fallen into bankruptcy, and he had lost his home.

For estate agent Meyers, his death merely confirms that Celebration is not as detached from real life as people make out. "What that guy was going through, it could happen to anyone. The people that live here, we're not immune. We have foreclosures, we have divorces. This is still America, even if we do live in a town built by Disney."

*The lake does have alligators, and it is against the law to feed them.