Page 45 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

According to the publicity surrounding Faneuil Hall, the main buildings were
created by Peter Faneuil in order to provide accommodation for Boston’s mer-
36 chants and sellers of produce and to provide a forum for orators. It was the site
of the first protests against the Sugar Act in 1764. According to the website:
‘Firebrand Samuel Adams rallied the citizens of Boston to the cause of indepen-
dence from Great Britain in the hallowed Hall, and George Washington toasted
the nation on its first birthday’. 73
Faneuil Hall provided a model for many other redevelopments of inner city
areas or areas of cities that had formerly been important regions of economic
activity that had gone into decline or even disuse. These include: Harborplace,
Baltimore, Maryland; Jacksonville Landing, Jacksonville, Florida; Riverwalk
Marketplace, New Orleans; South Street Seaport, New York City; Pioneer Place,
Portland, Oregon; Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco;
Laclede’s Landing in St. Louis; Cannery Row in Monterey, California; and Old
Town Alexandria, Washington D.C. At least twenty-five US cities had festival
marketplaces developments by the mid-1990s. 74
Nor are such developments confined to the USA. The Rocks, a harbour front
area in Sydney’s Central Business District, draws on its past as a port and on the
lives and the work of its labourers. 75 Harbour front locations have been popular
sites for festival marketplace developments in part because of the ease with which
they can be invested with an attractive maritime theme. In the case of Aloha
Tower Marketplace in Honolulu, its location on the waterfront and the artefacts
that are employed to suggest its exotic maritime past 76 provide a theme of trans-
port and trade in much the same way as The Rocks and South Street Seaport in
New York. In addition, The Rocks lays claim to many ‘firsts’: Australia’s first hos-
pital, first cemetery, as well as oldest surviving houses. These heritage features pro-
vide the backcloth to, and in a sense a rationale for, upscale shopping and dining
opportunities. In 1996, it attracted 1.2 million visitors which was only half a million
fewer than the nearby Opera House. Similar approaches to the development of
heritage attractions-cum-shopping malls have emerged in London’s Tobacco
Dock, Liverpool’s Albert Docks, Barcelona’s Port Vaill and in Cape Town’s Victoria
and Albert Waterfront.
Whereas the Disney theme parks and themed malls clothe consumption in false
environments in order to feed off the advantages of the adjacent attraction prin-
ciple, the approach of Faneuil Hall and its emulators is to take authentic buildings
and/or environments, fit them out with additional layers of heritage meaning,
and attract retailers and restaurants to buy into the architectural fabric and its
fabricated meanings. This heritage shopping combines cultural tourism with
shopping and dining.
This apparently benign process of reinvigorating areas that have fallen on hard
times, in the case of dock areas usually in response to declines in ship building or
to shifts in commercial maritime activity, has been heavily criticized. An example is