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  • 2001-02-01 (xsd:date)
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  • Were Disney Studios Required to Convert into a Hospital? (en)
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  • In his 1968 book The Disney Version, Richard Schickel wrote: Schickel went on to describe how the Burbank facility's extra-wide corridors, soda machine niches (easily converted to nursing stations), multiple buildings connected by tunnels (a setup used by some hospitals to guarantee easy access during inclement weather) and eight short wings per floor were designed with hospital functionality in mind. None of that necessarily demonstrates that the Burbank studios were designed with easy conversion to hospital use in mind, however — Disney might have preferred extra-wide corridors, the wings might have been designed to provide all the offices with outside views, Disney theme parks are constructed with underground tunnels as well, and the soda machine niches might have been created . . . to hold soda machines. Requiring that new construction projects be adaptable to other uses is not an unheard of condition for bank loan boards or city planning commissions to impose before granting loan approvals. However, their concern would be mainly that the proposed buildings not be so specialized in design as to be unappealing to other buyers, not that they be convertible to a specific use. Even if the local community needed a hospital, requiring that a studio be designed with that alternate purpose in mind wouldn't provide much of a guarantee that the bank could recoup its money if the studio owners went bust, because the community isn't going to sit around waiting for that to happen before erecting their own hospital. The idea that Disney's Burbank studios were designed for the possibility of converting them to a hospital if necessary may have come from a conversation between Walt Disney and his father Elias while the construction was underway, as reported in Bob Thomas' biography of Walt: Thomas relates this same conversation (in a slightly different way) in his 1998 biography of Roy O. Disney, Walt's brother: Whatever the origins of the hospital legend, Thomas assures us that it is not true, a mere story that Walt himself may have propagated (or even created) to mitigate his brother Roy's concerns over their finances: Disney was there to stay, of course, and Burbank built St. Joseph hospital across the street from the Disney studios a few years later. It was in a room at St. Joseph, facing his beloved studio, that the wizard of fantasy passed away on 15 December 1966. (en)
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