Once upon a time, a man named Walt wanted to build a city—nay, a kingdom—in Florida swampland.
In 1964, the Disney company began secretly purchasing 27,400 acres in small parcels and stitching them together to form a landmass roughly the size of Manhattan. Walt Disney wanted plenty of space to keep the type of tacky tourist shops that encircled Disneyland—plopped in the middle of Anaheim, California—from encroaching on his new kingdom.
