The DisneylandForward proposal won final approval from the Anaheim City Council tonight.
The unanimous vote follows the council's preliminary approval of the proposal last month: Anaheim gives preliminary approval to DisneylandForward. Tonight's vote means that the slate of land use agreement changes will go into effect on June 7.
Those agreements, in short, will allow Disney to develop attractions, hotels and other retail locations on property now reserved for use as surface parking lots at the Disneyland Resort.
"We’ve worked closely with city staff, neighbors, and our local community over the past three years to make sure DisneylandForward is a win for everyone," Disneyland President Ken Potrock said. "I'm grateful the city council agrees and voted to work with us on this legacy project that will set up Disneyland Resort and the City of Anaheim for an incredibly bright future."
The first project to break ground likely will be the construction of the new eastside parking structure, next to I-5. Approval of DisneylandForward was not necessary to begin that project, but Disney really had no reason to build the extra parking structure if it could not redevelop the current Toy Story parking lot's land for other uses.
Once that parking structure is complete, along with the pedestrian overpasses across Harbor Blvd. that will connect the structure with the rest of the resort, Disney can start work on whatever will be replacing Toy Story.
Suggested plans for that site include a new hotel, convention, dining and entertainment district for the resort, with new attractions going in west of Disneyland Drive, on land now occupied by the Downtown Disney parking lots. IP tipped by Disney for those attractions include Avatar (the sure thing), Frozen (pretty much as sure thing), and possibly Wakanda, Encanto or Zootopia.
Many fans are hoping that Disney will announce more details about its Disneyland plans at the D23 event in Anaheim this August.
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You're not kidding fattyckin. Considering the timing of this approval, Disney will have a solid 3 months to develop concrete plans (they probably already have a good idea of what they want to do) and create some tantalizing concept drawings to wow D23 crowds. Throw in all the potential announcements that they could make for WDW as well, and D23 might be one of the biggest single publicity events of new attractions/developments in the American theme park industry in the past 5 + years.
The only downside is that fans will probably have to wait 3-5 years before any of these new attractions would be ready to open.
Alas, ‘tis also true
fattyackin- scintillating------- Russell Meyer -tantalizing
Robert, I am not sure I have the vocabulary to be part of this comments section !!
Glad to see it's moving forward (pun intended). However, I wouldn't get excited about anything coming too soon to this area. Everything I've heard says there are still several projects in line before the parks get expanded into this new space, so I'm guessing we're looking at early 2030s as the soonest for anything except the parking structure (so I'm expecting blue sky if anything out of D23 regarding it).
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D23 just got that much more scintillating…