The Tea Room is being updated; whether for actual tea or overflow bar seating is anyone’s guess. However, I think it’s probably just that the birdcage has been dead space for a long time and was viewed as decent theming for the bar. I do kind of wish they’d just turned it into a dais for the piano, though. Would’ve freed up space rather than consuming more.
Caged birds are a very depressing sight. I would hate to see them in any hotel lobby, let alone WDW’s flagship resort.
They shouldn’t be kept there either. And there’ll come a time, not too far in the future, when they won’t be.
This has been a strange day on the forum. No animals at resorts on this thread and yet shark fin soup is good to go in another! Haha
Mine isn’t an especially strange position. There are plenty of people who don’t like to see animals in captivity.
That’s absurdly awful and will throw off everything about the lobby space. What a travesty.
There are also plenty of people who visit places across the country where the main attraction is...animals in captivity.
I didn't say it was. But even within my own lifetime (I'm a little over 40), I have seen significant shifts in attitudes to animal captivity and "entertainment". Things that were quite normal in my childhood (circuses with animals, dolphin and orca shows) are either moribund now or controversial. Disney's decision only a few short decades ago to build a zoo would be unthinkable today. Attitudes have changed and will continue to change. How far that change goes is a matter of speculation, but my money's on a not-too-distant future in which the practice of enclosing and displaying animals for human entertainment is no longer considered normal. I may well be wrong, of course. Regardless, I'd rather not see birds in confinement when visiting a Disney hotel lobby.
I think the pure scope of this and the amount of space (H x W x L) is larger though and more expansive. Further, that’s just the footprint of the bar- they’re invariably going to add some bar type seating around it, to say nothing of the people milling about in line for their drinks or drinking said drinks.
Yes, the total volume it occupies will be larger, and it may ultimately look visually unbalanced relative to the elevator opposite it, which the cage originally mirrored to a degree. I was responding to the screenshot above, which suggested the size of the bar is why the gingerbread house isn’t happening this year; that’s 100% because the lobby is currently a maze of walls, not because the bar physically impinges on any of the space it once occupied. If it continues to not exist, it will be a result of conflicting foot traffic rather than lack of room.
