Next up, BestinShow writes in to ask:
Jim --
What do you know about the hotel rooms over at the Contemporary? Weren't they supposed to be built with this state-of-the-art construction technique where the completed rooms were slid straight into the building's A frame -- like drawers into a dresser?
If that's really what happened here, Jim, then why haven't we seen any cranes towering over at the Contemporary whenever that WDW hotel has had a rehab? Wouldn't it stand to reason that -- whenever Disney's redone that resort -- that they should just pulled out the old hotel rooms and replaced them with brand-new rooms?
Just wonderin',
BestinShow
Dear Bestinshow--
Yeah, that was the plan originally. That -- every decade or so -- the folks at Walt Disney World would just be able to yank the old rooms out of their slots at the Contemporary and Polynesian Resort Hotels and replace them with brand-new state-of-the-art units.
But then -- when Disney & the folks at U.S. Steel (I.E. The corporation who actually built & operated the on-site factory that constructed all of the hotel rooms for the Contemporary and the Polynesian) came up with this innovative construction technique -- they forgot to take one rather important thing into account: Central Florida's incredible humidity. Which is how all of these 1970s-era hotel rooms basically wound up rusting in place inside of their resort's metal frames.
Thus ended Disney's experiment in modular construction. Though -- truth be told -- given the enormous cost over-runs that the company incurred during the construction phase of these two hotels (U.S Steel had originally promised to deliver finished modular hotel rooms to the Disney Corporation for just $17,000 per unit. But -- by the time the construction of the Contemporary & the Polynesian had basically been completed -- the cost of these finished modular hotel rooms had actually risen to over $100,000 per unit. So is it any wonder that Disney & U.S. Steel eventually had a huge falling-out? With the end result being that the Mouse actually bought out U.S. Steel's share in the resort and then booted this American manufacturing giant off of the WDW project? Anywho ...), I seriously doubt that Disney is ever going to use this particular construction technique again.
