This is so amazing to me that they take the time to do such elaborate crowd control. I think WDW gave up on anything resembling crowd control 10 years ago.
Yes, us West Coasters have noticed when we visit WDW.
At Disneyland the benches are moved by CM's. They get teams of young guys to sweep through an area in early evening, with one guy on each end of the bench, and up and away it goes and is carried away to the location where it can do the most good. They move benches out of walkways and plazas to free up walking space, and they also use benches to act as barricades and walls to funnel people where they need to go, almost always forming different lanes of one-way traffic moving in different directions. All the benches and furniture is put back later that night after the entertainment event is over, so that by the time Disneyland is closing it's all back to normal and you'd never know that something huge happened a few hours earlier.
They also move hundreds of chairs and dozens of tables around the Carnation Plaza Gardens and Tomorrowland Terrace dance floors in the late afternoon each day, to prepare for dancing. Dancing is nightly in summer at both park locations, and at least on weekends the rest of the year. Big band dancing to the Disneyland Orchestra at Carnation Plaza Gardens, and rock n' roll bands at Tomorrowland Terrace. Dancing to live bands is something Magic Kingdom seems to have given up on decades ago, but Disneyland has kept up the tradition for 50+ years. It's a gracious touch I think, dancing under the stars at Disneyland to a live band with a date or loved one.
Date Nite at Disneyland!
Carnation Plaza Gardens Seating By Day
Carnation Plaza Gardens Dancing By Night
The tables and chairs in dining patios around New Orleans Square are moved the same way, but not quite as dramatically as the park benches or for dancefloor action. But they do get shifted and reorganized closer to
Fantasmic!
The folding chairs and tables brought out for the
Fantasmic! Dessert Buffet are rolled out on carts under covers, and then assembled in place in the area. A rolling hostess stand also gets set up for check-in procedures. Food and beverages are rolled out on carts closer to seating time for the buffet, and waitresses serve coffee and hot cocoa while you sit in your seat eating dessert. After the last Fantasmic! at 10:30PM, it's all cleaned up and rolled away again, so by 11:30PM it's all put back to normal for the last hour or so of Disneyland operation.
Fantasmic! Dessert Buffet area with coffee and hot water urns and tables set up in the back, under the light tower that rose from underground inside the poles and heavy rope nets set up by CM's in the late afternoon. This was a busy walkway an hour or two earlier.
I think what Disneyland is doing here is making very,
very efficient use of space, while still packing in as much entertainment into one small park as two or three WDW parks have combined. On the average summer night at Disneyland you've got the evening parade that leads into the first Fantasmic! that leads into the fireworks that leads into the second Fantasmic!, all while two big dancefloors are going strong, atmosphere talent is playing in the lands not affected by the spectaculars, and 45+ rides and attractions are operating. It's an amazing thing to experience really; a balmy SoCal summer night at Disneyland, and the crowd control CM's and all their little tricks really pull it all together.
At WDW, they seem to have a very different operating philosophy when it comes to evening entertainment. It's just one of those things that is different between the coasts. :wave:
World of Color will no doubt have many of the same tricks pulled out of thin air, perhaps even less obtrusive since the amphitheater was designed from scratch for this purpose. But I'm sure Disneyland management weighed in on exactly what they needed, and let WDI know exactly how their crowd control CM's would interact with the area and furniture.
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