As we saw in part one, after Disneyland opened Walt and his Imagineers almost immediately planned a second street running parallel to Main Street. This street never came to fruition, but what I didn’t mention in the last article was that plans for later versions of this street would have ended in a small enclosed area that would have been named Edison Square. This again would have emphasised the residential aspect of the area as opposed to the commercial theming represented by Main Street.

Walt had always been fascinated with inventors and inventions, especially Thomas Edison, and loved the idea of a portion of his park honouring technological progress in day to day life. Edison Square would have been both thematically and physically situated between Main Street USA and Tomorrowland. It would show the technological progress from the time of Walt’s boyhood up to the present day and beyond, linking the Main Street’s turn-of-the-century past with the idealised future of Tomorrowland.

Here’s an extract from the famous 1958 map by Disney legend Sam McKim. Although the quality of the scan isn’t too great you can hopefully make out the label of Edison Square at the end of Liberty Street, and how it fits onto Main Street.

Had it gone ahead, Edison Square would have probably opened in 1959 as an expansion after Liberty Street (or one of the other Residential Street concepts) had been established for a year or two, and would have featured a major attraction called Harnessing The Lightning. This was to be a cul-de-sac made up of four walk-through theatres. As guests were ushered from theatre to theatre they would first see an American home as it would have been in the gaslight days before electricity. Audio animatronic figures would be designed to show how life was in those days. The next set of the home would have just received electric lighting, before the audience walked to a third theatre showing the same home with the electrical appliances of “today”. In the final set, guests would see the robot actors explaining how tomorrow’s technological advances might be brought into their daily lives.

Unfortunately, as with the planned Confucius dinner show in THE OTHER SIDE OF MAIN STREET, USA part one, the audio animatronics that Harnessing The Lightning would have required simply weren’t sophisticated enough in the mid-1950’s to make the attraction work, and it was reluctantly shelved. With its signature attraction gone, there was no justification for the building of Edison Square and it was quietly forgotten. The great inventor Thomas Edison never got his own Land at Disneyland, but he has received many tributes around the Disney parks in the form of plaques, portraits, and windows.

The area that Edison Square and it’s residential street would have occupied is now used for storing parade floats and also contains The Inn-Between, a restaurant for cast members.

And the Harnessing The Lightning idea? Less than a decade later the concept was resurrected and (with the addition of a revolving theatre) proved a huge success at the 1964 / 65 World’s Fair. It would of course later appear at Disney theme parks on both coasts of America as the Carousel Of Progress

And that’s going to be the subject of my next column.