Liberty Square in Disney's Magic Kingdom offers an experience of traveling back in time to colonial America so that you can travel forward again towards the American frontier.
How do Disney's designers do that? Here are some of the tricks the Imagineers use to create a perception of experiencing fictional places that seem more real than reality.
Accepting the Impossible Liberty Square in Disney World's Magic Kingdom mirrors places that really exist.
Or that once existed.
Disney's Imagineers exaggerated the design and architecture of Liberty Square to make this early American urban environment seem even more real than real.
This is how Disney World helps you suspend your disbelief and accept the impossible.
How else are you going to enjoy dream worlds and animals, puppets, and clocks that talk? A trip through Liberty Square starts on the imaginary East Coast of colonial America, on the Hudson River in the early 18th century.
Of course, this Disney version of colonial America is both real and surreal.
For here along the banks of this great river (which is not actually the Hudson River but only a fictional Hudson like everything else), you find a Haunted Mansion in the gothic architectural style of some of the great houses built in the late 19th century.
With brickwork typical of English Tudor structures, this haunted house is a lonely distance away from the main square.
And while a similar version of the house at Disneyland in California has a less daunting air, this haunted house is just plain spooky.
The Hall of Presidents and the Liberty Tree The square itself with its Hall of Presidents and Liberty Tree is the focal point of Liberty Square.
Around this urban center, narrow streets wind around storefronts and restaurants, porches with rocking chairs; shops, the loading dock for the Liberty Belle, the Rivers of America and the island representing the expanse of the West.
In the distance you can see Frontierland, which is part of your future experience as you travel through time in the Magic Kingdom.
Beyond the Haunted Mansion is a cemetery.
Be sure to note who has taken up residence in one corner of the cemetery: one of Disney's most popular characters.
Fortunately this character is still living at Disneyland.
Bridges of Imagination Next is an example of how the Imagineers are always thinking of your perception and how to move you seamlessly through the narrative they are creating.
If you were alive in Boston harbor in the mid 18th century, you would probably recognize the Columbia Harbor House.
This house, with its dining room over the walkway, serves as a bridge between Liberty Square and Fantasyland.
One side of the house is fantasy and the other side is in keeping with the colonial theme.
Disney's designers used the same effect to help you transition between Adventureland and Frontierland.
The buildings of Liberty Square begin to change in style as you move through the physical space that represents time in the Magic Kingdom.
As in Williamsburg in the late 1700s, Georgian architecture predominates.
But soon, at the Hall of Presidents, you are in Philadelphia at the time Constitution was adopted in 1787.
The Next Frontier The Diamond Horseshoe Saloon is another example of a bridge, both imaginary and real, between time and place in the Magic Kingdom.
In this case the saloon creates a transition between Liberty Square and Frontierland.
A building in the style of the saloon was typical in the 1820s, and could be found in St.
Louis along the Mississippi River, itself once the natural boundary between the East and the Western frontier.
As in all of Disney's creations, it's the wealth of detail in Liberty Square that helps trick you into convincing yourself that what you are seeing must be real.
The impossible becomes the possible.