Disneyland Opening Day: A Shaky First Day for the Happiest Place on Earth

Disneyland was the result of Walt Disney’s vision to make a theme park that captured the illusionary wonders found in his movies, as well as a place where parents could have just as much fun as their children.

Disney started planning his park in the 1940s, while his overriding theme had morphed several times before construction began in 1954. Originally, Disneyland was to be called Mickey Mouse Park, and if he had kept that vision for a mouse-centric experience, his final product would have been drastically different than the Disneyland we’ve come to know.

Despite his evolving concepts for the park, in Disney’s mind, anyway, Disneyland had to be totally perfect, including no potential glimpses at building in the surrounding city of Anaheim that existed outside his theme park. In other words, Disney insisted that nothing should be allowed to break the magic and illusionary wonders he had set out to create.

Opening Day of Disneyland 1955

Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, exactly one year and a day after construction first began. Opening day guests were by invitation only, including celebrities, press, friends, families and Disney VIPs.

There was a total of around 11,000 invited guests, but the invitations themselves soon leaked to the outside world. Counterfeit tickets were sold illegally, and one man even set up a ladder and charged $5.00 a person for desperate would-be park-goers to scale the fence. Over 28,000 people entered Disneyland that day, a number that both Disneyland and the City of Anaheim were completely unprepared for.

Traffic was backed up for several miles outside of the park, and the Disney parking lots soon reached capacity. Problems were magnified when a plumber’s strike turned off all the water to every drinking fountain on the unusually hot 100 plus degree day, while every Disneyland restaurant ran out of food and drinks within hours.

The heat also made the freshly-laid masonry asphalt turn spongy, making walking particularly treacherous for women in high heels. Several of the rides malfunctioned, and a gas leak prompted Adventure Land, Frontier Land and Fantasy Land to be evacuated.

Despite these opening day glitches, Disneyland would open to the general public the following day, welcoming upwards of 50,000 visitors into the park, who had begun amassing at the main gates as early as two AM in the morning. Within its first two months of operations, Disneyland proved to be an overwhelming success, welcoming more than a million visitors to the happiest place on earth.