At the very northern edge of the Disneyland Resort property, just off of Ball Road and reclining at the western edge of the Team Disney Anaheim (TDA) guest parking lot, sits an elegant little building. It's not really in an area designed for guests, but it's not in an area barred from the public either, since it's before you get to any sort of backstage security checkpoint.
I've dropped many-a Cast Member friend off at the adjacent parking lot, but only recently did the house catch my eye. Really it should have sooner, because it's completely unlike any other building in the resort, especially a backstage one.
You can tell [or at least, I can] just from looking at it that it was originally a house, whatever its current function. And all its architectural details point towards it being built in the 1900s-1930s. Which means that it must predate Disneyland itself.
And so I thought to myself, "I bet that's like the oldest building on property or something."
Thus inspired, I began my quest to figure out if I was right.
Only in retrospect do I realize that I know went about it the hard way. I took at once to my favorite archival resource: pictures sourced from Google Images. Doing so took me down a long dark road of obfuscation, idleness, and no real results. I combed over images like these pre-construction 1953 aerial snapshots, trying to squint at structures like the one circled in red and guess, "could this house still be there 65 years later?" From so far away there was no real way of telling.
My biggest clue to the house's origin came when I stumbled upon, of all things, aerial postcards for the City of Anaheim, taken during construction for Mickey's Toon Town in most likely 1992. The one below, from a glamour photography standpoint, is taken at a really weird angle, since Disneyland park is only partially the focus. Also clearly visible are Disney backstage areas, the Santa Ana Freeway, and various hotels in the vicinity. Now, I realize that the City of Anaheim has more to offer than just Disneyland [depending who you ask], but the other parts aren't necessarily postcard-pretty.
For my purposes the postcard shot showed something that until that point I hadn't even considered. The house I was trying to find an origin for wasn't even there. The TDA guest parking lot (in red) was clearly in the same spot as it is today, even before they built the actual TDA building in 1995-96. The structure previously on the site, former world headquarters for Global Van Lines (one-time Disneyland locker storage sponsor), is circled in blue. Noticeably absent from the parking lot is any kind of house-like building. Whatever the house was, it hadn't always sat on its current plot. It had been moved there. Recently.
I then spent probably another hour combing over even more historical aerial shots, trying to pick out the outline of the house's roof somewhere else on the property. A fruitless endeavor, I assure you. Fed up with squinting and trying to do "real detective work," I eventually gave in and simply googled "house moved to TDA guest parking lot." And what do you know? That worked.
Bam! There was my answer. The Pope House.
My fatal mistake [or at least, one that could've saved me a few hours] was assuming that since I'd worked for Disney for years and never heard of this building, that no one else on the Internet must care about it either. If I'd ran a search engine query for "oldest structure in disneyland," I could've answered my quest in about 5 seconds.
Here's the lowdown on it, information courtesy of a 2011 article by the Disney Parks Blog's ever-informative Erin Glover:
Owen and Dolly Pope were animal trainers from California who showed their ponies at animal fairs throughout the state, and first came to Walt Disney's attention in late 1950. Walt was interested in having the Popes raise, train, and nurture live horses and pack mules for his amusement park project, which at the time was still in its earliest planning stages. Years before the site for what would become "Disneyland" was even selected, Walt moved the Popes around Thanksgiving 1951 to a trailer on the Burbank studio lot so they could begin training their stock. Once the park site was chosen in Anaheim, and in order to keep Dolly and Owen close to the livestock, Walt gave the Popes their choice of farmhouses already existing on property, which would otherwise be demolished. The 1920s-era home they selected was then relocated from its original site along Harbor Blvd. to a 10-acre backstage area known as the Pony Farm, and later the Circle-D Corral, just north of Frontierland and the Big Thunder Ranch. For many years Owen and Dolly actually lived within the Disneyland property, occupying the house until 1971, when they moved to Florida to help train horses for Walt Disney World. In 1975 they actually became the first Cast Members from Disney World to retire. Meanwhile back in Anaheim the Pope House was thereafter used as office and storage space.
Ain't that interesting! But why was it relocated yet again to the corner of a parking lot? Another couple of articles confirmed the obvious. The House's 1955 location, directly above Frontierland, was a casualty of early 2016 land-clearing for the upcoming Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge project. In order to get guests to a Galaxy Far Far Away, some longstanding backstage stalwarts had to go. The good news is that someone in the Disney command chain realized the Pope House's significance and decided that it should be transported and preserved for posterity, a fate which, sadly, was not granted to all structures in the fallout area [RIP, Fantasyland Skyway Station].
Mystery solved. Hooray! Why had it been so hard to spot in old photos? A combination of the park's northern berm and the tree line separating onstage Frontierland from backstage had mostly obscured the House in every single picture I'd looked at. But I'd found it in the end, and could end my quest happily.
However, there's also an interesting technological anecdote to this tale, which goes as follows:
During my searching I happened to have Google Earth open in one of my tabs, because it's a brilliant tool for observing the parks from all angles. For the Pope House, I knew its current location, but for fun I thought I'd take a glance at where it used to be. So I scrolled down to look at the empty plot of the its former site above Frontierland, and was hit with a strange surprise. There it was.
Again.
The Pope House was on Google Earth... twice! What could this mean? Did they accidentally move some other house onto the TDA parking lot? Did they covertly build a copy of the Pope House there while planning to destroy the original?? Had I slipped into some parallel universe where one house could be two places at once!?
Of course not. Well, unless you count Google servers as parallel universes. The obvious answer is that Google satellites must require multiple orbital passovers of a site in order to render it in 3D, and that the most recent time that they rendered Disneyland just happened to be the exact few days in which the Pope House was moved. That is, January 19-21, 2016. Just over a week from when the DRR, Tom Sawyer Island, and half of the Rivers of America went on shutdown for a year and a half. Moving the Pope House, it seemed, was the very first part of Star Wars land clearing.
Let me prove it. Dash cam photographs from Mice Chat user Bye130 actually show the Pope House in transit, sitting atop the bed of a large flatbed semi truck [dare I say, a Popemobile?] at around 8am on January 20. Apparently it was actually stalled there until at least 11pm that night, bottomed out at backstage gate leading onto Disneyland Drive near the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure. If you look closely at it, is the truck bed in the photo collapsed? A reverse Pooh Bear situation if I've ever seen one ["Ooph!" I can imagine the House groaning, "I'm stuck!"]
But by hook or by crook the crew assigned to the task somehow got the House going again, because another dash cam shot, also by Bye130, shows it resting comfortably in its new home off of Ball Road by 9am the next morning. Good for them. [Ignore the January 1, 2014 in the timestamp though. Bye130 must've confused his cam when downloading pics from the previous day.]
Independent of Mice Chat users, an article on the OC Register's website by journalist Joseph Pimentel confirms that the House sat in the corner of TDA parking by January 22 at the very latest. The article claims that moving the House cost the Walt Disney Company approximately $20,000, and they had not at that point figured out exactly what they planned to use it for.
Going back to that second House on Google Earth, the one still in its 1955 location, I think is the most interesting part of this whole story. Again we can place the dates of the Google scan flyovers at approximately January 22 on the late end. By why just January 19 on the early end? Why not earlier? Because if you zoom in on Google Earth and flip the angle so the House isn't obscured by trees, you can actually see a bevy of poorly-rendered flatbeds clustered around the House, preparing to whisk it away. You wouldn't rent big, expensive trucks for longer than you had to, and if the House could be offloaded in under a day, surely it could be loaded in a similar timeframe.
Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I'd wandered into a little Twilight Zone of my own, where the past and present coexisted in eery harmony. This, needless to say, must be an extremely rare occurrence, even for tech giant Google to capture. Most entire buildings don't move, and when they do, it's not on the exact days they happen to be photographed via satellite.
It just goes to show, sometimes you find Disney Magic where you least expect it.