/ Cory Doctorow / 8:45 am Tue May 4, 2010

Overnight with Disneyland's cleaning staff

The LA Times spends a night in Disneyland with the custodial staff and details the insane attention to detail used to make the park picture perfect. My favorite bit is the non-black-light-luminescent saliva-cleaning solution to clean spit off of Indiana Jones:

Sometimes, the jobs require ingenuity, even for some of the more distasteful chores. For example, the Indiana Jones Adventure ride relies on nearly 1,000 black lights that shine on painted mesh screens to create floating ghost images.

But the effect is marred when guests sometimes spit at the ghosts, and the saliva ends up on the screens where it glows under black lights. Because typical cleaning products bleach the screens, David Graefen, the ride's service manager, said his crew created a special saliva-cleaning solution.

Park workers have also found a resourceful way to remove other unwanted guests -- rodents.

Years ago -- no one seems to know when -- feral cats began to sneak into the park, living among the park's trees and shrubs during the day. At night, they venture out, and an estimated 200 cats now prowl through Disneyland and neighboring California Adventure Park.

But instead of evicting the cats, Disneyland's animal wranglers work to control the feline population by spaying and neutering the adult cats and finding homes for all kittens born in the resort. The cats eat at five permanent feeding stations installed throughout the two parks.

After dark, the dirty work at Disneyland begins (Thanks, Will!)
Previously:

20

  1. Yeah, the feral cats did not mysteriously start sneaking in (because cats love whimsy and heard there was a giant mouse around?). Disney brought them in as free rodent control and then let them get out of hand.

    1. Right. Cats could never figure out that there were no predators and mass quantities of food at the park on their own. Old Walt brought in these Nazi cats from Brazil after they were done scouting the Dallas School Book Depository off Daily Square.

  3. Well, they used to have some dogs to keep the cats under control, but they got rid of them because they were fucking goofy.

    1. Not necessarily – the hunting instinct is separate from the hunger drive, and if they’re being fed the typical dry food (and I can’t see Disney being that nice), a nice juicy mouse is much preferred.
      Props to Disney for taking a long view of the problem.

  5. It’s a mystery when they came in? Well, it is no mystery WHY they have two hundred cats there now. Five feeding stations? You’ve got to be kidding me.

    This is very, very, Disney. It looks NICE, but it really isn’t at all. You don’t feed feral cats. If you feed feral cats, you get more feral cats. It makes a great little project for somebody, all the feeding and trapping and sterilization and releasing. And of course, all the sweeping up of the feces produced by two hundred feral cats. Mmmmm, think of all the toddlers wandering around Disneyland and touching things and putting their hands in their mouths. Nice.

    But kitties are CUTE. And you don’t need real birds in Disneyland, you have artificial ones.

    So two hundred cats and more kittens all the time. More kittens from fed parents. More kittens who are handed off to people to adopt, people who might have otherwise adopted other cats. But the park is producing more more more more kittens. Because you have to feed the kitties, because they are CUTE. It would be mean not to feed them. Because they are CUTE CUTE CUTE CUTE CUTE.

    1. So Disney is wrong for feeding and spaying/neutering feral cats? I’m not following your logic. If these cats were not fed and spayed by Disney, they would starve and reproduce somewhere else. The cats come from idiots in the local area who buy kittens and then dump them when they stop being cute. That’s when Disney takes care of them. Dana Point harbor has a similar problem and takes a similar approach – feed and spay/neuter. What else would you suggest they do? Ignore the problem and hope it goes away on its own? Shoot the cats on sight? Ship them to the pound to be euthanized?

      As for the health issue, I’m pretty sure the millions of human slobs who come through there pose more of a risk to those toddlers than 200 cats ever could.

      1. Only if there’s a diggable surface. And they’re not annoyed with you.

    4. Apparently Pipenta missed this part of the story: “Disneyland’s animal wranglers work to control the feline population by spaying and neutering the adult cats and finding homes for all kittens born in the resort. The cats eat at five permanent feeding stations installed throughout the two parks.”

      After having watched a child of about five LICK the brass handrail in one of the restaurants, I think I have much more to fear from people than I do from cats. My husband and I always carry hand sanitizer at Disneyland and use it liberally, not because of the cats, but because of the people who come to the park and spread their germs. I can’t tell you how many children, teens, and grown women I’ve seen who use the restroom then don’t wash their hands. Yuck!

  6. Clean, shmean. It’s not a real amusement park unless I go into the men’s room and am forced to urinate in a giant trough choked with cigarettes and old band-aids, a contraption that one of my college roommates dubbed “the collective urinal.”

  7. I saw a cat for the first time on my last Disneyland visit. Didn’t know what the deal was until today.

  8. Reminds me of being 16 and standing in a pile of dry ice, holes in my shiny black work shoes, feet freezing, shoveling more dry ice out of the ice cream carts.
    Disneyland at night could be lonely lonely lonely…

  9. I have to say, adding to BookGuy’s comment, Disneyland is really not always all that clean… but it does certainly blow away typical amusement parks, no doubt about that.

    The thing that really bugs me about Disneyland is how over-crowded it is (on most days). I currently live five or six miles down the road from the place so I’ve been there several times, and only a couple of those times did I see the “magic” of the place – that mystical notion of the place that enticed you as a kid. One was the first time I went, and the crowd was mild (last year, at 22 years old) and the other was when the weather was “bad” and there was hardly anyone there.

    If you’re there when few others are, you see how it works. There are a lot of cleaning people constantly doing stuff during the day, but fairly discreetly. Somehow, the big messes that you see all over other amusement parks get cleaned up before anyone really sees them.

    It’s a fun place if you go when the crowds are reasonable… the way you imagine the place if you base your mental image of it on photos and home movies from the 50’s and 60’s. And when you imagine Disneyland (or any other place) in the 50’s and early 60’s, you think of conscientious, clean people who don’t throw trash all over the place and mess stuff up (Mad Men scene where they toss their picnic trash all over the park notwithstanding). When 50’s-level crowds are there, the staff are easily able to handle keeping the place pristine, giving you the illusion of “simpler times” when things were clean and in good condition (at least, that’s how people remember them).

    Contrast that to a typical day, where they jam-pack people in to the point that you’re waiting an hour and a half to get on the Winnie the Pooh ride… which is probably the most boring things there. If you wanted to go on one of the star attractions and didn’t get a fast pass as soon as the gates open, forget it. On these days, the place is (understandably) dirty – approaching typical amusement park levels at times. Combined with the other displeasures of being in such an overcrowded place, this is not a good thing for customer happiness.

    Not to say I’m not impressed by how clean they manage to keep it, but I wish something could be done about the root causes of the place getting trashed in the first place – overcrowding and un-conscientious visitors.

Comments are closed.