May 9, 2009
A Saturday Morning, Good Friends, and A Hotel Implosion
Keith and I gave up a good Saturday morning sleep-in to leave the house at 6 a.m. to go camp out on the side of the highway and watch the implosion of a giant pink skeleton of a hotel.
The hotel was built before Disney World was in existence, and Disney executives used the Colony Plaza Resort in Ocoee, Florida as sort of a headquarters while they were buying up property and planning the empire. The picture at the right is what the resort looked like in its glamorous hey-day. The picture at the left is what it looked like in the middle of its implosion.
When we moved to this area in 1999-2000, the hotel-turned-timeshare wasn't nearly as run-down as it is now, possibly because it hadn't been sitting condemned for eleven years yet. In 2005, when we returned from our time in Dallas, I think the hotel had already become home to West Orange County's homeless population. (Here's some guy's flickr account with pictures of the hotel he uploaded in April 2008 to give you an idea of what it has recently looked like.)
At 7:10 this morning, thousands of people--including Keith, Rita, our friends Rebekah and Joe Fana and their daughter Libby, and Jeff Cooper with his son Johnathan--gathered along the corner of Highway 50 and Maguire Road to watch the end of the once-glorious hotel. After the demolition crew's countdown, charges exploded throughout the second floor of the hotel, and then it collapsed in a roar and cloud of dust. (Here's somebody's YouTube video of the implosion.) A very dramatic beginning to our day.
Rita Diane Devlin
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