Harry Potter World, Orlando Fl

Forward: Please note this was originally published in 2018. I'm republishing it as part of my larger collection of urban planning observations.

I still have my first Harry Potter book — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. My mother even inscribed the date she had bought it for me. 11/2000. She didn’t know then how much this book would mean to me for the next 18 years. How I would spend days dreaming about magic and the what ifs of Hogwarts. I would reread the books like clockwork. I inhaled all the online fandom to stoke the fire for most of my high school and college years. I’ve fallen in love with other books and worlds of fantasy but Harry Potter is home.

So you would think now, as an adult with disposable income and a healthy amount of nostalgia I would be the first in line for more of the Wizarding World whether it be these Fantastic Beasts films or the Harry Potter World (in Japan, LA, Orlando, and London). But I was wary. How could our world ever successfully masquerade as the one JK Rowling wrote? I finally bit the bullet this year and went with a friend. I’m still mulling through if the trip was worth it personally but I thought it would be interesting to do an analytical review of the amusement park. I think amusement parks themselves are interesting subtopics of urban planning. There’s the question of how these large corporate entities fit into the cities they inhabit but also how the amusement park planners create life and order within the parks through design.

My friend and I went to Harry Potter World in the busy season and we paid $180 some dollars for 2 park 1 day pass. Universal Studios cleverly split Harry Potter World between two of their parks and having the “Hogwarts Express” connect them. I personally think you can do all of it one day. You have to go through the rest of Universal Studios to get to Harry Potter World and there was a weird sense of suspense at 8:30am walking through an amusement park that was slowly coming to life.

The park doesn’t look different from any other city landscape at first glance. It has paved streets and sidewalks. It has fire hydrants and stop signs. But there are moments of clear realization that this isn’t necessarily a fully functional city. That these buildings were not built for what they look like. You see a movie theater marquee without a single theater seat inside. It is eery when there is not a car in sight on these neat streets. Do they even allow cars in the park?

We started at Diagon Alley — to be chronological with the plot of the Sorcerer’s Stone. We later would take the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross to land in Hogsmeade. Both Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade house 1 main ride which you can wait anywhere from 20–80 minutes in line for. You can eat at the Leaky Cauldron and drink butter beer at Hogsmeade. It’s a strange to feel nostalgia or deja vu for a place you’ve never been just imagined and seen in movies. The amusement park designers clearly researched the movie sets to create this experience. What’s ironic to me is both are illusions copying each other to create reality.

It's interesting but clearly intentional that the amusement park makers built Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade as they are places to shop. As muggles, we cannot fly on a Quidditch Pitch or defend ourselves from all the different creatures in the Forbidden Forest. But what we can do that feels very real is open up our wallets and pay for things that wizards and witches have. It also helps their profit margins. And honestly, that’s fine to me. I’m the first person in line to buy a time turner necklace or a Molly Weasley themed Christmas sweater. But I think what made the experience feel stolen from me was the shops didn’t fill me with wonder. You can go into Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes but the “magic” is happening above you and out of reach. Instead, you can buy a bloody nougat candy for $12. You can’t read the books at Flourish and Blotts because you can’t open the door at Flourish and Blotts (probably since JK Rowling, hasn’t written enough world building books to fill up a bookstore). You resign yourself to staring at the window presentation, hungry for more knowledge.

My final thought is about the people in the park. It was pretty busy and at times hot day at the park for Thanksgiving season. By noon, it was hard to weave around from point A to point B and most of the rides had wait times of 60 minutes or more. You can eat, shop, or wait in lines to ride lines at amusement parks. The park isn’t really designed for much else and you can clearly see that in how people sat wherever they could that was mildly appropriate such as stages or stairs. Several times, we were politely asked by staff to vacate a part of the area so they could set up for a live performance. It seems like the park didn’t think through how much people need to rest and loiter, even in the world of magic.

ps. Pumpkin juice and butterbeer are overrated. But the fish and chips were surprisingly good.