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Walt Disney World Tour of Concrete

Whereas a giant ’70s foosball table highlights Kelly’s favorite courtyard, the bowling lanes near the pin pool had to be the most intense part of the project and are the creation of which he is most proud.

“Disney wanted the pool deck to look like a waxed floor and the relief had to be very shallow,” he remembers. “The stamping was so finite. It’s within a 1⁄4 inch and the shallowest stamp Scofield has ever made.” Since the crew only had a small window of time, “like 20 minutes,” to do the job right, “we broke up the pool deck into 100 different pours. If you look real close, you can see the construction joints.”

Kelly says they had 11 different sets of stamps set up in sequence to control the finite stamping process, and the whole crew had to pitch in and stamp to get the appropriate relief on the pool deck. As if this wasn’t problematic enough, it turned out to be one of the wettest years they’ve ever had in Orlando, Kelly says, adding that it’s typical for it to rain around noon every day during the summer anyway. In order to have the concrete set up before it rained, crews had to start work in the middle of the night — a normal workday ran from 2 a.m. to 11 a.m. — with artificial lighting from light towers glaring down on them much of the time.

Kelly says because a lot of the concrete was integrally colored, they used a conveyor with a telescopic boom to place the concrete. The water necessary to use with a pump would have jeopardized the consistency of the color, he adds.

“The whole job took a massive amount of preplanning,” Kelly says. “Without the great supers we had, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.”

Although the roads at Disney’s Kilimanjaro Safari game preserve look like crude unpaved roadways, they actually are crafted out of concrete.

The concrete in the Magic Kingdom’s Fairytale Garden is fashioned from skins and random imprints.

The wild happenings at Animal Kingdom
Earl “Honk” Visger, currently hardscape division manager for D&D Tree in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., has worked on numerous Disney projects since 1990. For three years, as the hardscape super for a company called Valley Crest, he helped build Animal Kingdom — literally from the ground up.

For starters, the area where the park now stands was leveled, and everything — every shrub and tree, every hill and dale — was strategically placed according to a master plan. “It was the most challenging job I’ve ever been involved with, completely different from anything I was ever taught,” Visger says. “We threw away everything we knew and started experimenting.”

All the walks were shovel cut; they didn’t use any forms. For the first time in his experience, Visger recounts, he fashioned concrete to look like wood. They made many of their own stamps to resemble dirt, forest litter or a combination of both. They made giant root skins and root molds from actual tree parts. Near big trees, they placed concrete roots to make them look like they were jutting out of the walkway. “Some people actually try to pick them up. That’s how real they look,” he says.

The crews ran barefoot through the cement mud to mimic fleeing “aborigines.” Some guys were wrapped in plastic and rolled around to create imprints that looked like the result of large wallowing beasts. Others strapped three-gallon buckets on their feet and ran to create elephant footprints. Still others were dragged away from the mud into the brush, similar to what a lion would do with its kill. “We did a lot of strange stuff,” Visger recalls. “It was a wild job.”

Wild, indeed. When the safari animals were first brought to Animal Kingdom, he explains, they had to be trained to go into their houses to sleep at night and most of them weren’t fast learners. There were many hairy nights when Visger and his crew were pouring the ride paths and had to scramble to safety.

“We’d be pouring concrete and if an animal keeper blew his whistle, we went and jumped in our trucks, no questions asked. Then we’d see a herd of wildebeest or ostriches or zebras run by. It’d happen a couple of times each night.”

Visger, who was known as Honky before his first Disney employers emphatically recommended he shorten his nickname to Honk so many years ago, credits Disney with high standards and a penchant for quality work. “If you do things right you can be a household name,” he says. “If you don’t, you’re out of there.”