Interesting Facts about Bay Lake Tower and the Contemporary

You’ll marvel at every Disney Vacation Club resort. That’s a given. Still, every hotel in the DVC lineup is capable of surprising you with a few tricks and tidbits. Today, we’ll focus on one of the originals. Here are a few interesting facts about Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort.

This Was the First Hotel Disney Ever Owned

One of the oddest parts of Disney history circles back to a regrettable business decision. In the days leading up to the opening of Disneyland, Walt Disney ran out of money. Desperate, he had to sell one-third of the theme park to ABC. In addition, he couldn’t afford to build a hotel even though he knew it would sell. So, a third-party investor owned the Disneyland Hotel until 1988. 

In the planning stage of Walt Disney World, park officials weren’t about to make that mistake again. At the time, Disney had made countless unsuccessful overtures to acquire the Disneyland Hotel. So, the park planners wanted to avoid that mistake this time and planned two hotels. I mentioned this in the Interesting Facts about the Polynesian piece, but it’s also true about the Contemporary. 

These were the first two hotels that Disney ever officially owned. Both opened with Magic Kingdom in 1971, with the Polynesian being the place where Disney hosted VIPs and the Contemporary the architectural marvel. 

Disney Prefabricated the Entire Hotel

Speaking of which, here’s something you probably don’t know. The majority of the structure at the Contemporary wasn’t built on-site. That’s an extraordinary thought, but it’s true. 

Disney construction crews built the hotel rooms off-site and then transferred the rooms to the Contemporary. On the hotel campus, cranes lifted these rooms and positioned them within the A-frame skeletal structure. Initially, that frame was the only part of the hotel Disney built at the Contemporary.  Here’s a brief video of the process:

You didn’t expect wall covers and sliding doors to be part of the prefabricated build, did you? At the one-minute mark of the video, you get a quick glimpse of the process of sliding the apartment into the frame. Construction teams could only slot 15 hotel rooms into the frame per day. It was that slow of a process. Knowing all this changes how you perceive the Contemporary, doesn’t it?

Bay Lake Tower Had Been a Part of the Contemporary 

Differentiating the history of Bay Lake Tower from the Contemporary proves challenging. Part of the reason why is that they were once one and the same. Before Disney introduced Bay Lake Tower, it used this space as additional inventory at the Contemporary.

Back then, guests stayed at the North Garden Wing of the hotel. That changed in 2007, when Disney reclaimed the space. Construction crews demolished that part of the Contemporary campus and built Bay Lake Tower in its stead.  The process took two years, which means that Bay Lake Tower is only 16 years old, whereas the Contemporary is 54!

Have You Heard of Tempo Bay?

Here’s a fun fact about the Contemporary. That name came late in the process as plans changed. Walt Disney purchased the land for the Florida Project under the belief that he would build the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It would have been a utopian city had Uncle Walt lived. Sadly, he died in 1966, which reset most plans. 

A city would have needed transportation to and from the hotel, which would host non-residents, presumably business people visiting the area. So, Disney planned a hotel to match that philosophy, one with spots for PeopleMover and monorail stations. Remember that Walt Disney believed that the PeopleMover would become a viable form of transportation, not a Tomorrowland ride. So, the stations for this and the monorail would reside on the hotel’s lower floors. Impressively, a monorail would have gone straight through a part of the hotel’s A-frame. 

I’ve just described the plans for the Tempo Bay Hotel, which Disney never technically built. We know this because the Contemporary doesn’t have a PeopleMover station, although that would be amazing, wouldn’t it? The Original E.P.C.O.T. website has published a few photos of this project. 

You cannot help but notice the similarities between the initial plans for the Tempo Bay and what the Contemporary became. However, the Tempo Bay would have been much more utilitarian for people visiting and living in the city. A shopping center and a city center would have resided in the same vicinity, reducing the amount of travel. Walt Disney had intended the PeopleMover to carry guests on these short little trips, with the monorail functioning as a longer form of transportation. 

Bay Lake Tower Was the First DVC Monorail Resort

This fact is a bit obvious to longtime DVC members, as many remember a time before we could buy at a monorail resort. Program participants clamored for the addition for more than 15 years before Disney broke ground on Bay Lake Tower. 

Once this resort went on sale, DVC officials instantly recognized that they’d severely underestimated the demand for monorail properties. Within 18 months of Bay Lake Tower’s official opening, plans were well underway for the announcement of what would become The Villas at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. 

DVC confirmed that property in 2011 with sales beginning in May 2013. By September of that year (!), the company went ahead and confirmed that a DVC presence at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort would also arrive. So, in a span of four years (and a month), DVC members went from zero resort monorail options to all three! Bay Lake Tower was the first one, though, and it functioned as a proof of concept for the others.

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