WestCOT
Illustration of the built property
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| Location | Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California, U.S. |
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| Theme | Technological innovation and international culture |
| Owner | The Walt Disney Company |
| Operated by | Walt Disney Parks and Resorts |
| Opened | Canceled |
WestCOT was a planned second theme park for the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. It was essentially a replica of EPCOT Center at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, and was dedicated to the celebration of human achievement, namely technological innovation and international culture. The park was represented by SpaceStation Earth, a larger version of the geodesic sphere Spaceship Earth featured at EPCOT Center.
In the 1990s, The Walt Disney Company expanded the original Disneyland Park into a multi-park, multi-resort business model. Intended to be the centerpiece of the revamping, WestCOT was announced in 1991, though financial restraints contributed to its cancellation in 1995. Its planned site later housed the complex's second theme park Disney's California Adventure Park, opened in 2001.
In 1991, Disney announced plans to build WestCOT on the site of Disneyland's parking lot. It was themed around a Utopian vision of the future, similar to EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World, and it was the first Disney theme park to contain hotels within the park.
Several issues arose that would ultimately lead to the project's cancellation. It required a significant land acquisition, though residential areas built around Disneyland caused land prices to skyrocket, and thousands of residents wanted to be relocated. Residents claimed that the park's light pollution was too much to bear at night, and that the replica of Spaceship Earth would have become an eyesore. With estimates hovering close to $3 billion and the company's significant financial problems with the recently opened Disneyland Resort Paris, the project was scrapped in 1995.CEO Michael Eisner held a three-day executive retreat in Aspen, Colorado to come up with a new idea, and from that meeting of about thirty executives came the idea for a California-themed park. That project became Disney's California Adventure, which opened in 2001 on the property that WestCOT was to occupy.
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