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In a 400,000 square-foot warehouse in Cerritos, Disney cast members create magic.
It’s the facility where cast members create decor for the park — right now they are putting the finishing touches on Halloween and have
already started winter holiday-scapes — fix everything from restaurant appliances to the iconic spinning teacups; it’s where signs get fresh coats of paint and carousel horses receive tender loving care. The facility houses machine shops, fabrication shops, a sewing team, a paint shop, and all kinds of skilled professionals who keep Disneyland beautiful and running efficiently.
And all the creativity and skill behind the decor and park enhancement is there to serve the storytelling. “Storytelling is a centerpiece to everything we do at the company, and particularly in how we approach our business. We always approach it story-first,” says 21-year veteran Phil Rahn, director, resort enhancement & horticulture. “Whatever we put in, whatever we design, whatever we create, there has got to be a reason for it.”
Tristen Tierney, associate project manager, resort enhancement (9 years at Disneyland), told his parents that he wanted to work at Disneyland when he was “11 or 12” and had already spent a couple years documenting the park’s decor, and deconstructing it to figure out what made it “elevated,” he tells Variety.
When he got a job at Disneyland, “I started buying the decor from property control”: cast members get to buy retired items at a deep discount. “I’d take it apart, really see how it was put together, and then I would rehab it myself. And I started creating a portfolio using the existing decor here at Disneyland.”
Parks Enhancement noticed, and Tierney landed his dream job.
Tristen Tierney, associate project manager, resort enhancement, shows off a Halloween display headed for Disneyland in the park‘s giant Cerritos warehouse.
The team was finishing up the decor for the Main Street USA Pumpkin Festival.
The lamp posts on Main Street were set to be topped with the popular Mickey Mouse-shaped pumpkins backed with traditional fall foliage. Bunting will be attached using a clever slider system and secured with grommets to keep it in place. The pumpkins are fiberglass, a big improvement over the foam ones previously used. “They are lighter, and more robust,” Tierney says.
Everything is hand-carved, painted and sewn in the facility but craftspeople.
Every leaf, pumpkin, ribbon, paint and fabric must withstand the harsh Southern California sun and heat — the park officially unveils its Halloween decor Aug. 21 and on Nov. 1 it comes down. And those months are some of the hottest in the region.
“We have to easily be able to store the items here in the shop, be able to pull them down. We do a rehab on all our items, so every item goes through each decorator station,” Tierney says, adding that the team will make fixes and adjustments. “We don’t just put the put the thing back in the warehouse, forget about it, and put it back up. We need to make sure that it’s show ready and it’s safe. And this is just part of the checks we do for our over 8,000 pieces of individual pieces of decor.”
The enhancement team also experiments with installation techniques — the quicker the better as they must do their work after the park closes (sometimes that’s midnight) and before it opens at 7:30 a.m.
And that team can be 12-15 people or more, depending on the size and scale of the projects, as Disneyland works with outside vendors to make sure that the decor is ready to go by opening time. “That provides a very small window for us to get in there. So, we have to be ready to go, and be able to install very quickly, and get back here within just a couple hours,” Tierney says.
The seasonal decor’s themes and colors are developed with Walt Disney Imagineering and the Enhancement team.
The warehouse contains hundreds of boxes of florals and other small decor, all neatly and clearly labeled, rows of every textile used for umbrellas, chairs, bunting and other uses, rows of spare parts, props for the Main Street stores and other environments — an eye-popping inventory of everything large and small needed to keep the details of Disneyland’s attractions perfect.
There’s a giant teacup — stripped down to primer gray — in the spray paint bay waiting for its new coats. The machinists and fabricators are kept busy rehabbing the guts of cars from rides, making sure they are safe and can support the millions of guests each year.
The facility’s mechanics, machinists, metal workers and welders handle bigger projects involving vehicles from rides and other big display pieces. One of the ongoing tasks is to make sure rides are safe and in top working condition, like stripping down a Toy Story ride vehicle which needed some welded repairs and strengthening rods.
Devin Sweet, show overhaul sign painter and 20-year park vet, introduces the Show Overhaul sign shop, which is part of the Show Overhaul team. “We take care of the show elements that our guests personally interact with, so that would be attraction vehicles, outdoor vending carts and even trash cans. Some of the elements that maybe get overlooked in the park, but all tell the story of Disneyland,” she says.
Disneyland trash cans have fandom now, though. “Last year we had this great group of guests all dressed up as different Disneyland trash cans. It was fantastic,” she says. “But the great thing about these trash cans that’s maybe overlooked sometimes is that they have hand-painted elements on them.”
The artisans stay true to the original colors and designs of the park — never deviating in 70 years.
And everything is hand-painted and hand-drafted with love — there are no computer terminals around and certainly no AI agents.
“I think that’s always been a part of our story, right? So Walt Disney, when he first created Disneyland, he really wanted to bring his guests back in time. He wanted to bring them to a fantasy world,” says Sweet. “So as soon as you step foot into Disneyland, you’re stepping into his childhood of Marcel, Missouri, at the turn of the 20th century, and so everything there had to be meticulously designed, and you wouldn’t have a computer-generated sign at the turn of the 20th century, right? So, it only makes sense that it’s done in the old-fashioned way. And as artists, we’re so lucky that Disneyland really values that. Because this is a bygone art form, sign painting. And so, the fact that we get to do this and help bring that story to life, our guests notice.”
She was also working on refreshing a carousel horse called Lucifer’s Rose (all the carousel horses have names). She notes that the horses were bought by Disney in the 1950s from parks that were closing and are all hand-carved antiques — some even dating to 1875 — and each has a theme and color palette. “They’re solid wood, and so it’s our job to maintain these really special pieces of art. We follow artwork given to us by Walt Disney Imagineering, so that the horse looks exactly the same every time we do it.”
The gold on the horses is real as well.
“Our art is part of people’s memories and their stories,” she says.
There’s another paint shop where artisans are getting Christmas holiday decor ready. Rahn says, “This is a group that we call Small but Mighty. There are seven pictorial artists on our team, but they cover all the resort and then all the interior black light painting for all the attractions.”
He notes that former Disney topper Bob Iger just got a window on Main Street, “This is the team that made the window.” The shop’s proprietors’ names on Main Street all have a connection to Walt Disney and Disneyland, so it’s a great honor to get one.
Inside the part of the tidy and ordered facility is a ribbon of corrugated metal decorated with large Disney characters. It’s actually the walls of the old machine, paint and other workshops at Disneyland. “So, when we moved over here, we wanted to take a little piece of that with us,” says Rahn. “So this is all hand-painted stuff that the artist did over the years.”
Tradition, memories and stories are what help drive the artisans. “Because we always have to keep up with the industry, and we need to make sure that we’re making wise business decisions while at the same time, we’re honoring the craft and we’re honoring the legacy of Disney, it all comes back to storytelling,” says Rahn. “So if you’re walking down Main Street and you see a sign for Carnation, and that’s a printed vinyl graphic, that’s not going to make sense. That’s going to take you out of the story that you’re in. So we have to make sure that the decisions we make are still honoring the tradition, but also the stories that we’re telling, and that really is what drives our decision-making. You know, there are places in the park where you can get away with printed vinyl signs, but we have to be really intentional with those decisions.”
Disneyland by the numbers:
Disneyland Resort is home to 36,000 cast members in hundreds of different roles. It’s Orange County’s largest employer.
On average, full-time professional and skilled-labor cast members have worked at Disneyland Resort for more than 12 years.
75% of applicants surveyed cited career advancement as a top reason they wanted to work at Disneyland Resort.
