Tom's Treehouse, July 1962
Tom Sawyer Island was sort of a dream come true for certain kids who loved the idea of a place where they could have little adventures, climbing rocks, exploring spooky caves, crossing swaying bridges, and so on. I know I wanted a treehouse when I was younger, but we didn't have a suitable tree, and we moved every 2 to 3 years. Oh well.
Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, not only had his own island, he had a small platoon of boys who helped him build a darn fine treehouse at the top of the highest hill on the island. Until the Matterhorn was built, souvenir maps listed the treehouse as the "highest point in Disneyland".
21 comments:
Major-
This is a mighty fine treehouse - fake leaves and all.
Every time I read/hear the old line about the treehouse being "... the highest point in Disneyland", all I can think of is the bragging rights Los Angeles television station KTLA used to tout about its transmitter being "...located on Mt. Alta - the highest point on Mt. Wilson" - as if that mattered-! (I wonder if there ever was a treehouse on Mt. Wilson-??)
Thanks, Major.
Pleasant, bright, Treehouse pics. So, which came first: Tom's artificial tree or the Swiss Family's artificial tree?
I'm curious to know how the grand piano was used in the construction of Tom's tree. (And where they 'found' the piano.)
Back in the late fifties we had a treehouse, built in a large weeping willow tree. The tree blew over in a wind storm in 1962 (the Columbus Day storm, about 3 months after this photo was taken). So much for the treehouse... and the tree.
I like the combination of blue sky, (fake) foliage, (probably not fake) people, crude Treehouse, and railings. Thanks, Major.
@ JB-
Tom's was first (1957) and the leaves are fake; SFR (1962).
...the boys used whatever they could scrounge up, including pieces of old crates, and a Steinway grand piano (needs verification).
Major, are you sure that it wasn't a Stoneway piano, purchased from Eighty-Eight Fingers Louie? (Flintstones reference!)
I had actually forgotten that they closed Tom and Huck's Treehouse. Another TRE!!!!
These are really nice pics of the treehouse, Major. Thanks for sharing!
I loved Tom‘s Treehouse. I was fortunate to climb it one last time with my son, so he got to see it too. Climbing down was another matter, the ladder inside the trunk was smaller than I remembered, and bending was harder for me.
I had a fun treehouse on the farm, it was in the apple tree that produced the applesauce apples. But ever after leaving, we never had trees big enough, so my kids never had that joy.
Walt sure knew how to build an island with everything a kid could want. Thanks Major!
JG
The first pic looks like a publicity shot, with all of the kids posed appropriately on steps and in the window, looking directly at the camera. The second one seems a little off with the gray-haired kid on the steps.
Nanook, it is just about the perfect treehouse! Only an escalator might improve things. So there is a Mt. Alta ON Mt. Wilson??
JB, nobody knows which treehouse came first, as they sprouted hundreds of years ago. The lid of the grand piano was mostly what was used, though the bench was also useful. I remember an older neighbor kid had a treehouse, but he wouldn’t let “babies” in it! What a jerk.
Nanook, well you and I have very different information!
TokyoMagic!, ha, as soon as I read “Stoneway” I knew where you were headed! I want to go to whatever they call Tom Sawyer Island the next time I go to Disneyland, I feel like it’s not long for this world.
JG, I can only imagine how cramped the inside of the tree must be! How many heads were bruised by bumping them? Did you build the farm treehouse yourself? I need details! And yes, Walt really knew what a kid would love for his island.
Dean Finder, maybe the photo that I posted second was actually the first one taken, and the first one was the redo that was acceptable!
The Tom Sawyer Island Treehouse closed completely in 2013 to guests , but the secondary access “ladder in the trunk “ had been blocked off from used much earlier than that. I remember one of the treehouse windows had a canvas flap /shade reading “Harper’s Mill” as if a scrap from a grain sack from the nearby grist mill was being reused as curtains…
Oh .. another detail of the later version of the treehouse ( the top part had been rebuilt several times since this photo was taken) was that it had only a partial roof and was mostly open to the elements. ( kinda like what happened to Fort Wilderness!!”)
@ MIKE-
"I remember one of the treehouse windows had a canvas flap /shade reading “Harper’s Mill” as if a scrap from a grain sack from the nearby grist mill was being reused as curtains…"
The exact same decorating idea was extensively used at Hearst Castle... it's the highlight of the tour-!
Major-
"So there is a Mt. Alta ON Mt. Wilson??"
In part from a sign-off around 1973...
"KTLA Channel 5 now ends its broadcast day. KTLA is owned and operated by Golden West Broadcasters, with studios and offices located on 5800 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. KTLA's transmitter is located on Mount Alta, the highest point on Mount Wilson. KTLA operates on channel 5, on an assigned frequency of 76 to 82 megahertz, with a radiated power of 50,000 watts, under license granted by the Federal Communications Commission, Washington, D.C. KTLA, the west's first commercial television station, with over a quarter century of broadcast service, dedicates itself to meeting the interests and needs of the Southern California community..."
Any treehouse is a good treehouse, even for grey hair kids such as myself. I like seeing older photos of the treehouse in the distance as it is really high up there...or it seems without vegetation growing high around it. I've been luckily enough to crawl into the treehouse many times..and was wrather miffed when I read on here that it's closed. Lawyers and insurance companies: "ugh"....and perhaps it's not them, it's guests that can't mind their kids...I'll settle for that one. I always thought that the treehouse was a very easy up and easy down like the big treehouse across the way. Well....I guess I was smaller back then and it SEEMED doable. Hmm...gotta think on that one. Thanks Major!
Nice clear photos. I was definitely one of those certain kids, delighting in Tom's at the park and building my own tree house from cool junk just like that (too cool, as it turned out when teenager thugs took over it). A favorite feature I could not reproduce at age 7 was the brook babbling up from the roots; but I have many fountains now, so I won!
MS
Major, my Dad put up the initial platform, but I added to it over the years. At some point, the apple tree was too fragile to keep climbing into, and I grew big enough to climb into one of the big maples, so I built another treehouse in the bigger tree.
JG
Mike Cozart, I wonder if there were already plans to “piratize” Tom Sawyer Island when they closed the Treehouse?
Mike Cozart, WEIRD, I thought that the Treehouse always had a roof!
Nanook, I think I remember that part of the tour!
Nanook, well there you go. I still think it’s weird that Mount Wilson has a “Mount Alta” on it, not sure how that works. I guess it’s just one of several peaks?
Bu, I agree, the Treehouse is much more impressive when it was not hemmed in by trees, especially when those trees got to be almost as tall. I’m kind of surprised that the groundskeepers let it get like that (same with the trees that eventually dwarfed Cascade Peak), but I understand that removing trees is a big undertaking. I suppose “liability” was probably the reason the Treehouse (and other TSI features) were removed; as others have said, “This is why we can’t have nice things!”.
MS, while I never had a treehouse, my friends and I did have some “Huck Finn” type experiences when I lived in Pennsylvania. In the summer, the Susquehanna River would get very low, exposing islands that would become “hideouts” that we could wade out to. Once somebody found a six pack of beer (Coors I think) on one island! Yes, we drank it (though I admit I did not like it).
JG, all the best treehouses have dad’s help, at least initially! The one I mentioned that I was not allowed in was pretty crummy, it must have really been built by the kid!
Did they change the direction of traffic on the treehouse over the years? I seem to remember.....at least in the 1980s, that guests were supposed to enter up the ladder inside the trunk of the tree, and when leaving the structure at the top, you were supposed to use the outside staircase to go down. Did the treehouse used to have two staircases on the outside of it?
- TokyoMagic!
TOKYO : that was the way I always remembered it - you entered up the ladder through the trunk and exited down the stairs …. But there was always the kids that went the opposite way. When the ladder access was blocked off , you had to use the single set of stairs … it wasn’t much of an issue as like today , very few people go on the island. A place not long for this world . When people hear this they are worried , but I always asked them … “did you go to Tom Sawyer’s Island “ on your last visit … and they hem and haw and explain reasons why they didn’t…. And they will be the biggest complainers when it is gone…. Like when you’d see maybe 5 people on Adventure Thru Inner Space “ in 1985. OR the people who complain about the Rivers of America closing so early - but they never miss a performance of Fantasmic. I despise what that flickering fluorescent light and burning river duck show did to Frontierland & New Orleans Square and I saw it once : in 1992 and refuse to watch it ever again.
Mike, I guess I never really paid attention to the treehouse, in it's later years, even though I continued to take the rafts to the island. In recent years, I have always hated seeing that thing that passes for Fort Wilderness now. I was never fond of the pirate overlay, either. And the last few times I was over there, some of the pirate "stuff" was broken and there didn't seem to be any urgency on management's part, to fix it.
I saved a space on the ground to watch Craptastic! just once when it was brand new, and then never again. I was also comped a spot on the "dessert" balcony of The Disney Gallery once in the 1990s. After that, I only caught parts of the show while trying to get over to the westside of the park. What a huge mess that is! I remember around Christmastime, they only had one way traffic going through the crowd in front of the river. They would not let us go back the same way. They were forcing everyone to go through New Orleans Square in order to leave the westside.
We went on Adventure Thru Inner Space during EVERY visit! I remember going on it when it was "free." And we continued to go on it once we were required to give up a "C" ticket for it, and then starting in 1983 when we got our first annual passes, we still made a point to go on it every time. It was the coolest! I would trade Star Tours in a heart beat, in order to have ATIS back!
- TokyoMagic!
Today viewed a DVD of "40 Pounds of Trouble", a 1962 film I faintly remembered seeing on TV as a kid. It's an update of Damon Runyon's "Little Miss Marker", starring Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette. The slapstick climax has agents of a divorce lawyer chasing Curtis around Disneyland, including one of them clumsily popping out of the Tom Sawyer Island treehouse. It's a mediocre movie notable mainly for that sequence, approved by Walt but reportedly regretted due to the disruption of park operations and probably the quality of the final product. Disneyland got a prominent plug with copyrighted art on the posters and I presume newspaper ads, but oddly no mention in the movie's credits.
All I have to say is that greed and lawyers ruin everything. In my youth the treehouse was one of those happy discoveries while traversing the island. It's a shame it had to go.
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