Batter up! Grab a hot dog and a cold Coca-Cola in Casey's Corner, right on Main Street, U.S.A., and experience the history of the America's favorite pastime, baseball.

Originally opened as the Coca-Cola Refreshment Corner in 1971, the restaurant located at the corner of Main Street, U.S.A. and the park hub was refurbished and renamed Casey’s Corner in 1995. The eatery, one of the most popular in the park, sells “designer hotdogs”, including chili-cheese dogs, corn dog nuggets, and the barbecue slaw dog. While there are still a few slight nods back to the Coca-Cola Refreshment Corner through the use of Coca-Cola signage and advertisements, the theming of the restaurant leans heavily toward the game of baseball, specifically around the turn of the century.

As guests approach the restaurant from the hub, they find an outdoor seating area across the sidewalk against the wrought-iron fence surrounding the gardens of flowers, which is often occupied by the families of ducks that frequent this area of the Magic Kingdom. These tables, covered by red and white umbrellas, offer additional seating. A pianist playing ragtime piano often performs beneath the canopy of the restaurant. Attached to the canopy, on the corner of the building, is the sign for the restaurant, a large red “C” outlined by clear electric light bulbs, with the restaurant’s name, Casey’s Corner, printed in blue letters along the curves of the sign. The large red C is shaped in the same style as that on the opening scene for the animated short in the segment from Make Mine Music. Inside the hollow part of the sign is a figure of a baseball player swinging at a pitched baseball. The baseball is hollow on one side, and on windy days causes the figure to spin in a circle as though the player is striking out, like the baseball hero in Thayer’s poem. A six-foot-tall wooden figure of a baseball player wearing a white uniform with vertical blue stripes and the restaurant’s name scrolled across his chest welcomes guests as they walk into Casey’s Corner through its Main Street, U.S.A. entrance.

The white entrance doors show the opening date of the restaurant, engraved on a baseball, as 1888. This date fits into the overall story of the town of Main Street, U.S.A., but also connects back to the year that Thayer published “Casey at the Bat”. Upon entering the small counter-service restaurant, guests find the ceiling painted red, with red-and-white striped wallpaper. Above the service counter is an ornate wooden awning, similar to something that would have hung over the box office or concession stand of a baseball stadium in the 1880s. Stained glass lamps featuring the Coca-Cola logo hang from the ceiling, making the room feel even more a part of the era it is meant to represent.

The menu, attached to the wooden awning over the counter, features the fateful scene from the Disney short, with Casey standing haughtily on the left while the opposing pitcher stands on the right in mid-pitch. The room is decorated with framed photographs and magazine advertisements featuring baseball players and ladies in Victorian dress drinking Coca-Cola out of glass bottles. A wooden cabinet on the left wall of the room, which serves as a condiment station for the hot dog fixin’s and other supplies, including napkins and straws, is decorated with baseball-themed props, such as a metal basket full of baseballs and cardboard popcorn buckets. Similar supply cabinets throughout the restaurant feature other memorabilia, including beer steins emblazoned with baseball team logos, glass bottles of Coca-Cola, baseball caps, and glass jars full of peanuts.

To the right of the main entrance of Casey’s Corner is the small main dining room. Above the entryway into this dining room is a large white banner reading “BALL GAME TO DAY”, beneath which hang five small American flags featuring a circular pattern of thirteen stars. This flag is out of place here, as the flag of the United States in 1888 would have been a similar pattern of stars in the rows that we have today, but would have forty stars for the forty states, rather than the thirteen stars on the flag that was adopted in 1777. The flag that flies atop the building on Main Street that the restaurant is located in is actually a more accurate representation of what the flag would have looked like in the period of the restaurant’s story: it features forty-five stars organized into six rows, leading us to believe that our visit to the restaurant is taking place sometime between 1896 and 1907, which is when the forty-five star flag would have flown. The flag would not have forty-six stars until 1907 when Oklahoma became a state. This flag may place the restaurant in the year 1902, as this is the date referenced in the animated short when Colonna explains that Casey is “the Sinatra of 1902”.

The main dining room has red painted walls featuring photographs, advertisements, portraits, and artist renderings of the game of baseball during America’s Victorian era. A wooden chair rail stretches about three-and-a-half feet off the ground with square wainscoting below, adding to the Victorian elegance of the restaurant. Felt banners and pennants hang from the crown moulding along the ceiling of the room commemorating different baseball clubs from the turn-of-the-century, including St. Louis, Lehigh, Downer, and Lockport. Red and white tables with decorative metal chairs litter the room, sitting atop black-and-white tiled floors. Electric lamps hang from the ceiling featuring upturned glass fixtures and Tiffany lampshades.

On the left hand wall of the room is a scoreboard that seems to just be another decoration fitting in with the baseball memorabilia. Astute observers will realize that the scoreboard actually references the poem and Disney short: the teams on the scoreboard at Republic Field are listed as VISITORS and MUDVILLE, with Mudville trailing by two runs. The ninth inning scores list both teams as having scored zero runs; a number is only placed on a scoreboard in baseball after the completion of the inning. As a result, we can assume that the scoreboard is showing the final score of the game, referencing Casey’s failure to win the game for his team in the bottom of the ninth inning. Also, the scoreboard explains that the game is taking place at Republic Field, although neither the animated short nor the original poem named the field on which the game was played. Instead, the field’s name listed on the scoreboard in the restaurant is likely a reference to the full title of Thayer’s poem, “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888”.

Continued in "A Historical Tour of Walt Disney World: Volume 2"!

Each scene in Spaceship Earth, when fully "unpacked", presents a fascinating, in-depth mini-course about a pivotal time in world history, such as this one, the burning (actually, the third burning!) of the Library of Alexandria. If you don't recognize the name, you certainly recognize the smell...

After displaying the glories and strength of ancient Rome, the following scene shows its decline. Interestingly enough, the scene representing the fall of Rome did not actually take place in Rome itself, but, rather, in the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. Amidst one of the favorite smells of many Disney fans, simply known as “Rome Burning”, Dench explains that the Roman Empire fell and that much of the learning that was discovered during the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria is burned. Originally built to house the wealth of Egypt when Alexander the Great established the capital city of his Hellenistic Empire at the mouth of the Nile River after conquering Greece and Egypt in 331 BC, the library had varying amounts of papyrus scrolls (books as we know them had not yet been invented), with some estimates as high as 400,000 scrolls in the library’s collection at any given time.

While the attraction portrays the burning of the great library as being a result of the fall of the Roman Empire, or even leading to the empire’s fall, neither is the case. In fact, the attraction doesn’t even specify which burning of the Library of Alexandria is being portrayed. There were actually three different instances in which the library was destroyed. The first burning occurred in 48 BC when, in an attempt to conquer Alexandria, Julius Caesar burned the Egyptian ships anchored in the harbor. The fire spread unintentionally from the ships to the library, causing all documents in the collection to be destroyed. However, this is not likely to be the fire depicted in the attraction, as Caesar’s accidental destruction of Alexandria occurred eighty years prior to Caligula’s rule over Rome depicted in the prior scene.

The second burning of the Library of Alexandria took place in 391 AD and was brought about by Theophilus, the patriarch of the Coptic Christian Church of Alexandria. Attempting to establish the power of the church in Egypt, Theophilus decided to destroy all examples of pagan religion, including the various shrines and temples to Egyptian and Roman gods that littered the city. One of these temples, the Temple of Serapis, held ten percent of the scrolls that made up the library’s collection. In order to eradicate the city of all un-Christian influence, he burned the interior of the temple, destroying many of the texts in the process. He then established a Christian church in place of the Temple of Serapis, using the burned-out building as the shell for the new church. While this may be the historical event described by Dench, it is unlikely, due to the fact that she groups the library’s destruction with the fall of the Roman Empire, which occurs approximately eighty-five years after Theophilus’ destruction of the Temple of Serapis. Also, his destruction of the pagan temple did not destroy all of the records; ninety percent of them remained unscathed in the main building of the library nearby.

The most likely event as described by Dench occurred in 640 AD, one hundred sixty-four years after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. The two events are not actually linked; the power of the Roman Empire was no longer a threat, and as a result, it made the burning of the Library of Alexandria possible without opposition. In 640 AD, Muslim armies from the Arabian Peninsula invaded and conquered Egypt, taking it from the fairly weak Byzantine Empire. The conquering officer of the Muslim armies, Amr ibn al-As, wrote to the caliph of the Islamic Empire, Umar Ibn Al Khattab, requesting instruction on what to do with all of the texts stored in the Library of Alexandria. Umar responded famously that the texts “will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous”. As a result, he ordered the library to be destroyed and the texts burned. Arabic legend says that there were so many scrolls that it took six months to burn all of them, and that the burning paper was used to heat the baths of Alexandria for the invading armies.

This is likely the historical event that the scene represents, especially within the context of the following scene. The burning of the library in 640 AD is not a result of Rome’s fall, as it occurred centuries after the end of the Roman Empire. After being sacked by the nomadic Huns in 476, Rome ceases to exist, and Alexandria becomes a part of the Byzantine Empire, whose capital was located in Constantinople (modern-day Turkey). Although the burning of the library, which this scene likely depicts, occurred in 640, the Byzantine Empire would continue for another 800 years, ultimately coming to an end in 1453 with the Ottoman sacking of the capital city. As a result, the library’s destruction did not affect the stability of any empire, but rather caused the loss of great knowledge.

Continued in "A Historical Tour of Walt Disney World: Volume 2"!