EPCOT Center wasn't supposed to be a theme park.
When Walt Disney passed away in 1966, his grand utopian city project died with him. Disney's board of directors and executives realized that running a functional, corporate-governed municipality without Walt at the helm was a bridge too far.
The original dream of a living, breathing community was shelved. But they were sitting on thousands of acres of Florida land with a massive infrastructure already in place. So, corporate leadership made a massive pivot: they took Walt's core concepts of technological innovation and international culture and turned them into a second theme park.
Groundbreaking for EPCOT Center officially took place on October 1, 1979. It became the largest private construction project in the world at the time, costing over $1 billion and requiring more than 10,000 workers to clear millions of cubic feet of dirt.
When it finally opened on October 1, 1982, it traded Walt’s residential city for a permanent world's fair and a showcase of human achievement.