Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Map Looks Weird Without the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island

Here’s a closer look. If you aren’t one of us theme park weirdos who are intimately familiar with the layout of every Disney park, I’ll fill in some details for you. If you look at that green space above like a clock, the building at 1 o’clock is the Haunted Mansion. The mountain between 10 and 11 o’clock is Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Those two attractions aren’t going anywhere, of course. Below the green space, in that row of buildings at the bottom of this close-up, is what has traditionally been Frontierland’s main drag, with its shops, restaurants, and the Country Bear Jamboree attraction. And the small building a little past 3 o’clock, buried in the green that’s newly taken over most of this part of the map, is the pavilion where you would board the Liberty Belle Riverboat. Apparently that building isn’t going anywhere, at least not just yet. Seeing all that space really hammers home how significant of a change this will be to that portion of the park.

As I’ve written before, it’s not a surprise that Disney would eventually want to replace Tom Sawyer Island, a large, underused space sitting at a crucial part of the park between two massively popular attractions. And given how Tom Sawyer Island and the Rivers of America were built, it’d be difficult to replace the island with a sizable modern ride without somehow altering the river that flows around it. Still, given the lengthy tenure of these attractions, and the fact that a river with a riverboat has been a central part of not just the Magic Kingdom but the other Disney castle parks as well, it’s still a bit shocking that they would remove the Rivers of America here. Especially when you look at this:

That’s also taken directly from the Disney World app today. See all that open green space above Big Thunder and the Haunted Mansion? Part of that will be taken up by some of the new villains-themed land Disney announced last year. There’s a lot of space up there, though—more than enough to put a Cars ride without removing the park’s most scenic water feature.

What Disney has revealed about Piston Peak National Park looks really cool. And their Imagineers have put thought into how it will connect Liberty Square—the Colonial northeast—with the west of Frontierland. The concept art even seems to indicate that it might preserve a solid chunk of Rivers of America, namely the stretch opposite the Frontierland buildings, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and Big Thunder. It’s entirely possible the new thing they build will be impressive enough to justify this whole project. (And maybe it’ll even have some cool fake caves.) But given how drastically this will change the Magic Kingdom, and how much space was available to Disney without having to replace those three classic attractions, it’s natural to question why this is the route they’ve chosen to go down. Hopefully what they build will be even more beautiful and photo-worthy than what they’ve taken away, but for the next few years that whole chunk of the Magic Kingdom will just be one big, dusty construction site.