Greetings family, friends and neighbors! Today's ramble is about a couple theme park attractions with a very vague literary connection. The postcards are from the 1960's.....Bill 

Theme Park Ramblings 

A TALE OF TWO HOUSES 

I hope that you will excuse the cheesy Charles Dickens ripoff, but it 

seemed like an clever way to lead into the back stories of two 

iconic theme park “house” attractions; Knott’s Berry Farm’s Bottle 

House, and Disneyland’s House of the Future. 

Traditional building materials were scarce in the southwest deserts 

during the rush for mineral riches requiring creativity in building 

permanent structures. One of the first documented houses built 

primarily of glass bottles was in1905 by Tom Kelly in Rhyolite, 

Nevada. Kelly collected fifty one thousand empty beer bottles from 

the saloons of dozens of nearby abandoned mining camps, 

cementing them together with adobe clay and plastering the inside 

surfaces to form the sturdy walls of his unique desert home. 

Using three thousand wine and whisky bottles, Walter Knott 

created a bottle house in his Knott’s Berry Place Ghost Town. The 

colorful structure was completed in1944 for use as a Indian 

Trading Shop concession while an adjacent connected Music Hall 

displayed his extensive collection music boxes. Knott created a 

second bottle house in 1966 during the rebuilding of Calico Ghost 

Town in the high desert near Barstow, California. 

More than twenty million Disneyland visitors toured Monsanto’s 

House of the Future during a ten year period beginning in 1957. 

The futuristic home, optimistically set in 1986, was the creation of 

Walt Disney Imagineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

and sponsored by the Monsanto Company to demonstrate the 

versatility of glass-reinforced plastics as a building material. Park 

visitor’s were already familiar with Monsanto’s House of Chemistry 

and later with Monsanto’s Fashion and Fabrics Through the Ages, 

and signature dark ride, Adventures Through Inner Space. 

Monsanto’s House of the Future featured three bedrooms, two 

baths, family room, dining room and kitchen (nicknamed “Atoms for Living”) within four gracefully curved wings. The walk-through tour featured carefully crafted floating furniture and disappearing appliances, a microwave oven that cooked food with radio waves, wall sized TV, telescreen intercom, polarized lighting, automatic climate control, and even phones that dialed themself. 

(Remember, this was in 1957!). 

Popular Disneyland lore is when it became time to demolish the popular attraction the plastic structure was so sturdy that wrecking balls, chainsaws, jackhammers, and torches failed to make a dent, however the House of the Future was ultimately cut into small pieces and hauled away. 

Walter Knott’s Bottle Houses built with recycled glass and cement still stand and attract curious visitors, while all that remains of Disneyland’s futuristic house is the concrete foundation camouflaged as a planter box. 

It was the best of building materials, and it was the worst of building materials 

-Bill 5/24