PI Update: What's All This Then?

(CLICK ON IMAGE ABOVE TO ENLARGE) Lots of chatter out there now about the meaning of the 7/13 edition of the Downtown Disney Guidemap shown above, in part.  When it comes to Pleasure Island, it certainly presents huge changes compared to the 5/13 edition that it replaced.  Let's take a look at it:

1) The hill appears to be gone.  Is Pleasure Island going flat?  That appears to be the case.  The Lombard Promenade is gone from the map.  You'll recall that Merriweather Adam Pleasure had the winding pathways built after a trip he and wife Isabella took to San Francisco, as a memory of that city's Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world.

2) Comedy Warehouse & Laffers Cantina are gone. Because there were "Notices of Commencement" on them, this was no surprise and as we know, demolition of CW has already started.

3) The building that housed Curl by Sammy Duval and before that Superstar Studios, is gone. In reality, the space was pretty small for retail of any kind.

4) 8TRAX is gone! We previously published interior pictures that showed that putting in some lights and speakers and one could get the place up and running again relatively cheaply.  So this finding on the map is very sad!  One can hear a lot of drilling coming out of there lately so they must be trying to sever its link to Mannequins so it can be demolished.

5) Yes, Mannequins remains on the map.  That's an indication that it will survive at least this round of demolitions.  It's still our position that since the Island's power grid is housed at the rear of the building, it would be too expensive to remove.  It's going to take a lot of work to demolish the Curl & 8TRAX sections of the building since they really are one building, so if they planned to take down Mannequins it would be logical to do the whole building complex at one time.  Yet Mannequins remains.  And as many of us have said numerous times, as long as it remains there is a chance it could reopen as a nightclub in some form!

6) Also part of the Mannequins building is the retail space just vacated by Apricot Lane.  We thought that would get demolished too but in the corner of the Mannequins building, at the Hub, one sees that retail spot still there. PI Live Bar is gone though.

7) Across the pathway Soundstage and Adventurers Club are still there.  Disney Springs concept art shows AC remaining and becoming a train-themed restaurant of some sort but Soundstage is likely coming down later.  It remains on the map for now.  They can't keep the Island open and demolish on both sides of the pathway at the same time.