Lifestyle
He built a mini-Disneyland in his backyard — and you can walk through it this spring
The castle is immaculate, its gold etching regal and its towers a bold shade of sky blue. The band at its gates plays no real instruments, but the musicians look dapper and at the ready. Before it all sits an elongated train station, a mix of Victorian grandeur and small-town affability. Look in the distance — there’s a Southern-style mansion, multiple distinct mountains and even another castle, this one nestled at the top of a mound, its spires peering over a wall.
All of it is familiar. It’s Disneyland, mostly.
The iconic entrance to Disneyland, re-created in the Sheegogs’ Anaheim backyard.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
But the setting, the backyard of a modest suburban home in Anaheim Hills, makes it clear this is no official product of the Walt Disney Co. Yet fans flock to it, with free tickets for the rare open house disappearing often in minutes. Welcome to Castle Peak and Thunder Railroad, as David Sheegog calls his backyard garden, home to a miniature love letter to Disneyland and Disney animation. Creating this scaled-down universe has been a passion of his for about a quarter of a century now.
Over the decades, Castle Peak has garnered the attention of local media, become a social media darling and grown with the Sheegog family, as what once was meant to be a gift for his children has taken on a life of its own. The kids have left home, but Castle Peak continues to flourish.
As Sheegog, an independent architect, looks forward to retirement — he turned 65 last year but is still in practice — he speaks of Castle Peak as if it’s just getting started. Walk with Sheegog to the family garage and find not just storage but a workshop, currently home to a model for a “Star Wars”-inspired entryway that Sheegog hopes will someday lead to a new section of his backyard garden, this one inspired by Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
David and Frances Sheegog pose with their mini-Disneyland in their Anaheim Hills home.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
This is no mere modest hobby. That’s apparent not just in the details but in the way Sheegog today thinks of entertaining guests, who are welcomed each spring and fall.
There are small but irresistible touches. Sheegog’s version of the Casey Jr. Circus Train is equipped, for instance, with its own sound module, playing the locomotive’s theme song as it chugs across a bridge. But over the years, Sheegog has embraced his showman side. A recent addition to the patio is what Sheegog calls the “enchanted tiki waterbar,” where a glass window erupts into a thunder and lightning show, complete with a mini-rain storm created by a pump and reservoir.
While the actual Disneyland Resort is just a few minutes from the Sheegog home, Castle Peak speaks to the way the theme park can become a sort of communal hub that can touch multiple generations and stand as something for which people can connect around. For many in Southern California, Disneyland sits somewhere between a landmark and a rite of passage, a place of familial and friendship rituals that stays with you long after the grand finale of the evening’s fireworks.
The Sheegogs’ much smaller version of the iconic statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, whose real-life counterpart graces the entrance to the magic castle at Disneyland.
A miniature model of the floating balloon house from “Up.” (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Fans walk in the backyard of the Sheegogs’ home, lifting themselves up over the brick walls to look a little closer at the miniatures laid out in front of them.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Sheegog believes that’s one reason why his backyard, also home to a 105-year-old Chinese elm bonsai, can barely meet its demand.
“There was a woman here one time, and she was close to 100,” Sheegog says. “She worked in the park on opening day, when Walt Disney was there, and worked in the park her whole life. She had a whole crowd around her, just listening to stories about what it was like. She started weeping. As she was talking, she was reliving her life when she was 20 years old, her first love, where she met her husband. All these memories come back, and a lot of people who come here are that way because we’re in Anaheim. We grew up with the park, and it has a certain sentimental niche in your psyche. People just want to be around it, and our place provides an outlet for that.”
Sheegog kind of stumbled into model railroading. About 25 years ago he was perusing for a gift for a young nephew, now in his 30s, who was a fan of “Thomas the Tank Engine.” Shopping for the latter at a local railroad store, the Orange County native who grew up within walking distance to Disneyland was suddenly hooked by the model railroad industry. Things quickly spiraled.
“This was back in 1997 or so, and I said, ‘This will be a 10-year project.’ As I developed the model — I built a model on our dining room table — we had to decide on the major structures,” Sheegog says. “Most of the garden railroads I had seen people had bought pre-made kits of little plastic buildings that are all about 12 inches by 8 inches. They look like premade little buildings, like a barber shop. No. I wanted to build this from scratch, and wanted them to be impressive, like 5 feet across and 4 feet tall. Or in the case of one our castles, 7 feet tall. I had to plan these out as to where the major buildings would be.”
Mini-riders descend down the slope of a shrunken-down Splash Mountain.
An homage to Mulan in a small potted plant. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
A mini-Merida stands proudly within a circle of rocks.
References to Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride are nestled in small pots around the Sheegogs’ attraction.
At the time, he was thinking of set pieces that would look akin to mini-golf buildings. Sheegog once worked at Disneyland on the Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes, and the family’s eldest daughter is named Ariel after “The Little Mermaid.” Thus, Disneyland was a natural theme for the family to explore for the backyard garden. And the Walt Disney Co., of course, has a romanticized history with railroads, as Walt Disney once had a backyard railway of his own and is said to have dreamed up Mickey Mouse on a cross-country train trip.
A Disney-inspired backyard is not, necessarily, an anomaly in American suburbia. HGTV once ran a show dedicated to the practice, and in the early days of the pandemic it became a social media trend to re-create Disney rides at home, with fans experimenting with rudimentary special effects and bringing pets into the action. Some have even built makeshift roller coasters in the yards.
Young visitors look out onto a portion of a railroad and lagoon-like setting within the Sheegogs’ massive attraction.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
And today, there are host of businesses that attempt to tap the Disney fanbase. One can find elaborately themed homes for rent, as well as pop-up bars such as Montclair’s the Set, which rotates among Disney motifs throughout the year.
Sheegog’s creation has both a professional sheen and a do-it-yourself quality. It’s important to note that it will always be free, as the family doesn’t want to attract the attention of corporate lawyers — timed reservations are required solely to make sure the home and neighborhood aren’t overrun. Aside from Sheegog’s heavily detailed, multiple foot structures — he’s re-created references to the now-defunct Splash Mountain and Disney/Pixar films such as “Up” — he’s also peppered in hidden nods to most every Disney or Pixar animated film from 1937 (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”) to 2021 (“Encanto”).
“That will be the last one,” Sheegog says of “Encanto.” “I’ve finally put a cap on it. I’ve got 80 films out there. It’s a bunch. I’m running out of room. If they keep coming out, I can’t keep doing something. All my energy is going into other projects with the railroad.”
When Sheegog builds a structure, it’s no simple feat. Occasionally, he says, he’ll get inquiries from guests on the cost of hiring Sheegog to build, say, a Sleeping Beauty Castle. “They think you can do it for $300 or $400, and I say, ‘It’s probably going to be about $70,000 to build that thing again,” he says. “It takes someone six months of their life to build that.”
Money isn’t a topic Sheegog likes to discuss — “We are not wealthy people here, and I’m trying to figure out a way to retire because there’s not a way to do it right now” — and he’s quick to add that the castle didn’t cost him tens of thousands; he’s simply factoring in labor costs. He estimates that over the last two decades he’s sunk what would be the equivalent of buying a pool into his backyard Disneyland.
The investment shows. His initial Sleeping Beauty Castle was built utilizing plywood, PVC, wood turnings and cast resin veneer, but he has since updated the structure with largely polyurethane foam boards and 3D-printed materials. There are detailed galleries on his website documenting the builds of a number of structures, including Rapunzel’s tower and Beast’s castle.
Tinker Bell, nestled in a green forest scene with her fellow Pixie Hollow fairies.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Skyway, which no longer exists in the IRL Disneyland, is preserved as a reference in the Sheegogs’ backyard attraction.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
A key appeal of Castle Peak is that it doesn’t try to re-create Disneyland, per se: an equal number of miniatures reference animated films as they do park attractions. For the latter, Sheegog includes some that no longer exist, including the Skyway, a set he purchased from Von Roll Model Ropeways rather than built, as well as some references to Florida’s Walt Disney World.
Nothing feels incongruous. Disneyland, after all, exists as much in our memories and our imaginations as it does at 1313 Disneyland Drive.
Castle Peak and Thunder Railroad
Today, Sheegog is talking about moving the retaining wall on the house to further expand Castle Peak, wanting two new sections, one that nods to Disneyland’s Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland, which closed to make way for Big Thunder Mountain, and the aforementioned Galaxy’s Edge expansion. Time and money are hurdles, though, and he’s considered crowd-funding for Castle Peak’s continued development.
And yet that’s another aspect to Castle Peak’s enduring appeal. Like Disneyland, it’s never finished. “It’s like little home additions,” Sheegog says. “But rather than putting on a new bedroom we’re going to do another mountain or another rock feature.”
And it’s all in the name of capturing a little bit of magic.
Sunday Puzzle
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This week’s challenge
Today’s puzzle is a tribute to Mimi. Every answer is a familiar two word phrase or name in which each word starts with the letters MI-.
Ex. Assignment for soldiers –> MILITARY MISSION
1. Pageant title for a contestant from Detroit
2. One of the Twin Cities
3. Nickname for the river through New Orleans
4. Super short skirt
5. Neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains Museum Row
6. Just over four times the distance from the earth to the moon
7. Goateed sing-along conductor of old TV
8. American financier who pioneered so-called “junk bonds”
9. Little accident
10. Land-based weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal
11. In “Snow White,” the evil queen’s words before “on the wall”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?
Answer
Notre Dame –> Renovated
Winner
Chee Sing Lee of Bangor, Maine
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from James Ellison, of Jefferson City, Mo. Think of a popular movie of the past decade. Change the last letter in its title. The result will suggest a lawsuit between two politicians of the late 20th century — one Republican and one Democrat. What’s the movie and who are the people?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 23 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
A landmark is a landmark because it tells you that you’re home now — the piece of earth you’ve chosen to inhabit saying, “You’ve made it back, congratulations.” We identify our cities with their landmarks, and because we identify with our cities, we identify with the landmarks too. They are us and we are them, mirroring each other through eternity. A city like New York or Chicago, with the Chrysler Building, the Bean, etc., has landmarks that exist in the world’s popular consciousness. But L.A.’s most cherished landmarks belong to us and us alone, a secret you’re let in on if you live here long enough and pay attention.
The Fashion Nova baddie in horizontal sprawl off the Vertigo, for example, is an emblem for those in the know. Our twisted version of a capitalist guardian angel, patron saint of spandex in a cropped matching set. Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Fashion Nova. Merging on the 110 South from the 10 East while the sunset burns and traffic thickens is a miracle in more ways than one, and in the spirit of compulsively performing the sign of the cross when you pass a church on the freeway, this billboard is deserving of its own acknowledgment.
It may not be the landmark L.A. asked for, but in Sayre Gomez’s painting “Vertigo,” you begin to understand why it’s the one we deserve. At the opening for “Precious Moments,” Gomez’s solo show at David Kordansky, the room was vibrating. A game of energetic ping-pong unfolded underneath the gallery’s fluorescent light, beams of identification, recollections or stabs of grief bouncing off each piece in the exhibition. People were seeing hyperspecific parts of a city they love reflected in a hyperspecific way — for better and for worse. Recognition has two edges and they both happen to be sharp. Gomez twists the knife deeper for a good cause: He wants you not just to look but to really see.
In his work exist iconic signs of beloved local establishments — like the Playpen — the blinding glint reflecting off downtown’s skyline, telephone poles regarded as totems. The line to see Gomez’s replica of L.A.’s graffiti towers, “Oceanwide Plaza,” snaked through the gallery’s courtyard. Once inside, at least three graffiti writers whose names were blasted on the replica pointed it out proudly, even gave out stickers to take home. The truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly — in this case it’s both — on the flip side showing up in the form of smog, tattered flags and an abandoned graffiti tower that starkly represents the pitfalls of capitalism and greed, a neon arrow pointing to the homelessness crisis.
Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave.
— Sayre Gomez
In the main gallery, I was stuck on “Vertigo.” On the 12-foot canvas, my eye went to the place out of focus: the thin strip of billboard in the background featuring a young woman with sand-dune hips, patent knee-high boots and long black hair laid up on her side, wearing cat ears and a tiger bodysuit as flush as second skin. The model made the kind of eye contact that felt dangerous — might cause an accident if you’re not careful. “#1 Halloween Destination … FASHION NOVA,” it read. I knew her, anyone who has driven through the two main arteries of Los Angeles knows her. The black-and-white smiley motif of the Vertigo, an events space, sat right next to her face, just happy to be there, it seemed, above a painted sign that says “Ready to Party?”
The sky was the color of cotton candy, but the stale kind that’s been hardening in a plastic bag for days after the fair. Something rancid about it. In the foreground of the painting was a car encampment with a tattered floral sheet woven through the windows, cloth tarps and couch cushions creating a shield against the elements. Small plastic children’s toys lined at the top of the car — dinosaurs and dump trucks and sharks — creating their own shrunken skyline in front of the Vertigo, signaling that young kids likely lived there. It’s less juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an accurate reflection of the breakneck duality of living in a place like L.A.
Even angels exist within the context of their environments. Our Fashion Nova baddie hangs off the Vertigo, a building that has used its ad space as physical clickbait and political posturing for over a decade. It’s promoting the kind of fast fashion brand that’s been regarded as a case study on the industry’s environmental impact. In the years the billboard has been up, it’s looked over dozens and dozens of car encampments like the one depicted in Gomez’s piece.
She feels dubious, yes. But no less like ours.
Julissa James: I’ve lived in L.A. for 13 years now. For me, the city and the architecture of the city is less the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Frank Gehrys — there’s that — but other landmarks that signal, “Oh, I’m home.” The Fashion Nova baddie above the Vertigo has always been that for me. Your piece is layered and there’s so much more to it than just that, but that’s the first thing I saw and was like, “Whoa. I need to talk to Sayre. We need to talk about ‘Vertigo.’”
Sayre Gomez: It’s like L.A.’s Statue of Liberty. It’s the city of anti-landmarks, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s the Hollywood sign, which I think is so telling, because it’s the remnants of a real estate venture. The city is built by real estate schemes and 100 years later we’re feeling the effects of it. You’ve got empty skyscrapers and a massive homeless catastrophe. L.A. doesn’t really have real landmarks. It has anti-landmarks.
JJ: When did the Fashion Nova billboard above the Vertigo click for you as something that felt representative of the city, or something that you wanted to depict?
SG: My studio is in Boyle Heights, so I pass that billboard multiple times a week. This is my 20th year in L.A. and that building’s always been a big mystery to me. It was empty when I moved here before this guy Shawn Farr bought it and turned it into Casa Vertigo. I think he probably makes more money on it with the ad space than anything. I know nobody who has ever been there. Very mysterious to me. So that’s what I was drawn to.
(Paul Salveson from David Kordansky Gallery)
The Vertigo has always been mysterious to me. And that whole fashion industry is mysterious to me — the kind of shmatta, American Apparel-adjacent, or maybe coming out of the wake of that. These kinds of businesses, or the representations of these businesses, how do they function and how do they flourish? Is it aboveboard? What more perfectly encapsulates that than that building? It’s this weird thing you can’t quite figure out but somehow it has a lot of money and then it’s an event space, supposedly billed as that. Clearly it’s this big ad thing, and I’m very interested in the changing dynamics of capital. The capital of yesteryear, which was based on the brick and mortar, where things are being made in a specific location, maybe on an assembly line or in a specific way, to a kind of capital that is based solely on advertising or on viewership. These beautiful buildings acting as pedestals for some kind of ad space, you know? It becomes an anti-landmark for me. Something where I’m like, “Oh, there’s that thing again.”
JJ: It’s this gorgeous Beaux Arts building …
SG: It’s a Freemason building!
JJ: When I’ve talked to some people about the Vertigo, they’re like, “the Fashion Nova building?”
SG: They always have the woman in the same pose — same pose, different clothes. If you remember before Fashion Nova, they would have these provocative ad campaigns or provocative slogans. “Twerk Miley” was up, remember that? They did a Trump one: “TRUMP NOW.” They did one for Kanye when he ran for president. The 10 and the 110 are literally the crossroads of the city, so it’s really poised to be a special building. It has a special designation because of the location.
JJ: Talk to me about the process of doing this piece. Where did it start and how did it evolve?
SG: I was cruising around that vicinity trying to see if I could get a good vantage point to take photos of Vertigo. And then I stumbled upon this car — the car that’s in the foreground of the painting. Anytime I see an encampment that has kids’ toys, things that reference back to the lives of children, it hits hard. But I like to lay it all out there. I like to make things confrontational. I want it to be difficult. The painting isn’t based on a one-to-one photo [Gomez paints from a composite rendering of images he’s taken around town], but I knew that I wanted to use that car, and I knew I wanted to get the Vertigo building, and so I started just messing around with different iterations. I could never find a good angle to take a good photo of the building, so I just went on Vertigo’s website and I was like, “I’m just using these.” I switched the sky and put a more moody, atmospheric sky in.
JJ: Which I loved, because we know that feeling — you’re merging onto the 110 and you see a beautiful sunset. The euphoria of like, “L.A. is the best city in the world.” But you know what? What I found so interesting about your piece is that it was revealing to me about myself, but also about so many of us that live in L.A. and have lived here for years and have developed a jadedness. When I saw your piece, immediately I was like, “Oh my God, the Vertigo! The Vertigo! The Vertigo!” And then I was like, “OK, wait, hold on, there’s so much more going on here.” But the fact that my eye went to that first instead of the car encampment, the kids’ toys, brought up a lot of questions about my own relationship to the city and the things that we choose to see, the things that maybe we’ve seen so much of that we subconsciously filter it out. Why was it important for you to put these two things up against each other in this way?
SG: Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave. That’s what I’m doing in my work at large. I use the sunsets and the beauty to create a dialogue, to entice people to sort of look a little bit at how things are contextualized, how things act, what’s actually happening. I don’t make things in a vacuum. I was working on this show and I was going to really push this agenda of incorporating more of my experience with my kids into the work. That’s also a double-edged sword. I wanted to interject some levity, because the work can get so dark. I wanted to bring in some iconography from their world and things that they get excited about. When you’re juxtaposing that with really stark things, it becomes darker. I want to thicken the stock a little bit. Make things a little more complex.
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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The Trump Dump and Air Traffic Control Becomes Animal Control
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