The biggest construction project at Disneyland Resort is about to stop being a permit filing and start being a hole in the ground. Disneyland says enabling work in the esplanade begins this coming week in preparation for the new arrival experience, with an official groundbreaking ceremony for the new parking structure following the week after.
Two Weeks, Two Milestones
The timing came late Saturday night from D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event. Disney framed both milestones in relative terms rather than naming calendar dates. Enabling work is described as beginning next week, and the groundbreaking ceremony as following the week after that. No specific date has been attached to either.
Enabling work is not the same thing as construction. It is the preparatory phase: utilities, surveying, site protection and the fencing that reroutes how people move through a space. The esplanade is the open plaza between the entrances to Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure, which means this is the first phase of the project guests will actually walk past.
What The Eastern Gateway Actually Is
The parking structure is the piece Disney has repeatedly called the thing that unlocks DisneylandForward. Permits filed with the City of Anaheim in December 2025 describe an eight level structure of roughly 3.2 million square feet, and Disney has said the finished hub will hold about 6,000 parking spaces along with shuttle and rideshare areas, security screening and dedicated traffic access off Disney Way. The permits also list 302 electric vehicle chargers.
The headline feature is a pedestrian bridge over Harbor Boulevard, carrying guests from the new structure into the redesigned esplanade and providing public foot access across Harbor that does not exist in its current form. The wider DisneylandForward project is valued at 1.9 billion dollars, and the plan received final approval from the Anaheim City Council in May 2024.
The Groundwork Has Been Going On All Year
The site has been clearing quietly for months. Disney filed a permit in June to demolish the Team Disney Anaheim East administrative building, a roughly 70,000 square foot structure sitting between the two lots, and the Manchester cast member parking lot on the east side of the resort closed in late June. What changes now is that the work crosses onto the guest side of the property.
Everything Else Holds
The timing arrives alongside a fuller schedule update from the weekend. The timelines for Avengers Campus, the Coco attraction and the Eastern Gateway are all unchanged, with no delays or fast tracking, according to Disneyland Resort leadership including Disney Experiences Chair Thomas Mazloum. The one project that moved is Avatar at Disney California Adventure, which now sits behind the newly announced Tomorrowland reimagining in the resort’s queue.
That ordering is why the parking structure matters more than a parking structure normally would. Disney has been explicit that the arrival infrastructure has to come first, because the resort cannot absorb the crowds that two new Avengers Campus attractions, a Coco ride, an Avatar destination and eventually a reimagined Tomorrowland would bring. We covered the sequencing news when Disneyland Resort assembled its test and adjust team for the Avengers Campus expansion. The esplanade work starting this week is the first visible sign that the rest of it is actually coming.
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