Diagon Alley at Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter

I got into Harry Potter later in life than most people my age. I didn’t grow up reading the books, and although I’d seen and enjoyed all the movies, it wasn’t until a visit to Universal Studios last year with friends that my appreciation for the series blossomed. I decided to start reading the books, and once I did, I found myself not only falling in love with the richness of the universe, but also making connections between my adult life and the world of the books. One of those connections was between my life as a passionate urbanist and the landscape of Diagon Alley, one of the most beloved locales of the entire series. Fans often focus on the magical elements of the books that are different from everyday life, but there are more real-world sensibilities in that alley than many readers might think.

J.K. Rowling draws readers in early on by blending the magical and non-magical worlds together. We may relate, for instance, to an education that happens to be magical or to a job that happens to involve dragons. In the beginning of the story, Hagrid takes Harry shopping for school supplies on a shopping street that just happens to sell magical goods.

To British readers, this street may seem normal, but I have a hunch that it may be more exotic to American audiences. If Harry were American, Hagrid might put him in a minivan and take him to a strip mall on the side of a highway called Diagon Plaza and proceed to load him up on bulk discount wands. But in Rowling’s story, they visit a narrow commercial street filled with specialty shops run by people who have been making wands, selling books, and outfitting Quidditch players for hundreds of years. We’re quickly given the impression that the purveyors of these various magical goods really know their stuff. Without Garrick Ollivander’s decades of wand-selling, for instance, he may not have had the instinct to present Harry with the wand that ended up choosing him.

From very early on in the story, we are drawn to Diagon Alley’s charming landscape and inhabitants. But while Diagon Alley’s characters may remind American readers of a time when every town was filled with family-owned businesses, I argue that it is actually the physical layout of the alley that gives the cozy shopping street its power over the Muggle imagination. The first thing you might notice about the place is that there are no cars in sight. The street is completely open to children, teachers, parents, and all kinds of magical folk to comfortably and safely peruse the contents of each shop, meet up with friends, or watch people pass by from the terrace of an ice cream parlor. The buildings are nestled one right up against the other, and the whole street is packed with things to see and do. There is little to no empty space between its storefronts; you can meander from wand shop to owlery to lunch with ease.

The allure of walking around Diagon Alley is so strong that people, many of whom travel only by car in their everyday Muggle lives, will visit the Universal theme parks and happily explore its renditions of urbanity by foot for hours (this includes non-Harry Potter areas of the parks modeled on real-life cities like New York and San Francisco). The key to understanding this eagerness to explore the Wizarding World of Harry Potter by foot lies with the same characteristics that make popular Muggle-world walking-streets interesting. What makes Diagon Alley pleasant to stroll down can be found in many of America’s older, denser cities, like Chicago, Boston, or Philadelphia. Getting around by foot is perfectly suited to the density of shops and attractions in these cities. If you were to drive instead, you’d most likely either be stuck in traffic or be moving so quickly that you’d miss the streets’ charms. Just as you can stroll from Flourish and Blotts to the Leaky Cauldron to Florean Fortescue’s, so too can you wander from a secondhand bookshop to a restaurant for dinner to a cafe for dessert in many dense urban areas.

Perhaps this is part of the magic for some people visiting the parks. There is nothing like Diagon Alley in most of the United States, especially in areas built up after the advent of the automobile, and that was very much on purpose. In the early 20th century, zoning laws that were meant to separate industrial land use from residential, residential use from commercial, and commercial use from educational made their way into the law books of most American towns. That’s why, in most of the country, you have to drive or be driven from your house to the grocery store, to the post office, to your job, or to your school. Before exclusionary zoning came to dominate American building patterns, all of these might have been in the same neighborhood or town, and getting from one to the other on foot or bicycle was easy and common. But most Americans’ every day experiences aren’t like this, and most people have to drive a car down large highways to sun-baked parking lots to get anywhere at all. In comparison, the human scale of Diagon Alley’s cozy street is instinctively inviting.

There is perhaps one modern analog to Diagon Alley (though its grasp on the American imagination has dramatically waned over the past few decades): the shopping mall. Malls are similar to Diagon Alley in that (after parking the car you drove to get there) you can enjoy moving from shop to shop by foot. Although, even at their height, shopping malls were a far cry from the wizarding world’s best-known alley, the mixed-together nature of which makes the cold and corporate shopping mall seem even duller than usual.

But why is the shopping mall leaving our minds as the sterling example of American retail experiences? Because people, a large number of whom are millennials, have grown tired of suburban sterility and are seeking the unique urban experiences that many in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations left behind. The renaissance of the American city, accompanied by renewed interest in its inner-ring suburbs, has been a constant theme as millennials have come of age. Even though we may laugh at the cliche of an Instagramable brunch at a hip Brooklyn cafe, the fact is that long-neglected urban neighborhoods and peripheral towns built before the car are seeing interest like they haven’t seen in sixty years. Two decades ago, New York was the only example of a reviving city, but now you can find newly-thriving neighborhoods in almost every major American metropolis.

Americans are coming to appreciate the value of their old historic downtowns’ densely packed streets. They’re breathing new life into pre-war housing stock in their nearby residential neighborhoods. And they’re finding an appreciation for locally owned small businesses that give them a retail experience no big box chain store ever could. Why are some of the younger people in this group so drawn to the kinds of messy urban environments that offended previous generations so much that they decamped to the sprawling suburbs? It could be that the generation of kids who grew up with only that experience are looking for a more dynamic one that only an urban environment can bring. That’s why I love cities and why I chose to move to an old town with walkable neighborhoods and downtown streets packed with great places to eat, shop, and hang out. And just maybe, for some of us, growing up with the allure of Diagon Alley meant the suburban towns in which we were raised have lost their appeal. Perhaps we were hooked on the vibrancy that comes from a street packed full of wonders and intrigues and we’ve started to make our own world a bit more magical.