The place is called Reunion, which is a strange name for a town where almost nobody stays. Behind a gate in Osceola County, six miles from Walt Disney World, sit about three thousand houses — pastel townhomes, golf villas, eight-bedroom mansions with their own pools — and most of them are empty tonight, or full of people who will be gone by Sunday. The name promises people coming back together. What actually happens here is people passing through.
So where does a name like that come from? And why would anyone build a whole town, all at once, on a flat stretch of Central Florida six miles from the busiest theme park on earth?
A town ordered off the plans
In 2000 the developer Bobby Ginn bought 2,300 acres known as Magnolia Creek — citrus grove — from the Herman J. Heidrich family for $42 million. The pitch was permanence: a private resort community built for big multi-generational family gatherings, the kind of place three generations would come back to year after year. Hence the name.
Ground broke in June 2001. That December, at the first priority sales event, 264 home sites worth $40 million sold in sixteen hours. Across three such events, roughly $320 million in real estate changed hands before much of it existed. The plans ran to more than 5,000 properties when finished.
But the thing that made Reunion Reunion wasn't the houses, or the water park, or the grove it replaced. It was three signatures.
Three men who spent their lives trying to beat each other
Bobby Ginn got Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, and Jack Nicklaus — three of the greatest golfers who ever lived — to each design a championship course on the same property. Palmer's and Watson's opened in 2004; Nicklaus's in 2007. Reunion became, by the resort's own account, the only destination in the world with signature courses from all three. For Watson, the course here was his first design in the state of Florida.
Golfers on Reunion's three signature courses today — the Arnold Palmer (Legacy), Jack Nicklaus (Tradition), and Tom Watson (Independence) layouts. Photographs via Reunion Resort.
Put those three names on one entrance sign and you are selling a reunion of people who, in life, were anything but a team. Palmer and Nicklaus split American golf down the middle in the 1960s — Arnie's Army against the young man who kept beating their king. And Watson spent his prime taking titles directly off Nicklaus: the 1977 Duel in the Sun at Turnberry, where Watson won the Open Championship by a single stroke, 268 to 269; and the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, where Watson holed an improbable chip from the rough on the 71st hole to snatch the trophy out of Nicklaus's hands by two.
Decades later, their three names sit a few fairways apart on a Florida grove, under one gate that says they've all come together.
The reunion that never quite happens
The reunion Ginn sold — families, roots, coming back — isn't quite what got built. Of the roughly 3,000 homes here, most are zoned and equipped for short-term vacation rental; Osceola County permits it, and Reunion's own governing documents are built around it. A five-acre water park opened in 2005 for the people renting.
So the census counts a few thousand permanent residents, but the real population on any given night is whoever booked. It is less a town that gathers than a town that turns over — a lobby with a golf course, six miles from the Magic Kingdom.
Then, as at so many Florida resorts, the money vanished. When the 2008 crisis hit, Ginn's company filed for bankruptcy that November and the big planned town center, Reunion Square, stopped where it stood. But — and this is where Reunion's story turns away from its sister developments — the resort itself didn't die. Salamander took over management in 2011; Kingwood International Resorts bought it in 2019. The golf stayed. The gate stayed. The rentals kept turning over.
The one thing nobody could put in the ground
Which leaves the thing all of it rests on and none of it can fake. Ginn could buy the grove, clear it, draw the town, and hire three legends to shape the land. He could not put the electricity in the ground.
Three signature courses stay green on irrigation pumps. Three thousand houses stay livable on air conditioning. The water park, the gate, the pool and fountain pumps, the lights in every rented kitchen — all of it runs downstream of a wire that comes in from outside, along poles crossing the same flat country the grove once grew on.
A town can be built around three of the most famous names in golf and still go dark on an ordinary September afternoon.
September 10, 2017
Central Florida has seen exactly what that looks like. On September 10, 2017, Hurricane Irma came up almost the entire length of the peninsula. It knocked out power to about 6.7 million customers — roughly two-thirds of every electric account in the state, the largest outage in Florida's history. Across the Southeast, as many as 13 million people lost power.
In Osceola County, where Reunion sits, the local utility had more than half of its customers in the dark at the peak. Restoration figures here are county- and state-wide, not Reunion-specific — but the storm crossed the region the resort is part of, and the grid does not read the entrance sign.
And the power comes back the only way it ever does: crews on poles, one truck at a time, spread thin across a broken state. A gated resort full of visiting families waits in the same line as everyone else. For people who flew in for a theme-park week and have never sat through a Florida storm, a dark rented mansion — no air conditioning, a dead pool pump, warm water in the taps — is not the vacation they booked.
What the name gets right
So the name turns out to be backwards and exact at the same time. Reunion is a town of people who leave — the houses fill and empty, the names on the courses were rivals who shared nothing, the place itself was nearly abandoned once inside its first decade.
But one thing has to arrive every single day for any of it to work, and keep arriving, or the whole bright machine stops: the current, coming in from outside. Three rivals can share a grove. Three thousand houses can share a gate. They all share the same wire — and when it goes down, the most famous golf names in the world are just more dark windows, six miles from the brightest place on earth.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}