Alligator Bayou (“cajun country”) resembles the small cottages or villages found in the rural bayou regions of Southern Louisiana, featuring rustic, weathered-wood buildings with quaint tin or tiled roofs landscaped with pines and iris. The double beds located in each room were hand-carved from hickory by a North Carolina woodworker hired by Disney specifically for the resort project.
Sixteen two-story buildings, each containing 64 rooms, provide a total of 1,024 rooms in this section of the resort. Due to their smaller size, there are no elevators in any of the Alligator Bayou buildings so if you experience any difficulties with stairs you should request a room on the ground floor.
If you look closely, there are three styles of architecture in the Alligator Bayou buildings. Apparently, as legend has it, when the settlers first moved out from the town of Port Orleans, their earliest constructions were the four comfortable and opulent mansion buildings. However, the further upstream along the Sassagoula River they got, the harder it became to transport the necessary building supplies and so the constructions became smaller and more rudimentary. That’s why the closest group of buildings to the mansions (buildings 34-39) have brick-built columns and neatly tiled roofs, while another group (buildings 14-18) have much plainer wooden columns, and the final section (buildings 24-28) features plain wood columns and simple sheet-metal roofing.
Oh, and that ’gator infested swampland along the Bayou was so prone to flooding during heavy rains that the ingenious settlers built their lodgings upraised about a foot-and-a-half above ground level, which is why the Alligator Bayou buildings we see today are still upraised - even though the ’gators have mostly gone...