The Blog Wore Tennis Shoes: Eastern Winds Lounge

In my last post I shared some pictures of the Polynesian Village Resort circa 1972. One of the pictures featured an old ship docked at the resort. I was pretty sure that ship was no longer at the Poly, but I had no other info on it. Well, I seemed to get some pretty healthy feedback on this particular picture as it spotlighted one of Walt Disney World's earliest hidden treasures. The photograph I used last week was a wallet sized photo but I was able to also find the regular sized picture so I scanned that larger picture so that I could share with you a slightly more clear image. Here it is:

The ship, known as a Chinese Junk, was apparently part of the Polynesian Village Resort from 1971 to 1978 and was home to Eastern Winds a nightclub/lounge that I'm sure played a fair amount of disco. The ship was 65 feet long and had a deck lounge as well as a cabin lounge. You could also find staterooms on board. One of the selling points of this venue that was used in various publicity at the time pointed out the attractiveness of the cocktail waitress and their authentic costumes.

Eastern Winds is really one of those old WDW spots that really only survives through guest's memories. There is very little information about this nightspot online or in any of the older published materials that I looked through. Even a Resort Guide that I have from a 1978 visit does not list Eastern Winds among the Poly's offerings. However, while looking for info I came across this great website that I had never seen before: Tikiman's Unofficial Disney's Polynesian Resort Webpage. This site is filled with tons of images, stories and information about the resort. Maybe ya'll have heard of this site before, but it was a new find for me and I spent quite a bit of time reading through all the pages Tikiman has to offer. I even swiped a couple of pictures of the Chinese Junk from his page to share here.