Opened: May 1977, as the centerpiece of the newly renamed Walt Disney World Village. Closed: 1995. Status: Hull retained and rebuilt; reopened in 1996 as Fulton’s Crab House, itself closed in 2016 and replaced by Paddlefish, now part of The Landing at Disney Springs.
The Empress Lilly was a full-size paddle-wheel riverboat that never went anywhere. It was built in place on a submerged concrete foundation rather than towed in as a floating hull, with water let back in around it once construction was finished so it appeared freshly docked. It functioned entirely as a restaurant and lounge complex, three dining rooms and a bar spread across a boat that looked ready to cast off but was fixed in place by design. For eighteen years it was the visual anchor of the district, which had been Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village since 1975 and was renamed Walt Disney World Village that same May 1977, then Downtown Disney in 1997, long before the site carried the Disney Springs name.
Named for Lillian Disney
The riverboat took its name, with a small twist of spelling, from Lillian Bounds Disney, Walt Disney’s widow. She christened the Empress Lilly with champagne at its May 1977 opening, a personal touch that set the boat apart from the character-themed or generically nautical names Disney tended to give its dining venues.
The boat itself was built to evoke a nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat, three decks stacked above the waterline with ornate white railings, tall twin smokestacks, and a working paddle wheel at the stern that turned for effect even though the vessel never moved from its mooring. It was a piece of stage scenery built at full architectural scale, docked permanently at the edge of the shopping village so that guests approached it the way they would a working boat rather than a restaurant building.
Three dining rooms and the Baton Rouge Lounge
The Empress Lilly held its restaurants across the boat’s decks, each with a different register and cuisine, plus a lounge that anchored its nightlife.
- The Empress Room, the boat’s top-deck formal restaurant, served French-influenced fine dining in a Louis XV-styled room, required reservations and formal attire, and built a reputation as one of the most talked-about fine-dining rooms at Walt Disney World during its run, a holdover of old-guard Disney fine dining that stood apart from the resort’s more casual, character-driven restaurants.
- The Fisherman’s Deck served seafood in a more casual dining room, positioned as the boat’s middle-tier restaurant.
- The Steerman’s Quarters rounded out the trio with a steakhouse concept, the most casual of the three dining rooms.
- The Baton Rouge Lounge was the boat’s bar and live music venue, themed to a New Orleans jazz club, with a house show band, the Riverboat Rascals, performing Dixieland jazz and comedy for guests separate from the dining rooms upstairs.
That structure, three restaurants at three different price points plus a standalone lounge, let the Empress Lilly function as a self-contained dining destination rather than a single restaurant, closer in scope to a small dining district than to any other individual eatery Disney operated at the time.
Decline and 1995 closure
By the mid-1990s the Empress Lilly’s formal, sit-down model had fallen out of step with where Disney was taking Walt Disney World Village (renamed Downtown Disney two years later, in 1997). Disney was also turning many of its full-service restaurants over to outside operating partners as a cost-cutting move around this time; Levy Restaurants ultimately signed on to run the hull’s next tenant. The district was reorienting toward a younger, more casual visitor base and toward the kind of themed, high-turnover dining that could move volume rather than serve a smaller number of guests a multi-course French meal. The Empress Room in particular, for all its acclaim, represented an old-guard style of Disney fine dining that was increasingly rare across the resort by the 1990s.
The boat served its last meals on April 22, 1995, rather than being demolished. Disney kept the hull and foundation in place and began a substantial renovation to convert it into a new tenant restaurant, an approach that preserved the riverboat’s footprint on the lake even as its interior, exterior details, and operator changed.
Fulton’s Crab House and the hull’s second life
The Empress Lilly reopened on March 10, 1996 as Fulton’s Crab House, a seafood restaurant that gutted the original three dining rooms and lounge in favor of a single large restaurant concept. The conversion also stripped the exterior of its twin smokestacks and paddle wheel, removed because of rust and rot rather than replaced, leaving the hull’s silhouette noticeably plainer than it had been under the Empress Lilly.
Fulton’s Crab House ran for two decades, slightly longer than the Empress Lilly’s original eighteen-year run, and became a fixture of Downtown Disney’s Pleasure Island-adjacent dining scene in its own right. It closed in April 2016 as part of Disney Springs’ broader redevelopment of that stretch of the waterfront.
What stands there now
The riverboat hull, after two full interior and exterior transformations, now houses Paddlefish, a seafood restaurant that opened in February 2017 as part of The Landing at Disney Springs, following Fulton’s 2016 closure for the conversion. The renovation that created Paddlefish rebuilt the twin smokestacks and paddle wheel that the Fulton’s conversion had stripped away in 1996, restoring a version of the Empress Lilly’s original silhouette to the water for the first time in roughly twenty years.
Few structures in Disney Springs carry that kind of continuous physical history. The land around the boat has been renamed three times, from Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village to Walt Disney World Village to Downtown Disney to Disney Springs, and the restaurant inside the hull has changed three times, but the boat’s foundation has never left the water it was set into in 1977, even though its smokestacks and paddle wheel spent about twenty years missing before being rebuilt for Paddlefish. For a resort that demolishes and rebuilds as readily as Walt Disney World does, the Empress Lilly’s hull is a rare case of the same physical structure simply being renamed and re-dressed across five decades rather than torn out.
Readers interested in the rest of that stretch of waterfront’s history can find more in our coverage of Pleasure Island and the Adventurers Club, the nightclub district that grew up next to the Empress Lilly on the same lake.