For over a month now, Disneyland’s hub has been a mess of construction walls as the waterways between the area and Adventureland and Frontierland have been out of guest view. Just yesterday, these walls came down revealing the work that had taken place.
What we see is a far smaller body of water and a lot more landmass. However, Disney has not gone so far as to make any of this path space… yet.
The Adventureland side still has foliage, just much less.
Overall, there is just way less greenery than there was before and seemingly a little more landmass. You couldn’t see much dirt here before, it was mostly plants.
Not much has changed over by Fantasy Faire.
There are still some walls up between Fantasy Faire and Frontierland.
It remains unclear what the eventual plan is for this space, if there is any, but with all the recent planter removal and reduction around the park (Tomorrowland, New Orleans Square, and Frontierland), we assume that we will see more guest path space made in this area to handle the expected crowds for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in 2019. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I could be wrong but I think you assume to much. To widen these 2 portals would require major construction. I have no official knowledge but I would speculate that they screened off the areas to do a deep cleaning and plant removal. Reveling the land under the plant’s. It doesn’t look like the water ways have changed. The coincidence of this happening at the same time as the guest control modifications is just that. But anything is possible.
Yeah I am not sure how this project was ever spun as widening for Galaxy’s Edge. Especially because of how far it is from GE, I understand those will be the two main portals when the park opens but that’s the only time there will be any time if significant impact on the areas as far as GE is concerned. The difference with what they are doing in NOS is that there is the HM queue and Fantasmic. It was always just a maintenance project from what my friend who works there. Obviously take that with a grain of salt since it’s an online “source” lol.