Growing up in Florida I really identified with all the unbuilt subdivisions described by John Green in Paper Towns. The state is full of neighborhoods to nowhere, paved roads that encircle vacant lots covered in weeds and rusty torn "For Sale" signs. No one ever lives there, or wants to. When I was in college some of the flight students used to do touch and go's in ghost subdivisions (because landing at airports is so boring of course). (This all stopped when one of the planes stalled and the guy couldn't get it back in the air and phone calls had to be made, reports filed and much yelling commenced.) I always thought a ghost subdivision would be the perfect setting for a mystery and Paper Towns comes close to that. But really, they aren't a location for an adventure anymore but rather a sad story about so many hopes and dreams that went up in a lot of greedy smoke. From last week's Daytona Beach News-Journal:
George Packer's "The Ponzi State," in the Feb. 9-16 New Yorker exemplifies the new tone in national reporting about Florida -- much darker than the bemused tone one expects in Florida-as-a-warning features.
All the things a local looks forward to reading -- oddball crimes, spunky and colorful locals, Carl Hiaasen quotes, alligator and shark attacks, politicos in prison jumpsuits . . . -- are missing. Instead, Packer looked for the place where the housing bubble blew up most violently and found it in Pasco County. Instead of spunky, colorful locals, he found dazed blast survivors.
Representative observation: "Driving around Florida's ghost subdivisions, you feel not just that their influence is waning but that they are physically hollowing out." Harsh.
Years ago I read a book about lost cities - small towns that gave themselves grandiose hopeful names with "city" attached and then, for a variety of reasons but usually economic, disappeared. My stepfather grew up in a small town in North Florida named Lake City that I always thought was inappropriately named. (The current population is less than 13,000 although if you stretch to "greater Lake City" you get a population of 45,000. As the whole county has a population just under 70,000 I'm thinking they are really reaching with that "greater" definition.) The book was very good (I can not for the life of me remember the title and I've long since lost it) and revealed a great deal about how social history and urban planning can collide. The places the author rediscovered were rarely more than dots on the map in modern times but at one time they had been places of so many hopes and dreams and very real industry and hard work. In other words, even though largely vanished now, once upon a time they were real. This is clearly not the case for the ghost subdivisions.
There are dying cities, dead neighborhoods and then those places that never even were. Even on a highway we are surrounded by ghosts; even roads to nowhere have their own hauntings to contend with.
February 24
2009
12:10 PM
There are places like this in California that are actually frightening to me -- the lines on the road just... sheesh. There's something terrifying about them, in daylight or at night. Hollowed out is a good metaphor.