The Spirit of a Place

(Or, Ambitious but Rubbish)

Today, I got to go take some pictures at a place I've wanted to shoot at for a long time.  It's an abandoned amusement park in a nearby town.  I've been hearing about it for years and years.  It's been on my "Holy Grail" list for a long time now, but it's in a place that I should not really go by myself, secluded and lots of trees, possibly also inhabited by the homeless, so I have never been able to get in there and get any pictures.  Today, though, one of my friends came home from DC, and she decided that it was on her list of things to do as well, so her sister, she, and I hatted up and went to see Royal Land.

It was both oddly wonderful and oddly sad, which, I suppose, is to be expected of an abandoned amusement park.  We could find no equipment left in the complex.  All we saw were signs of others' presence, an eerie abandoned doll, wrecked and burned furniture, a child's shoe.  Clearly someone had been living there.  We didn't go all the way to the back, and we didn't stay inside the gates long.We took a lot of pictures outside and left.  As I drove home, I thought about the experience.

The town where I go to take many of my pictures has a pervasive problem.  Maybe it isn't unique to that single place.   It seems that all too often big projects get undertaken and abandoned; important things are allowed to decay and disappear; instead of preservation and appreciation, a great deal of quick, cheap replacement occurs.

I keep thinking about the general state of repair of things around town.  For a very long time, one of the great jewels, a movie palace from the heyday of film, was being allowed to fall into ruin.  The ceiling is spotted from leaks, the plaster on the walls of the stairwells is in need of repair, and nobody was using it at all.  Finally, someone came and saved it.  It is starting to recover at last.  Performances are being held in it once again.  Films are being show in its lavish walls.  While the restoration process is slow-going, it is no longer being lost.

Then there was the opera house.  There was a gorgeous gem hidden away, locked up, and forgotten.  Almost nobody cared.  It was out of fashion, like a diamond in a setting nobody wanted to wear.  Despite the efforts of a few local people, it took people coming in from outside to see its true worth and save it.  Now, it is a wonderful place to go and see concerts again.  We have world-class shows coming in to something that even ten years ago was still a dusty memory in the minds of most.

I photograph so many other things that are on the verge of being past reclamation, a skyscraper that has deco details that put it on the National Historic Register; an old train car that is a remnant of this city's legendary status as a rail hub without equal.  Some of what I've shot is actually already gone or beyond recall, an old hotel they waited too long to try to save, an amusement part that was never very good in the first place.  How many other things will join them in the pile of cast-offs and left-behinds?

What a city builds says a lot about it, what it chooses to create.  I think, though, you can also tell a lot about a place by looking at what it chooses to save, by whether it chooses to reclaim or destroy and start again.  Then there are the things that can be learned by what a place chooses to neglect....   I wonder what these choices are saying about this town?