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Ghost Towns, Vanishing Florida and the mirage-like sense of place, difficult to Geography of Memory isolate and identify. Mark Derr, author of Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man Christopher Strain and the Land in Florida (1998), has Florida Atlantic University described this refractive essence. ―In human terms, Florida is as much a state of mind as of being, a land of imagination where Perhaps it is the land itself—the way fantasies come true,‖ he writes, ―although the jungle encroaches upon the built the nature of the dreams, like the land itself, 1 environment and eventually swallows it in has changed with shifting social fashions.‖ lush greens. Here human existence Gary Mormino echoes this idea in Land of necessitates constant struggle against nature, Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History whether the vegetation, the bugs, or the of Modern Florida (2005): man-eating reptiles. The sea air corrodes, A powerful symbol of renewal and the constant humidity rots, and the land regeneration, Florida‘s dreamscape inevitably reclaims that which is claimed by constantly shifts… Malleable, would-be conquerors, beginning with the accessible, and seemingly Spanish explorers. Or perhaps it is the inexhaustible, the Florida landscape quickness with which developers—modern- can be anything that humans want it day conquistadors—also ―reclaim‖ valuable to be… Shifting images and real estate by re-appropriating it to more associations cast and recast Florida profitable use. Herding bulldozers and as a haven for the elderly, the fruit graders into the last natural corners of the and winter vegetable basket for peninsula, theirs has been a quest to pave North America, a citadel and arsenal, every square inch of available habitat. The and the crossroads for the dense thickets of saw palmettos, scrub pines, Americas… Reinventing Florida is a and mangroves were first cleared to make cottage industry.2 farms, which gave way to homesteads, which were sold off for businesses and It is a peculiar phenomenon, this housing developments, now razed for high- kaleidoscopic refashioning, which seems to rise condominiums. Or perhaps it is the relate to a spatial and temporal paradox: the hurricanes that periodically assail the coasts, sweeping them clean of not only human dwellings but also the ample flora that gives 1Mark Derr, Some Kind of Paradise: A the place its name. Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 13. Regardless, Florida is and seemingly always has been changing, often 2Gary Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of disappearing and reappearing in different Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 2-6. configurations that result in an ethereal, 1 more Florida builds and grows, the more it physical environments? To answer this degrades and devolves. It is a simple yet question and explain its related paradoxes— elusive concept, not only knotted around first, how a geographical space disappears as issues of place, historical memory, and it expands, and second, how people in that nostalgia but also tied to problems of space embrace change even as they loathe authenticity and sustainability. it—we might examine those places that have grown and gone, yet still remain. What According to Yi-Fu Tuan, human vestiges of the built environment speak to action often turns on the way people respond such paradoxes better than abandoned to their physical setting—their perception of settlements? In light of J. B. Jackson‘s it and the value they place on it. Referring observation about the ―necessity for ruins,‖ to the affective bond between people and ghost towns take on extra meaning as limbo place as topophilia, he argues that because localities: historical bridges between humans are able to manipulate their yesterday and today.4 surroundings, it is important when considering space and setting to take into Symbols of the Old West, ghost account humankind‘s affinity toward (or towns evoke frontier images of tumbleweeds loathing of) any given environment.3 and weather-beaten storefronts, long Tuan‘s notion of topophilia applies directly abandoned to the ravages of time. in this instance, relating to a second Hollywood westerns have made ghost towns paradox. Because Florida‘s natural iconic, and while fewer and fewer remain, environment has been so tough on its some still dot the American Southwest. A inhabitants, efforts to tame the land have few locales have even actively preserved been undertaken with startling enthusiasm; them: Bannack, the territorial capital of however, a kind of nostalgic longing has Montana, and Bodie, one of the roughest of often accompanied such efforts. Sometimes California‘s mining towns, now draw this longing resembles a desire to halt these tourists as state parks. Here visitors can efforts even as residents welcome stroll through entire towns, frozen in states ―progress.‖ In this way, change is of arrested decay. relentlessly pursued even as it is resisted. Florida, however, has no such places. In a place that periodically reinvents Here ghost towns have no official historical itself, how does development affect the value or significance. They are in fact relationship between people and their barely recognizable as ghost towns, often identifiable only by a dilapidated building or 3Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values 4John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity Morningside ed. (New York: Columbia University for Ruins, and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Press, 1990), 4. Massachusetts Press, 1980). 2 two, a glimpse of weed-covered foundation, human inhabitants: a tale of conflict and or a small pile of rubble. Speeding down conquest, of competition and survival; a Interstate 95 or the Florida Turnpike, few story of war, not only between cohabitants tourists are aware of the state‘s ghost towns, but also between people and the land itself; often layered beneath or sandwiched and also a history of transience and between more recent settlements. In fact, impermanence, of colonizers‘ heavy-handed many native-born Floridians would be intrusion into a land that fought and often surprised to learn there are more than two rejected human presence. Little evidence hundred ghost towns here, most dating from remains of the thousands of years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth habitation by Native Americans, and the centuries. state‘s built environment reflects little of its lengthy human history: while the land itself These remnants serve an important bears the imprint of human presence, there function, beyond any inherent architectural are few remnants left by people themselves value or significance as economically viable in terms of buildings or structures. This heritage sites. As traces of earlier built seeming impermanence—a lack of lasting environments, as repositories of memory, built environment, coupled with human and as tangible links to past human transience—may help explain Florida‘s presence, they signify a lack of constancy ongoing sustainability issues and perpetual while still often providing a means to ―disappearance.‖ imagine a bygone era. They are the in- between spaces between living present and Florida had been a state for only dead past, between rapid expansion and sixteen years when, on the eve of the Civil sustainable development, between amnesia War, it seceded and left the Union in 1861; and remembrance. Critically analyzing after the war, development began in earnest. ghost towns with something other than As white pioneers made a place for antiquarian interest yields answers about themselves, a certain fondness replaced the how certain locales filter memory; disdain so often conveyed by earlier intriguingly, these shadow places have a explorers and travelers in Spanish Florida— resonance that informs present-day even as these recent arrivals attacked the discussions of growth and decline. With an land and aggressively reshaped it to suit abundance of ghost towns, Florida is indeed their needs. This nostalgia is evident in the haunted, not by phantoms or specters but by writings of Charles W. Pierce, who recorded sustainability issues that not only threaten what life was like for the first white settlers the natural environment but also destabilize to live in and around Lake Worth, in any sense of history. modern-day Palm Beach County. His account, Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida, To appreciate Florida‘s ephemeral was written in the late 1920s and early nature, one must examine the uneasy 1930s as a memoir. Published in 1970, relationship between the peninsula and its amidst a resurgence of interest in Palm 3 Beach‘s not-so-distant past, the book is now railroad, the building of the big hotels, and regarded as a classic: an authentic account the founding of the city of West Palm Beach of bygone days, from the arrival of his brought an end to an era,‖ he concluded. family in 1872 to 1893, when Henry Flagler ―The pioneer days, like the little boats with extended his railroad along the Florida coast their ‗wings of the wind,‘ remained only as a after building the luxurious Royal Poinciana pleasant memory.‖6 Interestingly, what Hotel in Palm Beach the year before. In many historians cite as the beginning of the those twenty-three years the region morphed settlement of Florida—the building of from a virtually uninhabited wilderness to a Flagler‘s railroad—Pierce remembered as sophisticated tourist destination, a the end. Undoubtedly, there were Seminoles playground for the über-rich. Even as he who looked on the pre-Pierce days with was writing Pioneer Life, Pierce recognized similar nostalgia; but, the larger point is that that the Florida he remembered, the Florida Pierce‘s Florida had already vanished by the he had helped to create, was a faint memory, time of his death in 1939, at the age of an echo of something long since passed: as seventy-five.

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