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).

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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. more and more people arrived, bringing with them the trappings of civilization, change The period described by Pierce eclipsed the Pierces and the other settlers of brought enormous change to Florida, some South Florida. ―By 1893,‖ he wrote, ―before of it captured by Ralph Middleton Munroe, a photographer who chronicled the tropical the coming of the railroad, the people of the 7 lake, especially those who had arrived in the frontier on dry glass plate negatives. Pierce seventies, no longer thought they were and Munroe not only recorded the creation living on a frontier.‖5 of modern Florida but also--seemingly cognizant of something lost in the fury of Pierce went on to describe the daily construction, development, and change-- mail, express, and passenger service aboard noted the passing of its precursor. The the steamer Hypoluxo; the governmental themes in Pierce‘s book and in Munroe‘s weather stations and telegraph lines images are ones of transience and crisscrossing the region; and the post impermanence, as if the very land were offices, general stores, tourist hotels, shifting and changing beneath the feet of boardinghouses, and weekly newspaper that had sprung up as symbols of a new age, harbingers of more change to follow. ―Nonetheless, the coming of Flagler and his 6Ibid; see also William E. McGoun, Southeast Florida Pioneers: The Palm and Treasure Coasts (Sarasota, Fl.: Pineapple Press, 1998).

7For examples, see Arva Moore Parks, The 5Charles W. Pierce, Pioneer Life in Forgotten Frontier: Florida Through the Lens of Southeast Florida (Coral Gables: University of Ralph Middleton Munroe (Miami: Banyan Books, Miami Press, 1970), 250-251. 1977).

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those who would attempt to live there. In The result was a schizophrenic kind fact, the land was changing, or more of development that mirrored the boom-bust accurately, the land was changed, as cycles of the Old West. It is helpful, pioneers worked to shape it to fit their needs perhaps, to consider Florida as a kind of and wants. In the southern part of the state, ―non-western‖ western state in this regard. the developers who followed the surveyors The Florida frontier existed a little later than saw a vast area of rich muck lands perfect the frontier of the American West but the for the growth of sugar cane and other crops. trappings were similar, with pioneers, In the Everglades they perceived not a homesteads, and even cowboys and cattle unique and wondrous ecosystem but a drives; in fact, many of Frederic watery wasteland to be drained, parceled, Remington‘s emblematic images of and farmed. Those who succeeded—like cowboying come not from Texas but from Henry Disston, who drained the wetlands Florida in 1895, when he painted iconic from the Kissimmee River to Lake images of larger-than-life cowboys like Okeechobee, thereby opening a vast acreage Bone Mizell, who in turn enhanced the to farming and development—were cowboy myth.10 Some local economies— considered great men.8 Thus began a series from sponge diving in Tarpon Springs to of massive engineering enterprises that plume hunting in the Everglades—were carried unforeseen ecological consequences, distinctly non-western, but the enterprises many of them disastrous in scope and scale. were familiarly extractive and cyclical in Lakes were diked, rivers channelized, nature, expanding and collapsing in rapid marshes dredged. Wildlife suffered, entire succession; more traditional economic ecosystems coughed and sputtered, but as activities included lumber cutting and the swamplands dried up, economic turpentine harvesting in the pinewoods, and opportunity flooded in.9 phosphate mining in the southwest part of the state. Many business ventures lost steam as quickly as they were created, and the surrounding communities suffered accordingly. The result was little different

8 from the camps in the American West which Joe Knetsch, Faces on the Frontier: Florida Surveyors and Developers in the Nineteenth depopulated as miners, having chipped and Century (Cocoa: Florida Historical Society Press, blasted great veins of silver or panned 2006), 211. mountain streams for gold crumbs, looked

9For more on the water-control projects of elsewhere for precious metal. The make-or- th th the late 19 and early 20 centuries, see William Ross McCluney, The Environmental Destruction of South Florida (Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1971); see also Jack E. Davis, Paradise 10On Remington and Mizell, see Stuart Lost?: The Environmental History of Florida McIver, Glimpses of South Florida History (Miami: (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). Florida Flair Books, 1988), 114-115.

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break economies of frontier Florida be called something--that were never really launched some communities into lasting towns at all. While the first category is success while dooming others to failure, and undoubtedly the most interesting, there is a the state was left an inordinate number of fourth possibility that Warnke does not abandoned settlements, much like Nevada or consider: the town swallowed by other Colorado. towns, now superimposed on top of preexisting communities.12 In The Ghost Towns & Side Roads of Florida, James Warnke explains how entire Period maps, often contradicting one towns comprised of houses, hotels, and another, depict an ephemeral place in businesses simply vanished, ―so that today constant transition. A Rand-McNally map one is hard put even to find the spot where from 1910 of the newly formed Palm Beach the village existed.‖11 Perhaps there was a County shows a number of towns that no storm or bad winter; towns in Marion, Lake, longer exist, places such as Tantie, Fort Van and Sumter counties, for example, were Swearinger, Rio, Aberdeen, Gomez, Jupiter particularly hard-hit by the ―Big Freeze‖ of Station, and Yamato; however, a 1910 1894-1895. Perhaps the railroad (or later, Hammond map of the same area shows the interstate) bypassed the town, or perhaps other settlements that no longer exist, a local business closed its doors; regardless, namely Fruita and Munyons Island. A 1916 it was usually hard economics that killed map by the National Map Company depicts settlements. Gosling, Waveland, Mulford, Likely, and West Jupiter, none of which remain. A 1921 Such places fall into three categories, map by the L. L. Poates Company adds Ritta according to Warnke. First, there is what and Gladecrest while subtracting other might be called the classic ghost town, towns; a 1932 U. S. Geological Survey map which flourished then died with few traces includes Rood, Kelsey City, and a of its former existence. Second, there are smattering of new settlements around Lake towns once thriving and prosperous, now Okeechobee such as Chosen and Kraemer. dwindling and in decline, with a handful of Every few years new places were popping residents still living there; as Warnke notes, up as others disappeared. None of these such places should probably be called places appear on modern-day maps, but, something other than ―ghost towns‖ in deference to current inhabitants. Third, there are named spots on maps--railroad stops, junctions, and so forth that needed to 12Ibid. For more, see Steve Rajtar, Historic Photos of Florida Ghost Towns (Nashville, Tenn.: Turner Publishing Co., 2010); see also Weona Cleveland, Crossroad Towns Remembered: A Look 11James Warnke, The Ghost Towns and Side Back at Brevard & Indian River Pioneer Roads of Florida (Boynton Beach, Fl.: Roving Communities (Melbourne, Fl.: Florida Today, 1994) Photographers & Associates, Inc., 1978), 9. and http://www.ghosttowns.com/fl.

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more tellingly, the lack of consistency from example, decried the deforestation he saw in map to map seems to reflect a lack of From Eden to Sahara: Florida’s Tragedy agreement as to what constituted an actual (1929). ―Florida is being drained and town. Not so much scientifically accurate, burned to such an extent that it will soon geographical renderings of the topography, become a desert,‖ he cautioned. ―Yesterday these historic maps are impressionistic a botanical paradise. Tomorrow, the snippets of a place in time, snapshots of a desert!‖15 The writings of Marjory gone world.13 Stoneman Douglas also capture this tension neatly (her efforts, combined with Small‘s, The land boom of the 1920s, made would eventually help to create Everglades possible in part by Hamilton Disston‘s National Park). In The Everglades: River of efforts to drain the Everglades, changed the Grass (1947), Douglas described not only area more than anything before it. the fishermen, plume hunters, and gator Developers packaged and sold land in the skinners who commodified the environment same way citrus growers packed oranges, but also the explosive growth of Miami neatly boxed and ready for consumption. during this same period. ―The glitter, the ―Go to Florida,‖ commanded The Miamian whiteness, the play of light, the stimulus of in 1925, ―where enterprise is enthroned, the sun, the sense that a great city was where the silver circle is heaven‘s lavalier, 14 building here made it impossible now for and the full orbit its glorious pendant.‖ In people to check ills growing greater,‖ she these heady get-rich-quick days, land was wrote. ―Times and events quickened and bought and sold quickly, and people flooded rushed forward, as a river gathered to the the lower peninsula. It was not until this drag of a cataract.‖16 period that a few observers began to speak of paradise lost, sensing trouble in the speed What emerged was a kind of love- with which the subtropical wonderland was hate relationship with the land: newcomers modernizing. John Kunkel Small, for noted the natural beauty of Florida even as they ravaged it, and commented on how

much preferable the older Florida was even as they rushed to embrace a newer 13The 1910 Rand-McNally and 1932 U. S. Geological Survey maps are archived in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress; the 1916 National Map Company and 1921 L. L. Poates Company maps are in the private 15John Kunkel Small, quoted in Bill collection of Roy Winkelman. All are available Belleville, Losing It All To Sprawl: How Progress online through the Florida Center for Instructional Ate My Cracker Landscape (Gainesville: University Technology at http://fcit.usf.edu. Press of Florida, 2006), 92.

14Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An 16Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Informal History of the 1920s (1931; reprint, New Everglades: River of Grass 50th Anniversary Edition York: Harper Row, 1964), 225. (Sarasota, Fl.: Pineapple Press, 1997), 333.

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―improved‖ version. While it may have When the name did not lure land developers, been little more than hypocrisy that townspeople again changed the name to informed this relationship, it was more Winter Beach—just as the land boom ended. likely a kind of cognitive dissonance, The town was destined to remain a small perhaps a conflation of memory (the use of unincorporated community, now a ghost the past in conjunction with the present) and town. Other settlements turned on the hopes nostalgia (the rejection of the present for an and dreams of single individuals. When imagined past). Christopher Lasch has George End, for example, started a business described nostalgia as the ―abdication of to can rattlesnake meat on State Route 92 in memory,‖ insofar as it ―undermines the Hillsborough County, he made it the center ability to make intelligent use of the past‖ by of a town aptly named Rattlesnake, which idealizing what happened ―outside time, soon consisted of the cannery, a general frozen in unchanging perfection.‖ Whether store, a post office, and a roadside ―snake- an abdication of memory or a pit‖ attraction. Relocating from Arcadia romanticization of it, this nostalgia failed to with his wife and two sons in 1937, End prompt a reevaluation of the meaning of started a mail-order business that was quite progress in frontier Florida, where there lucrative until 1944, when he died from— persisted an inability or unwillingness to halt somewhat predictably— snakebite. The development—as if the present itself were town was annexed to the city of Tampa in inherently lacking. In such an implicit the 1950s, though the name still appears on deficit model, the here-and-now was certain maps.18 doomed, never to be good enough.17 Where there are ghost towns, one is Accordingly, the 1920s land mindful of ghosts—quite literally, in certain scramble in Florida resulted in more than a corners of the state. Cassadaga, with its few places begun with high hopes that never large number of mediums and spiritual materialized. To illustrate, the town of advisors, has been called the ―Psychic Quay, north of Vero Beach in Indian River Capital of the World.‖ Founded in the County, had changed its name from 1890s by a trance medium named George Woodley in the early 1910s to honor Senator Colby, the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Matthew Quay, whose efforts led Congress attracted those intent on communicating to authorize the first dredging of the Indian with spirits beyond this material world; River Lagoon for a navigation channel. today, this small town in Volusia County

18 17 On Quay, see Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/fl/quay.html; on Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 82-83. Rattlesnake, see http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/fl/rattlesnake.html .

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continues to beckon psychics and emotion or sentiment. Are they not haunted, spiritualists of all sorts. St. Augustine, with not because of the large-scale loss of life its nightly ghost tours, has long claimed to which occurred there, but rather because be not only the oldest city in the United they keep a certain historical memory? In States but also the most haunted. Not to be visiting the site of the greatest American outdone, Key West—originally called Cayo Civil War battle, for example, it is easy to Hueso, or ―Bone Island‖—also claims an feel the ghosts of Gettysburg—not as inordinate share of apparitions. apparitions or spirits, per se, but as a uniform atmosphere thick with presence and Of course, one need not believe in past meaning. Such hauntings are not ghosts to appreciate the nature of hauntings, limited to battlefields or sites of great which are inherently linked to sense of tragedy. Walden Pond, for example, is place. Paranormal investigators might haunted by Thoreauvian descriptions of describe a haunting as a worldly visitation quiet beauty; Muir Woods by the statuesque by an otherworldly being: a recurring, majesty of redwoods; and the U.S. Capitol quasi-corporeal manifestation of a spirit in a in Washington, D.C. by palpitations of given place. Less spooky definitions simply weighty decisions, of political power describe a place habitually frequented; wielded by influential statesmen. accordingly, we call places we used to visit often our old ―haunts‖ and hangouts. On yet In this light, it is possible to see how another level, a haunting is little more than a Florida is haunted by past visions of future lasting impression; in this sense we speak of grandeur, of dreams and schemes, all trading being ―haunted‖ by a painful memory or on historical sense of place, on incident. Central to any definition of environmental capital, and on the land itself. haunting, however, is the sensation of The second paradox—that people embrace remembrance occurring in a given locale— change even as they loathe it—enables a the notion of place. Certain localities evoke haunting sense of loss which makes progress more of a sense of place than others, perhaps troublesome: it is the wistfulness for because of certain memories lingering there; Florida‘s pasts that defines many of its therefore, we might think of a haunting as a presents in the modern era. In this sense, the memory imprint, a time stamp on a ―real‖ Florida is that sometimes particular place. Few would deny that romanticized version of the peninsula that places such as Senlac Hill, where English exists in a liminal state, wavering knights locked shields to face the Norman somewhere between reality and the ghost advance at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, or world, between past and present, relating to New York City‘s Ground Zero, site of the what Ronald Lee Fleming has called ―the September 11th terrorist attacks and footprint of the World Trade Center‘s Twin Towers, have more historical weight--more gravitas- -than other places which conjure less 9

capacity of the tangible physical Acknowledging that it is essentially an environment to live on in the mind.‖19 invention, Burt describes the Tropic of Cracker as ―a sense of Florida,‖ a kind of Al Burt, a columnist for the Miami collective memory tied to place. Loss, gain, Herald, has described this liminal state as and potential cannot be measured except by what he calls the ―Tropic of Cracker‖: comparison with the good and bad of what vestiges of ―native‖ Florida that persist and life had been like, he argues; without echo in the midst of fast-paced remembering how it was, one cannot know modernization. Tied to the land, the place how it could be. It is accompanied by a described by Burt exists in thought and certain degree of longing, an ―idealized imagination. ―The Tropic of Cracker vision of home.‖ The Tropic of Cracker survives in myth, memory, and love of represents ―what remains of the Florida that natural Florida,‖ he writes. ―It exists more needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its in the mind than in geography, more in the creation,‖ Burt notes, ―that was here before memory than in the sight, more in attitude there was a can opener or a commercial or a than in encounter:‖ real estate agent;‖ but in his estimation it is In the Tropic of Cracker there are no more than mere nostalgia. ―It is the feeling parallels staked out, circling the earth that here there has been something special at certain degrees and so many that should not be lost or forgotten, minutes above the equator, marking something not just confined to the library or a zone and rendering scholarly to a museum or to a vault,‖ he concludes. identification of the climate and ―There is a desire to cull the best of heritage 21 range of life. The Tropic of Cracker and weave it back into daily life.‖ has no boundaries. In Florida it Burt is one of several journalists simply occurs, as unbidden as comprising a cadre of writers mourning the sandspurs or wildflowers, rooting in loss of native Florida.22 However, the minds of Floridians who have

links to their past and kinship to their

native heritage.20 21Burt, Tropic of Cracker, 4, 13, 22-23.

22Others include Ernest Lyons, Jeff Klinkenberg, and Bill Belleville. See Ernest Lyons, The Last Cracker Barrel (New York: Newspaper 19Ronald Lee Fleming, The Art of Enterprise Association, 1976); Jeff Klinkenberg, Real Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Florida: Key Lime Pies, Worm Fiddlers, A Man Public Art and Urban Design (London: Merrell, Called Frog, and Other Endangered Species 2007), 17. (Asheboro, N.C.: Down Home Press, 1993); Jeff 20Al Burt, The Tropic of Cracker Klinkenberg, Dispatches from the Land of Flowers: (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), xv, A Snake Man, a Sad Poet, a Lightning Stalker, and 3. Other Stories About Real Florida (Asheboro, N.C.: Down Home Press, 1996; Jeff Klinkenberg, Pilgrim 10

journalists are not the only ones to note the As the older Florida recedes, passing of what they see as an older, more musings about what is real and what is not authentic order. Today the state park system are perhaps inevitable, relating to yet beckons visitors to see the ―Real Florida‖: another paradox, a third contradiction: the wild landscape quite different from the Florida is at once both the oldest and newest Disney-fied Florida more familiar to state, a place whose built environment tourists. Photo Salon, a group of artists in reflects little of its human history. In West Palm Beach, has attempted to capture Massachusetts, where tiny houses in seaside the people, places, and things they find most villages like Marblehead and Braintree date interesting, calling their latest exhibition to the 1620s, the past is living present; in ―Vanishing Florida.‖23 Such Virginia, denizens speak in hushed tones characterizations are only possible in a place about the wishes of the Founding Fathers as that transformed from under populated if they were still lingering in the next room hinterland to megastate so quickly, a place (at the University of Virginia, faculty, where the built environment almost wholly students, and administrators alike supplanted nature. Perhaps no one can bear consistently invoke the desires of ―Mr. the notion that the ―real‖ Florida might be Jefferson‖ in formulating contemporary the soulless nothingscape of concrete and university policy). In Florida, there are steel visible from the highway; if so, each comparatively few traces of the past—a invocation of the real Florida may relate not curiosity in one of the oldest gateways to so much to nostalgia as to a kind of guilt, an North America. As the state arrives at its unease about setting in motion large-scale quincentennial, celebrating the five- habitat loss, a displacement of people (not hundredth anniversary of Ponce de Leon‘s only Native Americans but also ―crackers,‖ landing in 1513, there is little indication that or native-born white Floridians) as well as people have been here as long as they have. animals. There are few old buildings, few reminders: even graveyards in places outside St. Augustine and Key West seem few and far

between. in the Land of Alligators: More Stories About Real Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, In such an environment, ghost towns 2008); Jeff Klinkenberg, Seasons of Real Florida represent something unique, not as heritage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); and sites or opportunities for historic Bill Belleville, Losing It All To Sprawl: How preservation or even places of Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). archaeological import, but as symbols of a preservation-less environment: a place 23 For more on the Photo Salon exhibit, see where preservation exists by accident, not http://www.vanishingflorida.net/. For other uses of design. Florida is, in fact, a state largely the term ―vanishing Florida,‖ see Susan Harb, ―Florida‘s Quirky Attractions Try to Stay Afloat,‖ bypassed by the U.S. historic preservation th Washington Post (January 14, 2007): 1. movement, pioneered in the late 19 and 11

early 20th centuries in places such as Mount visions of tomorrows that never Vernon, Virginia and Charleston, South materialized—the past present of future Carolina. The Florida Trust for Historic perfect. Xanadu, a conceptual, organically- Preservation—the state′s only statewide shaped house constructed with blown advocacy organization for historic polyurethane and inflated balloons, was preservation and its only statewide, not-for- intended to showcase computers and profit organization—was not established automation in the American home. Begun until 1978. Until then, historic preservation in Kissimmee in 1979, Xanadu remained a was limited to a few specific locales (like St. popular tourist attraction in the 1980s, but as Augustine and Key West, the most iconic of technology began to outstrip the Florida‘s preserved places). conveniences featured inside, including large-screen video projectors and home Historic preservation never really security systems, the bubble-dome house caught on here, not only because of the quickly felt outdated, its vision frozen in newness of the state but also because time even as the building itself dilapidated. Floridians exist in a rarified kind of Closed in 1996, the building fell into American Dream, an ever-grasping quest for disrepair until its demolition in 2005. Other bigger-better-faster. Why would the examples are no less dramatic in their dreamer bother with history when feverishly expectations and hope for tomorrow. While focused on the future? While the past not a ghost town, Disney‘s original EPCOT reassures and helps those who study it to was an instant anachronism, an avoid mistakes, it also slows presentist uncomfortably outmoded vision that almost intent, with tradition acting as a brake on totally miscalculated the contours of twenty- progress. Perhaps it is inevitable that first century life in the United States: plenty preservation would be an afterthought in a of Jetsons-esque rocket cars but no cell place whose subtropical forests hid not only phones. Focused on sunny dreams of peace El Dorado but also the legendary Fountain and prosperity through technology, Walt of Youth; where age has equated not with Disney‘s sharpest Imagineers still failed to past glory but with decay; and where patina anticipate the Internet. Excepting the still signifies tarnish—less point of pride autonomous, vacuuming Roomba, today than eyesore. there are scant few robots to do the There is little room for tribute to the housework, and EPCOT—the Experimental past in a place focused on things to come; Prototype Community of Tomorrow—has however, those tributes that do remain often had to constantly evolve and update to 24 speak to this forward-looking tendency, and reflect the present, let alone the future. crumbling monuments of past futurescapes dot the state. A weirdly fascinating subset of ghost towns, these ruined memorials of futurism crumble and decay as historic 24Tom Halfhill, ―Computers in the Home: 1990,‖ Compute! 31 (December 1982): 16-24; see 12

Thus, as spatial lessons in in a friendly way, without disputing over priority sustainability, ghost towns evoke not only and leadership,‖ he concluded.26 In the past but also the future. As Carl Becker championing the subjectivity of historical pointed out in his 1931 presidential address relativism, in which the past is rendered to the American Historical Association: relative and relational, Becker might have recognized ghost towns as mediating not [T]o be oriented in our little world of only historical memory but also what Alvin endeavor we must be prepared for what Toffler has termed ―future shock‖: too is coming to us… and to be prepared much change in too short a period of time. for what is coming to us it is necessary, not only to recall certain past events, but As references with no referents in the to anticipate (note I do not say predict) contemporary landscape, ghost towns also the future. Thus from the specious shade into what Jean Baudrillard has present, which always includes more or described as simulacra and simulation, or less of the past, the future refuses to be hyperreality; the hyperreal condition, or excluded; and the more of the past we reality by proxy, surely destabilizes any drag into the specious present, the more sense of historical order, if history is a an hypothetical, patterned future is record of events ordered according to a 25 likely to crowd into it also. given criterion (usually chronology). As ―[M]emory of past and anticipation of future visual cues in the built environment, ghost events work together, go hand in hand as it were towns provide links to the past; but as hauntings, or memory imprints on

geography, they also mold historical relativism as much as topophilia. Thus it is also Roy Mason, Lane Jennings, and Robert Evans, hardly surprising that ghost towns—existing Xanadu: The Computerized Home of Tomorrow and at the intersections of living present, dead How It Can Be Yours Today! (New York: Acropolis Books, 1983). On EPCOT, see Richard Beard, Walt past, and imminent future—haunt the 27 Disney’s EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of contemporary landscape in their liminality. Tomorrow (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1985). Several websites have discussed EPCOT‘s evolution, ―What is most striking about including Epcot Central Florida,‖ Mormino has written, ―is how (http://epcot82.blogspot.com/2006/10/seeing-into- quickly things changed.‖ It is a place future.html), Epcot Center: A History of the Future (http://webcot.michaelcrawford.com/flash.htm), and Lost Epcot (http://www.lostepcot.com/index.html).

25 Carl Becker, Annual Address of the 26Ibid. President of the American Historical Association, delivered in Minneapolis, December 29, 1931; 27See Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New reprinted in the American Historical Review 37 n 2 York: Random House, 1970) and Jean Baudrillard, (1931): 221–36; also available at Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/clbecker.h Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, tm. 1994).

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defined by periodically reinventing itself, a different kinds of illusion from those who place of ―instant cities… a society in flux.‖28 live in an environment lacking in Burt has described how Floridians orthogonality.‖ For him, the furnishing of characteristically look to the next big thing an ideal world is a matter of removing the in ―The Next Florida,‖ a chapter of The defects of the real one. ―Paradises have a Tropic of Cracker in which he writes: certain family likeness because the excesses of geography (too hot or too cold, too wet or There have been many false starts, too dry) are removed,‖ he continues. ―In all corrections or half-corrections, and of them, plants and animals useful and restarts. Progress has been ragged friendly to man abound.‖30 Tuan might and incomplete, but it continues. agree that Florida--a vacation destination Grandiose schemes came along with and ―some kind of paradise,‖ as Derr has regularity, new things or new ideas called it—is a carpentered world made with an appetite for eating away at livable by humans intent on tempering this things natural for dubious gains, but wild land. While barely moderating its each marvelous new answer seemed extremes of heat and humidity, modern to bring with it a set of three or four Florida is still beset by paradoxes relating to new problems, each requiring its inhabitants‘ quests for earthly another new answer that also carried perfection—quests that have most often multiple problems. As we made ended not in Gardens of Eden, as some progress, sometimes it seemed we 29 visionaries hoped, but in testaments to fell further behind.‖ human imperfection.

In creating one paradise, Floridians In fact, to the third paradox (that destroyed another. Where the two ideals Florida is simultaneously the oldest and intersected, one finds ghosts—figurative and newest state, with the newest built sometimes literal manifestations of endeavor environment and the oldest record of human and conquest. It is the curse of living in an habitation) may be added a fourth, neatly idealized setting, a Shangri-La that trades on illustrated as before by Douglas. In The the place‘s own natural beauty and Everglades: River of Grass, she recounts abundance. how Frank Hamilton Cushing, ―one of the ―People who live in a ‗carpentered‘ most brilliant and original ethnologists‖ of world,‖ Tuan observes, ―are susceptible to the late nineteenth century, excavated Marco Key as he followed reports of prehistoric Calusa Indian artifacts, partially uncovered by the land drainers. Groping in the muck,

28Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, 5, 7.

29Burt, Tropic of Cracker, 227-228. 30Tuan, Topophilia, 246-247.

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he uncovered pottery, tools, weapons, and of Central and South Florida is itself a kind jewelry: of giant ghost town—not devoid of inhabitants, but certainly symbolic of the All the carved wooden objects consequences of rapid overdevelopment. showed, in the light, the original paint, black, white, gray-blue, and While sometimes tragic, however, red. The muck had preserved them this story is not in itself a declension exactly as they had been, blown narrative. To restore the world to something down, he began to think, in some like its former beauty, ―there has to be that hurricane that must have destroyed interval of neglect, there has to be the whole village. discontinuity,‖ writes Jackson, continuing:

But as he lifted them and There has to be (in our new concept washed them off, in the brilliant sun of history) an interim of death or he saw to his horror that as they rejection before there can be renewal dried they began to disintegrate.31 and reform… The old farmhouse has to decay before we can restore it and In finding the artifacts Cushing was lead an alternate lifestyle in the destroying them, but much like the Calusas country; the landscape has to be themselves and the bounteous ecosystem plundered and stripped before we upon which they relied, no one much missed can restore the natural ecosystem; natural Florida until it was gone. One the neighborhood has to be a slum wonders if, to appreciate something fully, before we can rediscover and one must first lose it. gentrify it.32

In the case of Florida, few paused to Ghost towns serve in this capacity as question the nature of progress. What does necessary ―intervals of neglect,‖ reminding ―progress‖ really mean, exactly? Only us of dreams and possibilities as much as recently—perhaps only since the 1996 miscues and missteps. In this sense, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration built environment—along with human Plan, or CERP, and major efforts to presence and nature—helps to reorient not dechannelize the Kissimmee River—have only place but also history as well. The past Floridians asked whether it entails itself becomes the most surreal of subjects something other than boundless growth; yet, as historical change accelerates, making it development still continues, more or less possible to see new beauty in that which is unchecked. If ghost towns serve as vanishing. monuments to caution, then the entire region

31Douglas, The Everglades, 308. 32Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, 102.

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