The ruins of Lincoln Beach - dream rollercoasters and the appeal of abandonment

I've been meaning to post on the wonder that is the ruins of Lincoln Beach amusement park near New Orleans, ever since Elle's guidance and my own obsessions led to my spending hours researching it. And then this week, again partly due to the delight that is reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", it seemed like the time to post it.

I have always been obsessed with the magic of ruins - the inherent power of them on an intuitive emotional level that brings them into the realms of the imaginary rather than the physical reality that they are standing before you. I have often thought this could be because they speak of how we perceive our world in dreams - how here is a physical embodiment in our "real" world that actually belongs to the personal realms of how places can be in our dreams. In this way ruined theme parks are particularly powerful for me as their abandonment without demolition somehow speaks of a world of lost memories - a representation of days out we haven't had, a realm of play left for the amusement of ghosts - that these ghosts somehow represent the playing of childhood we have left behind. On a recent school project with six year olds we invented imaginary friends and took these invisible creatures on a day out to the woods. I asked the children to then create what their new friends would like to do on their day out and we immediately began to build rollercoasters of twigs and leaves. It was like these bodiless creatures began to inhabit the making corporeal of what we would rather be doing than being at school - that somehow again there was a magic to theme parks. And when the day was over we left these woodland rollercoasters and fairground rides to decay at their own rate in the woods. Days later the children still talked of what their imaginary friends were doing there - as if these places were taking on a life of their own as entropy pulled them back down to mud and leaf pulp.

In her chapter entitled Abandon, Solnit says:
"A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers."

I think there is an inherent danger in the romanticisation of ruins that we forget the damage the decay of a city can wreck on its inhabitants, for example an arguably middle class preoccupation with urban exploring in the economic war zone that is the ruins of contemporary Detroit, but at the same time I think it is impossible to ignore that whatever they symbolise and physically represent, ever since the documentation of intuitive responses to ruins began in the 18th century with the Romantic poets, their appeal as a realm of poetry and dreams is indisputable. I was so pleased to read Solnit's comparison to fairy tales as I think it is in their ability to transmute reality into the realm of communication inherent in our historical folk psyche that their power could lie. That maybe there is something redemptive in how they communicate and that maybe rather than inconsiderate, ruins as a site of exploration and play is where they can become regenerative; where as the inspiration of art and dream-like ways of thinking they can open up a deeper communication between place and the people that create and pass through its memories. I think this can be seen in the playful scribbled interventions bringing lightness to the melancholy of the other photos posted - that the childlike defiance is the true spirit of such a place; is how it would like to be seen to exist now - I don't know... But I certainly think we should not underestimate the importance of the emotion of places - the power of how places make us feel as well as how they exist as a physical entity... I hope that with upcoming travel projects like The Car Boot Museum I will have the opportunity to discover the stories of these abandoned places of distant fun - the ghosts of days out past - for myself...

(Please note these are not my photos - I would of course credit them, but I cannot figure out their original sources!)