3/25/2023 0 Comments Hidden ghost town nw usa![]() Until it was silenced, as it would be abruptly. The sound would be so subtly ambient, and increase in volume so gradually, that someone walking through would not even notice. He was working on a piece that would be installed in a public plaza or park, with multiple speakers hidden in the landscaping. His studio was filled with electronics and little speakers all over the place. I can't remember the artist's name, but his medium was environmental sound. Some years ago a friend took me to visit an artist acquaintance in a loft in lower Manhattan. It reminds me of the moody music that accompanied David Lynch's classic, creepy-but-fascinating TV series from the 1980s, Twin Peaks. Indeed it is, and the site is made all the more powerfully evocative by a haunting soundtrack composed and performed by a band called The Besnard Lakes. "It's like a scrapbook with superpowers." I read about it on Very Short List, who wrote that they 'can't think of a narrative-based Web object that's taken better advantage of the medium.' Indeed, this project really shows the potential of new media to chronicle the human experience. It was authored by the creative team formerly behind the venerable Adbusters magazine. But I've been haunted by this document since I first saw it yesterday. "Have you ever heard of Pine Point, a small mining town that once existed in the Northwest Territories of Canada? Me neither. The best description I have seen is on a site called Delineation of Design: It's not a film in the usual sense because it engages the user directly. Welcome to Pine Point is a captivating, interactive, web-based documentary. As Pine Point's Wikipedia entry notes, "all buildings were removed or demolished, and today the site is completely abandoned, although there is still evidence of the street layout." If you visit the folksy town-history site Pine Point Revisited or navigate your way through a hypnotic website called Welcome to Pine Point (about which more in a minute), you'll meet characters familiar to towns and high schools everywhere: popular kids and intellectual loners jocks and cheerleaders kids in a rock band guys who got in fights and the pretty girls who liked them for it.Īfter the Cominco mine closed in 1988, the town no longer had a means of existence. It had the usual small-town businesses, an elementary school and a combined middle/high school. There had been a few buildings on the site, but the town as most remember it was built in the early 1960s by a joint venture between the government of Canada and the Cominco mining company. It exists today only as vacant streets, a cemetery, a basement of an old hotel that no longer exists above ground, and the memories of its former inhabitants. A relatively normal small town for about 25 years, Pine Point simply disappeared in the late 1980s, after the local mining operation shut down. That's not the case with Pine Point, once in a remote part of Canada's Northwest Territories. Both have thousands of residents today, if far fewer than they might wish. But those towns never disappeared altogether. Salton City, California, a resort that never quite happened, also comes to mind. More recently, I have learned and written about some "almost" ghost towns of our own time, such as Braddock, Pennsylvania, mostly deserted after the factories closed but now attempting a bold comeback. They were relics of a distant past I could conjure only in my imagination. They showed up in western movies, generally as dusty old places deserted after a 19th-century heyday during a gold rush or something equally exotic-seeming to a kid in North Carolina. ![]() ![]() Like most people in my generation, I heard about ghost towns as a kid.
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