The Town That Lives Online Only
Elgin Park is a small city that doesn't exist. But online, through a series of photographs created from tiny models in the house of one Massachusetts man, the time-frozen industrial town of the mid-'60s has come to life.
"The memories, and the images on the Flickr photo-sharing site, belong to Michael Paul Smith. They’ve made his town' a tourist destination, attracting about 20 million views, all arriving through cyberspace, since January.
You won’t find Mr. Smith in Elgin Park — in a corporal sense, he resides in Winchester, Mass., just north of Boston — nor is the town on any map. It is not based on Elgin, Ill., or any other Elgin. Rather, Elgin Park is an imaginary melting pot of a steel mill town where the calendar is frozen at 1964.
Mr. Smith posted his first Elgin Park images about two years ago; for some time, they were attracting only about 200 views a day. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear — someone in the Flickr community clicked on the slide show feature and then sent the link to others — the images began to spread virally in January. At times, daily page views approached 750,000, Mr. Smith said."
Using a series of die-cast model cars from the mid-20th Century and a skill with modelmaking, Smith has created a town.
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Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University
Feb 10, 2012
www.flickr.com
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Cute, but...
Planetizen is hardly the appropriate forum for a celebration of everything wrong with mid-20th Century America, namely, all those cars and all that low-density sprawl that tiny, fictional Elgin Park represents.