California City is a city in the desert that never came to be. But much of its skeleton remains. A recent tour explored the ghost of this unbuilt city.
The tour was led by BLDGBLOG writer Geoff Manaugh as part of Atlas Obscura's Obscura Day, which explored bizarre sites throughout the world. GOOD's Alissa Walker tagged along and reflects on the tour's emphasis on documenting the place as a possible model for historic preservation.
"As Manaugh noted on his blog, Atlas Obscura was the equivalent of both a geographic expedition and a photographic flash mob: "Together we'll produce the largest archive of contemporary California City photographs that exist anywhere in the world." There were certainly a lot of really nice photos taken out in the desert on Saturday. But as I thought about it, these hyper-local concentrations of images could help bring Atlas Obscura out of the business of exploring of weird-and-wonderful places and into a global preservation movement aided by a tech-savvy generation of adventurers."
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FULL STORY: Obscura Day: Preservation By Expedition
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Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
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Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
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