Bodie: A City of Abandoned Dreams | Lost LA | KCET

Intro I wanted to learn more about how dreams from the past are embedded in our built environment today in both bustling cities and abandoned ghost towns so I tracked down Christopher Hawthorne formerly los angeles times architecture critic and currently LA's first chief design officer outside his City Hall office so ghost towns are a pretty Ghost Towns prominent feature of the American West certainly of California too what is it that what do you think it is about ghost towns that make them so alluring I think the idea of a dream that's been dashed and to see the kind of physical remnants of that idea kind of fill us up philosophical or utopian idea that's been abandoned or shattered to see some kind of physical or architectural remnant of that somehow is attractive to people because they think their architectural ruins stand in for you know whole complicated history that people can read sort of through the architecture so I think that's part of it it's probably not so different from Roman or Greek you know from classical ruins the the role that the ghost town plays in American and particularly in Western cultural history there's no better example of the Bodie romantic ideal of the ghost town in Bodie California located high up in the Sierra Bodie had a similar population to LA in the 1870s and similarly ambitious dreams and a lot more gold in my search to understand bodis past I came upon a photo album that paints an intimate picture of daily ordinary life in Bodie before the ghost moved in they provide a stark contrast to the bodhi you see today [Music] bori was a miner he came here from who keeps in New York various plays on the Gold Rush name water - Bodie wait - Bodie things of that sort and they came here for the California Gold Rush of 18-49 over the course of about the next 10 years or so the gold on the west slope is is kind of played out all the easy gold has been gotten a lot of those miners they start heading back east over the crest of the Sierra and a couple of guys one of those being a man named William Bodie he winds up he and his partner they wind up here in the fall of 1859 and they were heading from mown oval or to a town of to our east north and east here called Aurora which was a silver camp in Nevada at the time and they were moving from point A to point B came up discovered gold here in fact I don't know if you can pan that way but just surely if you see the water tank on the hill up here just below that is where the original strike was the gold here in Bodie unfortunately mr. Bodie he and his partner they go to town to get supplies they're coming back to town early in the fall and they're met with a very fierce high sierra nasty early season snowstorm at which point mr. Bodie he succumbs to the cold and they don't find him until spring and so he would he would never realize the town that was named in his honor the town of Bodie in Bodie they found gold and silver sand around a million and a half ounces of gold 15 to 16 million ounces of silver you'd probably look at it maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars today from about 1878 to about 1883 the population here fluctuated he was as many as eight to ten thousand people at one point that was kind of the height of the of the boom times and of course eight to ten thousand people here in 1880 would have made it one of the biggest cities in the state of California at the time but it was it was a thriving for real community but it was a very violent place people died here regularly and eventually so did the town but its spirit lives on Arrested Decay bori is really fascinating for a number of reasons because it's it's so fundamentally different from nearly any other historic site anywhere in the world and that is because of its foundational concept called arrested decay because Bodi was a collection of about a hundred and twenty ramshackle falling down buildings with hundreds and hundreds of abandoned objects littered around inside and so from the very beginning from the very beginning they developed this concept called arrested decay where nothing would ever be restored or returned to newness the buildings in Bodie are kept standing but they're still leaning looking like they're about to fall over so it was one of the first places in the United States to be identified as a ghost town labeled a ghost town and touristed as a ghost town bodis a-- is a real wonderful story of life and death in early westward migration to California and in the early history of the United States 140 hundred fifty years ago things were very difficult in the West California and that being here was not easy it took very Hardy diligent strong-willed people to make this place happen and that's one of the things that makes this magic that makes Bodie work is because it's real because it's what people call authentic because all the stuff was really left there all the buildings were really there nothing is fake and because of that then when people look in through the buildings and they think this was somebody's bed this was their chair and it's broken these were their curtains and they're tattered then they see the lives of people in the past and what they look at is they're looking at the lives of ordinary people in the past regular people like ourselves regular people like themselves so it's a very powerful experience to look into the perceived past and see yourself reflected in the mirror arrested decay is an interesting approach to historical preservation one that's maintained bori structures interiors and relevance long after the last miners moved away