Town / Community
This is a residential development in central Idaho, established and promoted by the notorious survivalist and decorated veteran Bo Gritz. Since 1994, a few hundred people have bought lots and built homes, and moved in trailers. Called a "covenant community", most, but not all its denizens share an...
Located at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, Alviso is an old port town with a dried up marina. Over a hundred years ago, Alviso was San Jose's shipping port, and after railways made the port less vital, it became a major cannery town. The Bayside Cannery, still standing, is said to have been...
A small town in south eastern Idaho dubbed as the "first city in the world to be lit by atomic power," from the nearby National Reactor Testing Station, on July 17, 1955. That reactor is now part of the nuclear complex at the Idaho National Engineering Lab. (Moorpark, California also makes this...
A partially-flooded trailer community with a few hundred homes, on the east shore of the Salton Sea. Once a popular water skiing and fishing location, Bombay Beach has suffered a decline, due to the rising lake levels, the increasing salinity of the Sea, and related pollution and bad publicity. It...
Burning Man is an annual festival that takes place on the vast playa of the Black Rock Desert, in northern Nevada. It typically attracts over ten thousand people, and has been called the best party in the world by self-proclaimed eurotrash veterans of the global party scene. Features include rave...
This is the Disney Corporation's first residential real estate development. The town of Celebration is planned for a population of 20,000, and is more than half-way there. It sits on 4,900 acres of Disney property across the interstate from Disney World. Beyond the village is a wetland that will...
The town of Marfa, at the southern edge of West Texas, has been transformed by the presence of the artist Donald Judd, who established the Chinati Foundation there, along with his residence and studio complexes. Judd, who died in 1994, was an internationally known minimal artist, who turned more...
The town of Concrete in the foothills of the northern Cascades once housed the largest concrete plants in the state. Nearly half of the concrete for the Grand Coulee Dam (the largest concrete structure in the world) came from here, as well as material for other Washington dam projects. The last...
The DuPont de Nemours Company operated an explosives plant at this site for 70 years, until it closed in 1975, after which the property was sold to the Weyerhaeuser Corporation. Both companies are involved in the clean up of the contaminated plant site, and only a few outbuildings have been left...
A community where carnival and circus performers with unusual physical features (once called "sideshow freaks") have been coming to winter and retire since the 1940's. Though most of 7,000 residents of the town of "Gibtown", as locals call it, are not anatomically challenged, there are a large...
The town of Goldfield once had almost 20,000 residents, during the height of the gold mining boom, and now it has a couple hundred. The surrounding landscape is a churned up mining area, littered with tailings piles, and remains of equipment and structures, underlain by hundreds of miles of tunnels...
Hamilton Field is the oldest of the recent base closure and conversion sites around the Bay, and an indication, perhaps, of the decades it can take for such redevelopment projects to come to fruition. Constructed in 1931 as a bomber base, it became a refugee center during the Vietnam war, and was...
Now just a ranch along a remote highway, Iosepa was a community of over 200 Polynesians, who settled in this desert valley in 1889, to be closer to the center of the Mormon church. A few years later, leprosy broke out in the community, leading to the formation of Utah's only known leper colony. By...
Lake Havasu is a lot of things. It is a reservoir on the Colorado River created by the Parker Dam, and it is a point of origin for the Colorado Aqueduct and Central Arizona Project, which bring water to Los Angeles and Phoenix, respectively. It has become a major resort area, with green golf...
The transformation of Leavenworth from a functional logging and railroad town into a Bavarian style village took place in the 1960's, and its success in attracting tourists has stimulated the creation of other "theme villages" in the Northwest. The Bavarian architectural style, which was deemed...
Lake Sacajawea Park is part of the first master-planned city built in the Northwest, the town of Longview, founded in 1923 by the lumber baron R. A. Long. Long operated the lumber mills along the nearby Columbia River, and built this city for the mill workers. Designed according to a classical...
A company town, built originally by the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company, later bought by Kennecott, and which is now largely abandoned. Headquarters for Kennecott's Nevada operations and a massive smelter that processed ore from the copper mines at Ruth, west of Ely. The smelter's 750-foot stack...
Piles of rubble surrounded by 12-foot barbed-wire topped fences are part of what you'll find at the ruins of the Mount Carmel compound where the Branch Davidian sect, under the guidance of David Koresh, was brought to its apocalypse in 1993.
New Llano is the site of the a Socialist community, said to be the longest surviving socialist community in American history. It operated for over 20 years, from 1917 to around 1937. The community was originally called Llano del Rio, and was established in the Antelope Valley, a desert area north...
Port Costa is a little town along the southern shore of Carquinez Strait, a remnant from a century ago, when this was one of the major grain ports of the world. Nearly four miles of wharves once lined the straits here, after the completion of the rail line through to neighboring Martinez made this...
The New Vrindaban community was founded in 1968 as part of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) founded by Srila Prabhupada. It is a spiritual center and pilgrimage site for Hare Krishnas and other Hindus and, along with the nearby Palace of Gold, a tourist attraction for...
Called a "New Age ghost town", Rajneeshpuram is an abandoned north-central Oregon town, vacated when the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh left, after his 1985 deportation back to India. In about ten years at the location, the 6,000 residents of the town had created almost a million square...
The Jefferson County Historical Society Farnsworth TV and Pioneer Museum has a collection dedicated to Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of Televion, on display, since this was his home town. Farnsworth developed the idea of picture tube telvision while in high school.
A complex of above ground and underground buildings in remote southwest Montana, constructed by the religious organization known as the Church Universal and Trimphant (CUT). Clare Prophet is the leader of the organization which is said to have a few thousand members and is preparation for...
A small Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, an isolated valley between Dugway Proving Ground and the West Desert Hazardous Industry Area. Seven households contain all of the approximately 30 Native Americans that live on the reservation, located a few miles south of Iosepa, the Polynesian...
This town was established in 1934 to house some of the office workers of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government agency that employs 27,000 people and is the largest energy producer in the United States. The TVA is a total topographical modification program, mostly completed, to...
The headquarters for a Shoshone Indian land reclaiming movement. Members of the Dann Family, whose ranch is nearby, have been arrested in conflicts with federal officials over ownership of what the Shoshone claim as ancestral lands, stolen from them by the federal government. A trailer in the town...