In 1976, RiverCountry opened up at Walt Disney World in Florida. By 2001, it had closed. Now, it stands–rotting and decrepit in a manner that J.G. Ballard would have approved of. These photos come from an excellent thread about River Country on Dis Boards.
It was just a waterpark, although one of the first generation of waterparks. Here are the rotting water slides:
Some fake rocks:
And a map of the whole sorry affair:
I have heard of spite fences. I have heard of architectural holdouts. But spite houses are a new thing to me.
Spite fences are built by people who want to “spite” their neighbor, building a fence that often blocks the view of the unoffending neighbor or otherwise is designed to irritate him or her.
Here is a spite fence built by wealthy businessman Charles Crocker on San Francisco’s Nob Hill to frustrate German undertaker, Nicolas Yung, who owned the smaller house and refused to sell out:
An architectural holdout is a building whose owner refuses to sell out to a larger project. New York was at one time filled with these places in the 20th century; now, not so much. A typical architectural holdout is a cottage house with a modern hotel wrapped around it.
Now, I hear of spite houses, which seem a weird combination of spite fences and holdouts.
According to Wikipedia, in its spite house entry:
At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Alameda, California, took a large portion of Charles Froling’s land to build a street. Froling had planned to build his dream house on the plot of land he received through inheritance. To spite the city and an unsympathetic neighbor, Froling built a house 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, 54 feet (16 m) long and 20 feet (6.1 m) high on the tiny strip of land left to him. The Alameda Spite House is still standing and occupied.
We see this everywhere at some point towards the latter half of the 1960s. Helvetica font runs rampant. It’s everywhere: in the LIFE copy, in the ads. It permeates other publications, as well, but rarely as much as in LIFE.
Not only that, but lower case. It’s more of that faux humility. Helvetica is a very fake-humble typeface, almost pretentious in its lack of artifice.
One feature I see again and again from the 1930s to the 1950s is the Gentlemanly Library. In so many cases, I imagine a permanent set at MGM or Warner’s where actors would sit down for their LIFE feature about Errol Flynn the Distinguished Scholar (or something). Or at least Errol the scholar when he wasn’t statutorily raping young ladies on his yacht, the Sirrocco. The Gentlemanly Library was simply a meme:
One thing that elevates this shot of Jean Hersholt and wife Via is that this does look like a real library. That award on the upper-right looks real. It looks…Danish (Hersholt was a Dane). And then there’s that book dead-center in the picture laying horizontally. Finally, those curtains look so weirdly arranged, they have to be real. Hersholt was a rarity in Hollywood, an authentically humanitarian guy who helped found the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.
Apparently, Pabst Blue Ribbon wasn’t yet the darling brand of pretentious downwardly-mobile art-types, because this advertising segment tries to put some gloss on the product. Notice the touch-up of the PBR bottles.
So what happened here. How, in the span of 19 years, did we go from this to that? The first image is from a beer ad dated October 31, 1949. The second image is from a tick spray ad dated August 9, 1968.
Most people might actually be more familiar with the 1949 image. It’s a common image…the sunny-smiling white-toothed guy with limitless confidence. It’s almost so common and familiar that we don’t see it anymore. It has become simply a meme, a symbol.
Now, look at the image from 1968. Part of what’s happening is this shift in advertising copywriting during the Sixties. We find a lot of this closed-mouth, we’re-straight-shooters posturing from advertisers and companies. So, we’ve got a black and white photo of a can of tick spray. Period. Copy says, “Sergeants. The largest selling spray flea and tick killer in the whole world. Because it works.”
Read that copy again. “…in the whole world.” “Whole” gives the copy this faux-juvenile spin, something you start to see during this period. Then that last line is understated and flat: “Because it works.” Finally, see how they aren’t capitalizing the copy? We want flat, flat, flat. Graphically, lower-case is flat. Also these are not sparkling words. No “amazing, wow, and gee” kind of words.
All of this is intentional. I imagine that some bearded, sideburned ad exec said, “Listen Phil, let’s take an understated approach to this next Sergeant’s campaign.” Phil said, “Kind of like the Volkswagen people?” And Sideburns says, “Right on, Phil.”
