Neighborhood Focus: Lake Winnemac
A more detailed look at one of the neighborhoods in my fictitious US Midwestern city, in this case a large lake in the forest that’s been the home for weekend camping, hiking and beach visits since the Victorian Age, but has recently taken a turn for the more modern with the introduction of a high-speed rail line there, and shadowy projects by a mysterious corporation
#jasonpettus #experimental #literary #mediamedia #project #storytelling #citybuilding #universebuilding #cityplanner #metafiction #fictitious #city #metropolis #usa #us #america #midwest #winnemac #sinclairlewis #ai #image #generator #lakewinnemac #victorianage #wildneress #getaway #citybeautiful #progressives #steamtrain #citymanager #mansion #caves #supernatural #horror #creature #lightning #highspeedrail #publictransit #greentech #farmersmarket #michelinrestaurant #neptune #compound #skyhigh #blimp #station #conspiracytheory
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To make things easier for myself, I’ve surrounded the Progress metropolitan area with just a vast state forest that lasts for hundreds of miles; the fictional state of Winnemac where it’s located, after all, is simply real-life Michigan, so I can get away with basically making everything around Progress an endless grove of trees. About 50 miles southeast from the city proper is a large picturesque lake and a chain of rocky caves beyond, which the locals have unimaginatively named “Lake Winnemac,” and it happens to be the destination of the very first public transit train that ever existed in the area. It was supposedly the brainchild of the large and vocal “City Beautiful” movement that existed in the city at the time, a real-life movement from these days that campaigned in the Victorian Age for such city amenities as parks, libraries, playgrounds and schools, all done with naturalistic landscaping that mirrors the real sights of nature, not the Euclidean structures of formal European and British gardens. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the real-life Frederick Law Olmsted belonged to the City Beautiful movement, and he designed (among other things) Central Park in New York and the 1893 World’s Fair grounds in Chicago; and those two massively influential projects basically determined the shape and look of public parks for the 150 or so years since.
The train line there and back cleverly makes a loop around the entire lake, far back enough from the waterfront to be about a 20 minute walk (about one mile), but in a way so that you can walk in the opposite direction as well and be all alone in the middle of the woods in another 20 minutes too. This allowed a massive amount of city dwellers to be able to come out to the lake on the weekends, yet still fundamentally have a solo or single-family adventure if that’s what they want, where everyone can get away from their smoggy factories and just stretch out and enjoy themselves for a few days. Rough Riders and Boy Scouts often went on rugged camping trips in the area, and it was considered a modern miracle that you could then just hop on a comfortable train come Sunday afternoon and be back at your home an hour later.
It was such a well-done system that virtually no changes were made to it for something like 75 years; then when the city finally did think about modernizing the line, nostalgia for the old 1800s steam locomotives created a public outcry. To “this day” (the 2040s in my fictitious universe, aka the “Progressverse”), it’s still these old Victorian steam trains that take people back and forth from the city to the lake and back, and it’s a hugely popular part of the city that locals of all ages continue to feel a lot of love for.
And to be clear, there have been people living out in the Lake Winnemac area since right after the city began; that includes around a dozen summer mansions by the area’s first wave of Swedish immigrant millionaires (who, as we discussed yesterday, all got rich from the extremely successful fishing industry that built up here), but most notoriously includes the City Manager Mansion, the focus of a fanciful conspiracy theory that’s been around for over a hundred years. The mansion was built only two years after the city was founded, back in 1847 by the very first city manager; he then set up a generous trust that would continue to fund the house’s upkeep, and donated it to the city on the grounds that it would be the home for every city manager who comes in the future. And most curiously, he built it right up against the entrance of one of the caves that dot the rocky large hills just past the lake, in a way so that there’s no way of accessing the cave except through the back door of the home.
It's true that the city managers of Progress have all been reticent over the years… It’s true that they’ve all vaguely looked like each other… It’s true that there are never any public events at the mansion, and that hardly anyone knows what it looks like on the inside… And it’s true that the city managers over the years have managed to pull off giant events and construction projects with remarkable ease and very little effort, such as the 1966 World’s Fair, the 1982 Olympics, etc. Could it be, the conspiracy theorists say, that it’s actually the same immortal being who’s been the city manager this entire time, kept alive in an unholy unnatural state by a supernatural creature who lives in the caves and that the city manager has trapped back there with his house?
This, of course, is a bit of an inside joke to acknowledge me as the official puppetmaster of Progress; more specifically, it originally made reference to the fact that in an early version of this project, I was actually going to built Progress out into a navigable urban area, using the video game Cities: Skylines 2. That’s where the idea of adding a World’s Fair and an Olympics to Progress’s history first came from, because those are two things you can actually build in that game; and what you can basically do is turn the game’s ticking clock off while building the entire campus, so that to the residents it looks like they went to sleep on a Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning when they woke up, BOOM, there was a World’s Fair in their city. I was really tickled by this idea, and loved the concept that the person in their world responsible for it is some kind of dark wizard possessing supernatural powers; and although I eventually abandoned the idea of building Progress in Cities: Skylines, I was tickled enough by the idea of the immortal evil city manager that I left this bit of the lore in. Plus, hey, it gives yet more fodder for story ideas (as I’ve talked about before, I like to think of Progress as my chance to build another Gotham City, and that ultimately I hope to one day convince a bunch of artists to set their own Batman stories in it); plus I’ve built the idea into the fabric of the various artistic movements and communities that exist in Progress over the decades, like the noir and crime authors in the 1910s who lived and worked in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, or the proto sci-fi authors of 1920s Emerald Coast, to the cyberpunks of the 1990s and eventually The New Ones of the 2040s. A heavy element in every one of these communities was a communal obsession with particularly dark and clever conspiracy theories, basically a reflection of my love for the subject combined with me trying to inspire artists to write their own stories of this type set in these Progress locations.
So anyway, for a long time Lake Winnemac remained the way it was from the Victorian Age; the last stop of a sleepy one-hour steam locomotive ride, in order to have a weekend out in the wilderness. But that all changed in the 2010s, when the Neptune Corporation decided to build one of their brand-new “Lightning” high-speed rail lines out to the lake. As we discussed in the entry on pink zones, the trillion-dollar tech corporation decided to build a new world headquarters on the outskirts of Progress, and really wanted one of those “pink zone” designations that would make them exempt from all local laws, in return for providing their own security, fire department, electricity, water, infrastructure, etc. It was an open secret that the company simply purchased their pink zone designation from the city council by designing and constructing the massive new light-rail system stretching from one edge of the metropolitan area to the other, then donating it all to the city government once finished.
The station was placed far back from the lake, so to not spoil the view; and it was married to a food and entertainment district underneath it, all of it new-agey and greentech in nature. A permanent farmer’s market was available, as well as the one and only restaurant in the entire Progress area to have a Michelin star, famous for their “farm to table” dishes that rotate on a daily basis. It essentially created a mini-community of its own, apart from the campers and bathers from the city down at the lake, especially when tied to the neat and tidy 20-minute ride in from the city when you take the Lightning (and with free WiFi to boot).
Why go to all this trouble in the middle of nowhere? Well, the conspiracy theorists again explain, that’s because the Neptune Corporation also very quietly bought up a huge tract of land very close by, and have with a lot of secrecy built a walled and fortified compound there where all their hundreds of executives are given free modern upper-class homes as a free perk of their job. This is yet another one of the odd and suspicious details that surround the modern Neptune, who as we discussed yesterday started as yet another small tech company in the Trout Alley neighborhood in the 1990s, but then moved into gaming chips right at the correct time for gaming chips to explode, so that they’re now a trillion-dollar company in the 2020s. Their eccentric founder, Jasper Quinn, is prone to bizarre experiments and conspiratorial behavior, with this infamously private community being a prime example of that, with virtually no one outside of Neptune’s circles knowing what exactly the inside of this space looks like or what exactly goes on there. Although the Lightning station is far enough away from the lakefront to make it kind of a pain for pedestrians, it’s just a little hop away from the Neptune walled compound, and the conspiracy-minded will tell you this is because Neptune always meant for this line to just be a private conduit to work and back for their executives anyway.
This conspiracy solidified even further a few years later, when Neptune announced that they were also going to build an expensive blimp public transit system as well and donate it to the city, this one mainly being a tourism revenue generator that only makes five stops across the entire metropolitan area. So what are the odds that one out of these mere five stops just happens to be on the other far edge of this Neptune executive compound, theoretically open to the general public but with it being such a pain to get there by most other means, really only used by Neptune’s employees as a fast and easy way to go directly to work and back each day. Back in the ‘80s, the city’s community of cyberpunk writers predicted that one day corporations would become their own autonomous city-states, like tiny nations unto themselves; are we finally now in the 2020s seeing the first attempt by a corporation to do so? That’s what the latest generation of genre writers, computer hackers, and general ne’er-do-wells are asking these days, and the answers are troubling.
Next time, a closer look at the 1982 Olympics which served as a Reagan-era shot in the arm to the city’s esteem and spirit, after getting beaten down during the grimy and dark countercultural age, which saw widespread riots across the city and the eventual establishment of the hippie-friendly Haven Freecommunity. We’ll also look at the Olympic Park suburb that was built next door, which famously became a cultural catchphrase among Generation Xers for bland cookie-cutter suburbs, because of the hit family drama on FOX in those years set in this planned community; and that will get us into a brief discussion of the I-94 Corridor and the suburban world outside of Progress proper.