Tales From Progress City

A more detailed look at one of the periods in my fictitious US Midwestern city’s history, when it hosted the Olympics in 1982, leading to a new residential subdivision next door that became famous in the late ‘80s because of a popular television show set there, plus a look at some of the other suburban areas of Progress

#jasonpettus #experimental #literary #mediamedia #project #storytelling #citybuilding #universebuilding #cityplanner #metafiction #fictitious #city #metropolis #usa #us #america #midwest #winnemac #sinclairlewis #ai #image #generator #1982 #Olympics #Games #Reagan #urbanrevitalization #olympicvillage #olympiccampus #publicpark #citybeautiful #bland #suburb #FOXtelevision #familydrama #interstate94 #suburbs #oakgrove #nilesville #wolfrivervalley #aurora #smalltown #bucolic #farmcommunity #harvester #agriculturalschool #agschool

(Right-click on any image and choose “open image in new tab” to see the full-sized version.)

I mentioned this in my last entry as well, but one of the many old versions of this Progress experimental storytelling project involved me actually building the city inside a video game called Cities: Skylines (until I actually bought and started playing the game, at which point I realized that the YouTube videos on this subject are deceiving, and that it’s actually wicked hard to learn how to play Cities: Skylines with any sophistication). Two of the things you can do in that game is build an Olympic village and also a World’s Fair campus*, so this is how those elements ended up bleeding into my official history of Progress, simply because I thought these would be fun major projects to build, along with such other interesting projects you can build in that game as an international airport, a zoo, an amusement park, a college campus, and more. (For what it’s worth, this is how a blimp public transit system ended up being part of Progress too, simply because it’s an option in Cities: Skylines as well.)

[*And just to be as clear as possible, I don’t mean that the game comes with one big ploppable campus that you can simply point and click to add; I mean that there are so many individual, specialized assets in the game at this point, that for all these kinds of projects – the airport, the Olympics, the World’s Fair, etc. – you can literally build them yourself piece by piece, first by plunking down a stadium, then a natatorium, a gymnastics arena and a tennis arena, some dorms for the athletes to stay in, etc. This is how I originally became a fan of Cities: Skylines, in fact, by watching these mindblowing obsessive fans of the game building these kinds of super-structures. One of the best, for example, is actually a city planner out in the real world too; here’s him building an international airport piece by piece in the game, and here’s him creating a highway-exit big-box superstore with complementary strip mall ringing the edges of its massive parking lot, a type of place where I spent like half my life as a teenager in ‘80s suburban Missouri. Little did I realize until I bought and tried the game that these YouTubers have put in hundreds and hundreds of hours on the game to get this good; and I’m spending those hundreds of hours on the construction of the Progress wiki, so don’t have any time left over to also become an expert at CS.]

That idea has now been abandoned, but I kept in the concept of an Olympics, because I thought this would be a delightful and complex addition to the city’s overall history. Specifically, I envisioned an alternative reality (which I call the “Progressverse”) where it was actually Progress who hosted the Olympics in the early 1980s, not Los Angeles; and to make it even clearer that this is all fiction, I changed the dates in the Progressverse so that the Olympics always fall two years ahead of the ones in real life (or two years behind if you want to think of it that way), so that Progress’s Games occur in 1982, not LA’s 1984. I thought it’d be interesting to take what really happened with those Games and apply it to Progress’s funhouse mirror reality of history; how this happening at the beginning of the Reagan era made it a real rah-rah moment for Progress’s citizens again, after a murky and dark 1970s in which widespread rioting happened in their city’s most notorious slum, former meatpacking center Slaughterhouse Row, and a newly “defunded” police force wasn’t big enough to control it. These Games came at the exact right time for all of Progress’s citizens to get deeply and profoundly behind it, and its success kicked off what we can now historically see as an uninterrupted 45-year period of constant revitalization and growth, until the tragic events of the 2028 “Judgement Day” attempted coup of the US government (but more on that in another blog entry soon).

Many people painted these coming Olympics as an attempt to recapture the magic of the highly successful 1966 World’s Fair (but more on this as well in a future blog entry); that’s why it was decided to deliberately carve out a brand-new Olympic campus out of uncivilized forest just due north of Progress proper, because this is how it had been done south of the city for the World’s Fair. (Many influential city leaders were arguing instead for the teardown of one of Progress’s several slums to build the Olympic campus, revitalizing that community and allowing the Games to happen within an urban environment, but they ultimately lost the city council vote.) It was not the first Olympics to envision its venues as one unified planned community (for example, my own fictitious version is heavily influenced by the real-life 1972 Games in Munich, which did a particularly amazing job with their campus), but was still one of the early ones; so mine is deliberately designed to not be too terribly slick or sophisticated as you might see ones now in the 2020s, but rather something that feels very real to the 1982 of its times.

This produced some interesting results over at the Google AI image generator while I was playing around with images for this. For example, if I just said “sports stadium,” I most often got these very contemporary, very sleek steel-and-glass things; but if I specifically said “a sports stadium built in 1982,” I very often got the same kind of image back, even during unrelated sessions, which is this one you’re seeing here, a circular stadium with one of those canvas roofs that only partially covers the inside. These were huge in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when I was a kid, so it doesn’t surprise me that Google’s AI image generator gives me variations on these over and over. This is the Games’ main gigantic signature stadium; and in the usual style of Progress’s far-left liberals always giving names of famous intellectuals to public works, this was named the Ada Lovelace Stadium after the Victorian-Age proto-computing pioneer.

And then here’s another shot of the entire campus, which highlights a common problem I’m having right now with using Google’s free AI image generator just to play around with ideas; their software contains no way of uploading your own existing image and then telling the bot, “Base your new image on this one.” It’s my understanding that the 800-pound gorilla right now of this burgeoning industry, Midjourney, does have this ability, but that it’s an expensive service (more per month than most streaming services charge). So, until I get serious enough about this project that I want to actually start spending money on it (which likely would coincide with me opening a WordPress account, using a specialized theme to turn the blog into a wiki, and start actually publishing the full project online for others to start using as story inspirations), I’m sticking with just the free and somewhat limited service at Google, where you can’t specifically request that one image look like another.

And then here’s a close-up of the natatorium, where water-based sports like swimming and diving take place, with now Lovelace Stadium seen in the background. Again, the goal here was to be cutting-edge for 1982, but it still remain a 1982 building when all is said and done, and I’m impressed how nuanced a bot can get this as long as you’re feeding it the right prompts. This is a really important part of the process, I’ve discovered, that you basically have the same relationship to the bot as a movie director has with a conceptual artist, where you say, “Hmm, give me this thing,” then they draw it and you say, “Oh, I forgot to tell you about this part,” then they add it and you say, “Oh, but make it a little smaller, and change it to this color,” etc. Every image I share on this blog has gone through 10 to 20 iterations of prompt editing and refining to produce the image you’re seeing here. Sometimes I can never get a satisfactory image, and I just have to give up on the idea of illustrating that part of Progress’s history altogether. But that’s okay; the story, the text, is the important part of this storytelling project, while the AI images are just fun little supplements that can come and go as needed.

The citizens of Progress voted in favor of authorizing the Games under the same provision that had led to the approval of the World’s Fair back in 1966, that it be turned into a free public park afterwards, which is exactly what happened. It’s morphed and changed over the years, as was its deliberate design; for example, the athlete dorms were always meant to be temporary structures, and afterwards their footprint was converted into an outdoor amphitheater for live concerts and Broadway musicals (officially known as the “Olympic Muny”), while in the 2010s a world-class rock-climbing arena was built, with seating for 2,000. Part of the long-term strategy of the park has always been to maintain world-class facilities in as many sports as possible, so that they can more easily attract the very lucrative national championships that happen in these sports every year; and indeed, to “this day” (the 2040s in the Progressverse), a mini-Olympics gets held on the campus every single summer, when something like twenty different sports all have their national championships here at once, which coincides with a series of famous musicians performing at the amphitheater.

Meanwhile, just a year later, a private developer totally unrelated to the Olympics built a bland subdivision next door and called it “Olympic Park;” this was before the age of global brand awareness and an overly litigious IOC, so the developer basically got away with it. A classic suburban community in the ‘80s and ‘90s mold, it became the source of bitter Generation X ironic humor that a community with such a grand name would be such a lackluster place to ever live. And indeed, in 1989, a relatively new FOX television network would try to capitalize on Generation X trends by setting a weekly family drama in this neighborhood, with the good-looking teen leads constantly complaining about this ironic location themselves when they weren’t busy loving and living their lives. “Olympic Park” soon became a national catchphrase for this Gen X ironic disgust over generic faceless suburbs, and references to it started showing up in indie pop songs and festival movies.

This in fact gives us a good excuse to talk a bit about the surrounding suburban areas of the Progress greater metropolitan area, for there’s a much larger and more diverse set of communities around the region than it might seem at first, since I’ve been concentrating so much so far on telling tales from the inner city. Olympic Park, for example (both the planned community and the Olympic campus next door), are at the extreme western terminus of Interstate 94, which makes a generally straight line straight east across the (fictitious) state of Winnemac and to the other big metropolis on the other edge of the state, Zenith (yes, as in Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith). This highway is supposed to be dotted with the kinds of suburban communities like I actually grew up in during the ‘70s and ‘80s in a city close to St. Louis, made up of subdivisions and strip malls, anchored by a big traditional mall or a big-box campus right off the highway, but otherwise mostly hooked together through that central interstate holding it all together (I-70 when it comes to my Missouri childhood).

Here's a very typical one, for example, called Oak Grove in my universe, but that is directly based on St. Charles, Missouri where I grew up. This will be a tier-3 collection of wiki entries to get around to writing, probably not coming until 2026; but I did want to carve out some space for its existence, because I do think I’ll probably end up visiting this area’s geography and history in much more depth down the road, after I get the main city better filled in.

This string of suburbs, however, is different from the string of small towns that run north to south out around 30 miles from Progress’s inner city, due east; those are instead the towns of the Wolf River Valley, and have their own unique histories that are just as long as Progress’s. The seven of them that stretch up and down the Wolf River were in fact started by the exact fleeing Transcendentalists from the east coast and Socialists from Europe’s failed revolutions who founded Progress, in the exact same years that Progress was as well; it’s just that the lake-facing, railroad-adjoining Progress was able to quickly build up fishing and meatpacking industries that suddenly made the wealth of that town explode, turning it into a world-class metropolis and leaving all these small towns along the valley quickly behind. That’s just fine, though, to the locals who live in this area, which is heavily inspired by both Chicago’s Fox River Valley and New York’s Hudson River Valley; like those two real-life regions, the denizens of such Wolf River Valley towns as Aurora (pictured above) are a mix of long-time natives, greentech millionaires, Libertarian preppers, and aging intellectuals who burned out on city life. There are all kinds of story ideas to set among the quaint, historic, picturesque small towns of the Wolf River Valley; for example, I’ve actually been tinkering around with setting a romance novel here in Aurora, a second-chance story about a middle-aged former hipster city artist who ends up opening a respected gallery for industrial artists out of an abandoned warehouse in this small town, and runs into one of her old city ‘90s lovers from “the scene” at an opening there one night.

To the southeast of Progress but not all the way out to Wolf River is the uber-suburb, the one that started them all, the notorious Nilesville. Constructed just after World War Two, it was the main destination of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers from the specialized fishing and meatpacking industries, who up to now had had to live in the unpleasant conditions of the tenement Slaughterhouse Row and Trout Alley neighborhoods, who after the war suddenly had lots of extra money and good credit with the bank, and could afford to move their entire families out to the brand-new, pleasant, leafy suburbs. That’s exactly what a million families from Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark and others did in these years, just as millions of them did in real life in places like Chicago, which earned these years the awkward moniker of the “white flight” era. Regardless of the language being used here, the result was an entire community that built up outside of Chicago in its own right, which started developing its own culture, institutions, habits, places to go out, etc., until “now” (in the 2040s, remember) it’s a highly urbanized area unto itself, whose westernmost boundary sort of bleeds in with the ever-expanding outward boundary of Progress City proper.

And then the last main metropolitan area (for now) is way down due south of the city, the main location of most of the metro area’s farmland. This is a tier-two area of the storytelling project, something I’ll be filling out in detail next year, but basically there’s a small farming town called Harvester located down there; Progress University Agricultural School (also called the “South Campus”), a much more conservative college than the one up north in the city; then trailing off on its very southernmost edge with the entrance to John Muir National Park, yet another long-term outcome of the tragic events of Judgement Day, which we’ll talk about in a future blog entry.

Next time, however, why don’t we talk some about Turtle Bay? It’s both a neighborhood in Progress and an architectural style that was invented there, which is a 50/50 split between the long Euclidean lines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style and the elegant, surreal curves of European Art Nouveau (think Gaudi in Spain, or the Paris Metro stations). That way we can talk about several things at once, including how I’m trying to build in artistic movements and cultural touchstones to encourage real-life artists to come in afterwards and actually set their own stories in the Progressverse (Turtle Bay is supposed to have been the home of the city’s first writing community, which focused on noir stories in the 1910s that had strong supernatural elements of a conspiracy-theory nature), the fascinating “what if” nature of taking two things from the same time period and mashing them together (what if Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany built a mansion together?), and a lot more. Talk with you again then.