Photobook 7/17/23
Exploring the abandoned in the late-to-be mundane suburbia.
It’s been 2 years since I left this place. Enough time spent away I’ve grown nostalgia towards it. Either time, separation, or a 2 year increase in the sheer task of existing has given me a 3rd person prospective relative to my younger self.
I’m in Austin for the summer, been traveling non-stop for weeks, and headed to California in a few days. I knew this was the only chance I’d get to do something like this. Something I never got to do in my childhood.
F.M. 1431 near Cedar Park
As a child, I would explore the woods behind our house, finding the ruins of 1930s farmhouses, cisterns, cars, springs, and forts built by local deviant teenagers. I mapped every deer path or created my own. I learned how to fossil hunt here, a skill which is forever engraved in my subconscious. But I never got the chance to explore beyond my area, past the cell towers which stood on a nearby hill. Today, I was going to change that.
I always wanted to explore this place, but never had the independence to do so. I got the opportunity to reenact the best kind of dream, the dream where you find a new door in your house and explore it.
Lago Vista was built by a resort company. Which explains a lot. Ranch land was bought up in the thousands of acres with one plan, “Golf Course = Money”. From what I can gather, National Resort Communities (NRC) had no real plan for a city.
“Build it and they will come” was NRC's philosophy, plotting and building roads before people could support it. Over the years, the flatter, more accessible land grew, despite being hours away from civilization, and minutes a from a drug commune. Lago Vista eventually incorporated into a city. The now city-owned land in the hills was too expensive to build on, now sitting vacant and undisturbed for nearly 50 years.
And it’s bizarre. In a place with devastating rapid growth, destroying native habitat and increasing congestion on an already deadly road, there's a sort of apocalyptic feel to where I stood. The dream of a long dead company looking to do the same, but failing.
Lago Vista officially designated this aera as “unsuitable for development” due to the lack of utilities and land being plotted on cliffs. But you can see this changing. In some places, you can find plots with freshly cut trees, a newly installed water main, or light repaving.
Even that the term has lost all meaning and is overused, this is a liminal space. It’s caught in the transition of a 50 year old failure, and a future concrete techbro mansion.
As I explored further, signs of civilization grew completely out of sight. This would be a fantastic area for filmmakers. Off the grid, undisturbed, and hidden while simultaneously being a stone's throw from Austin.
Again, it’s hard to state how weird it this place is. You can see the rough sketches of a what would be depressing suburbia, just never conceived. The roads are here, the streets are named, there's just no one here.
The dream is over, time to head home.
