"... safe, clean, aesthetically appealing ..."

Calhoun, Georgia, has provided spaces of play since the inception of the town. A park managed by the Women's Club stretched parallel to Wall Street (main street) in the 1800's. Spectators gathered at the fairgrounds and wild-ish gardens of Salacoa. One of these early spaces, Amakanata, is still intact. And strikingly, both the Calhoun Recreation Department (the "Rec") and a new downtown park mimic this older space's design. These three spaces of play all rest on architectures and arrangements which privilege nostalgia while simultaneously providing gathering spaces in which that nostalgia can be challenged.

The first picture, from Amakanata, shows the remnants of a once-lively park. A quaint stone bridge leads from one area of the lake to another; earthen berms line the lake and provide (prescribe) walkways among marshy grounds. Groves of trees and staircases attest to bathers and waders. In the foreground is a square fountain which was probably added at a later date when the lake functioned as a fish hatchery. The cracked sign on the right reads, "Amakanata: Danger in Swimming," a remnant which reveals one of the uses to which this space was put. Picnickers, daytrippers, and families traveled to Amakanata to relax from their jobs as professionals, cotton mill workers, orchard workers, and laborers.

The second picture is of the newest recreational space in Calhoun, the downtown park and bandstand. Finished within the last five years, this landscaped space includes colorful and vivid sculpture, a fountain, a bandstand, open spaces for play, and benches for resting. While the downtown park is full and overflowing during Friday nights when musical groups give concerts, the park is empty most of the time. The elements of Amakanta show clearly: fountain, prescribed places for walking and playing, and a pavilion/bandstand. One reading of this space is similar to that Weinstein gives for Disneyland, a recreation of an earlier, romanticized space. Marling would add that the tension between the 'real' uses of the downtown and the 'almost-real', managed experience of this park is what gives it some of its public power for townspeople.

The third picture is of the "Rec," a space which includes ballfields, playgrounds, picnic facilities, basketball and tennis courts, and a swimming pool tucked into a bend of the Oothcalooga Creek, in which visitors fish and play. This image shows the large pavilion which hosts family reunions, casual lunches, Girl Scout meetings, and corporate employee appreciation days. The gray memorial in the center of the image discusses a community member who was key in establishing the Rec (the pavilion was destroyed in a tornado in 2003, and the memorial put up when it was rebuilt). Also visible are old oaks and walking paths. All of these elements hearken back to Amakanata's design and purpose. The sign at the foreground, however, reveals the ways in which the uses of the space are in conflict with a nostalgic ideology of the space. The sign indicating that no soccer should be played in the large open spaces at the Rec (which have hosted such play as frisbee, football, catch, horseshoes, and many others) directly points to the recent emergence of a Latino/a population in the town which is in conflict with the traditional definitions of use for this space.

All three of these spaces of play shift the conception of "play" from child to adult (or at least child and adult). Yet, like Disneyland, they draw on turn-of-the-century nostalgia for "safe, clean, aesthetically appealing" places (Weinstein 132)--which is currently being challenged by a cultural demographic with a different conception of "play."