Author: Ian Fraser

by Jeff Dahlberg

During my many walking excursions around the SODO area I became curious about the spray-painted hieroglyphics and cryptic designations scrawled on sidewalks and roads wherever I happened to be. Their presence can be seen everywhere and yet they blend into the cityscape as though they belong there and have always been there.

I started to wonder about the purpose of this visual noise and couldn’t imagine anyone being able to decipher their meaning. To me they were not unlike a doctor’s bad penmanship found on virtually every prescription ever written for me.

I let my mind wander while imagining a team of city workers adorned with florescent orange vests at 4 a.m., arming themselves with various colors of spray paint and mounting a city utility van to begin the journey to make their mark on the territory. (I have to imagine it because I have never seen anyone actually do this.)

I started researching online and discovered that these writings have a very important purpose in our community mostly centered around public safety.

After disasters that have happened in the past like cutting into gas lines, killing dozens of people and engulfing entire city blocks in explosive flames, the American Public Works Association stepped in to develop uniform color codes for the temporary marking of underground utilities.

Part of me wonders if this a scam to make people think the city is hard at work, maintaining and improving the neighborhood infrastructure. I’ve personally woken up to find my street and sidewalk look like it was attacked by a school bus full of children brandishing spray cans. Yet as the weeks and months pass by, the graffiti gradually fades, and I realize that no work was ever done. But I guess I feel safer.

by Gisela Romero

Colonial Drive crosses the city of Orlando and leaves it to go from coast to coast. It is a large avenue that observes buildings, businesses, abundance, people in motion, and the loneliness of unpopulated places open to a not-yet-polluted sky by the day-to-day madness of growing places.

Colonial Drive runs from west to east, or vice versa, until you reach the sea. If this avenue opened its arms, it would touch the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other side and would encompass many shades of blue and many multicolored sunrises and sunsets.

This segment of Colonial Drive that I am covering in this text is in the east, on the way to Titusville.

I found an empty supermarket, it is strange to see a building that at some point fed people, completely closed, maybe at night the shelves are hugged so they don’t get cold, or they are organizing a protest to be filled with food again. On the left side of the road, what was a gas station is now a solitary structure, cars come and go, and she greets them from the emptiness of her skeleton. An aged roof appeared, once it covered auto parts of used cars whose sign still retains its height and dignity: “All FOREIGN used auto parts and DOMESTIC,” the roof falls on bushes that emerge from the bricks of the resisting walls that don´t want to die.

That area of ​​Colonial Drive has many junk yards, large areas of land belonging to pieces of cars that were once used to transport people or various things. Some cars are on the pavement, others on double decks, as if they are announcing a flight. Suddenly, a plane, half of a plane, there, living in itself, as if it had made an emergency landing between one coast to the other, lost.

And finally, lots of plaster figures, in a row, waiting for someone to take them home. Some crowded together, others organized by size, others facing the road, looking at each person passing by with their car at 70 miles per hour. Biblical characters, other mythological characters, dolphins, lions, fountains, eagles with outstretched wings, soldiers, giraffes, totems, dancers, columns, and rabbits, all in a stark gray garden, under the intense Florida sun, at three o’clock in a hot afternoon.

When was the last time your city knocked you to the ground and rolled you in the dirt? And you loved it?

I went to the beach the day after Labor Day (pro tip). If you know me, I don’t have to specify this, but for everyone else, it was the nude beach at Playalinda. (NOTE: Beach not pictured.) Once you’ve been in the sun and ocean naked, the idea of wearing something to trap sand in your butt loses all appeal.

Very few environments invite you to immerse yourself completely the way the beach does, beyond just running into the sea and letting waves lift and throw you. Sand and water and wind and direct sunlight are all tactile, a cauldron of sensations. And this does not even address the smell and taste of the salt air or the humbling beauty of the ocean.

For me, the greatest power is in the sound. And since I did not have foresight to bring my phone, I’m going to give you someone else’s recording of my favorite music on Earth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiZBR6xq3dw

No, no, that’s terrible. (No, it isn’t, YouTube user kiyokiyo; you’re in a bit and you’re doing great!) Try this one:

As someone who grew up with that as his lullaby, it is always odd to me that people can hear that and will still build right on the beach.

“I’m going to put a house right in front of this eternal, tireless drill that has pounded every rock into grains of sand. Oh, it’s alright. Most of the time, it stops a few feet from my walls.”

But this is not a screed against private beaches (though there is much to screed about there) nor an eighth grade report on Why I Love Boogie Boarding.

I’m talking about the beach to get you to think about the city.

Beyond views, think of the things you love about the beach or any other environment. Where is your favorite breeze? What field has the sweetest smell in bloom? What trees capture the most perfect sunbeams?

When we think of placemaking, we have to consider factors other than sights and utility. The art of cities can be to create every sensory experience. We should hear, feel, smell and taste our cities as much as we see them. We should ride and surf in our cities, relax and play in our cities.

And then finally, we can get naked in them.

By Jeff Dahlberg

Location: Thorton Park, Wadeview Park, Colonialtown South, Lawsona Fern Creek

When people visit Orlando as a vacation destination, I’m fairly certain the first things that spring to mind are theme parks, the characters associated with them and crowds of tourists laden with armloads of tacky souvenirs.

But to me, Orlando has a different kind of character that has nothing to do with tourist trap destinations.

It’s true character is reflected in the charming homes in the neighborhoods that surround me.

These homes date back to WWII and some go even further back to the late1900’s.

A time when things were built to last.

What strikes me is how different one home is from the other, existing side by side on the same block. It’s a metaphoric bouquet of cute Florida bungalows, craftsman, Mediterranean, traditional, ranch and Victorian style homes. No cookie cutter construction will be found in these neighborhoods.

Recently I’ve noticed a disturbing trend however. As people, for whatever reason, sell these homes, they’re being bought by developers that seem to have no appreciation for architectural diversity. They’re are being torn down in favor of square boxes with zero personality. Featureless slabs of faux stucco facades that are sterile and lacking of character. They dub these “modern contemporary”.

That just seems so out of character.

All the cities of the world have several faces: the happy face, the beautiful one, the prosperous one, the depressed, the dark, the ugly, the poor, the rich, the impenetrable, there are many ways of seeing and understanding a city.

I have lived in Orlando for six years; I have tried to get around the city and get to know it (I still have a long way to go). Today I will talk about a segment on the Orange Blossom Trail (OBT) between Skyview drive and 34th St., on a Monday in August 2023, at 9 a.m.

OBT is a very interesting mixture of cultures, the spices from the Caribbean merge with the Indians, the Egyptians and the Latinas, one walks the avenue and fills his eyes with advertisements for used car sales, empty places waiting for the night, many stores of pawnbrokers, pieces of billboards that barely announce a telephone number that one should call but do not know who or why, gas stations that are skeletons, closed stores that still keep objects in their windows, organized and shining, as if they were seeing me and not the other way around, small shopping centers with reading services about the future and some advice for life, buildings that were once perhaps hotels with good architectural taste converted into shelters for people who go out into the street with their vehicle: A broken grocery cart that is sometimes full, but many times empty.

In a corner a man is kneeling begging for money, and I remember Venezuela in 2017, when inflation led many people to starve. This is a very sad memory.

On the street I saw other human beings who seem to be dragging the night before,

as if their clothes were too big for them or that they rolled over their bodies while they slept.

At 9 in the morning this segment of OBT is still waking up, stretching their arms, yawning, waiting for the big trucks that will use the street to move anything from south to north and vice versa to pass by and make noise and blow horns and form traffic and help those still sleeping eyes, to open.

Gisela Romero is an American Visual Artist born in Venezuela, living, and working in Orlando, Florida. Her focus is on Drawing in multiple formats and surfaces. Check out her work at giselaromeroart.com.

I lived in Seattle for a year during the ’90s. At the time, bookstores were in every neighborhood. Like a lot of people living there, I rode the bus. I love mass transit. One reason I love it is because I can read instead of driving.

A favorite book I read while riding a Seattle bus was Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. This hyperlink sends you to This American Life’s episode about Eco’s essay. Eco was probably best known for writing In the Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. 

He is known in critical theory circles as being a semiotician.

Eco wrote about America’s hyper-detailed efforts to capture authenticity and recreate history without ignoring details. He called this reconstructive neurosis. 

He mentioned a few wax museums in California that recreated the Last Supper. Eco talks about how the reconstruction will never create the feeling of being there.

Ira Glass walked through several of the wax museums. He says many figures are paired with others with no apparent connection. 

Eco surmises this is because the USA is a country without a strong sense of history, so they aren’t expected to notice the lack of context. 

He pointed at Florida and the southwest as the biggest offenders. We often one-up the original or magnify the original experience. 

He also talked about how many people in this country try to shed the past and reinvent it in ways that borrow from it, muddling authenticity because we know it’s more of a reenactment. 

Eco talked about the nouveau riche. I think about Trump’s gold toilets or anything that is his. Aspiring to look affluent when you don’t understand your references inspired the design of the Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle borrowed from the past, a hodgepodge of grandeur, resulting in a mansion that was the design version of a cry for help. 

Florida is the home of Disney World, Legoland, Gatorland, Dinosaur World, The Coral Castle, Weeki Wachee, and we just lost Holyland. 

We have Celebration and other New Urbanist places built to mimic the past. 

One of my favorites is the Venus Project, which represents the future. Futurist Jacque Fresco developed it. 

By the way, I have mentioned spots I enjoy going to and appreciate. 

My father used to say Florida makes every effort to appear ahistorical. That thought bums me out, but I would love it if we could use that sort of a tabula rosa way, and we grew thoughtfully and looked beyond the bottom line.

Blog post by Jeff Dahlberg:

During early morning walks with my wife, I try to pass the time by letting my my mind wanderer by imagining ideas for whatever project I happen to be working on at the time. My eyes wander. I listen to birds, notice strange things on peoples lawns, that sort of thing. On one of these walks I started to notice that random people had left messages carved into the cement long before I had ever been there. I found this interesting and became curious. I asked myself: Who were these people? Where are they now? What was their state of mind? As I collected images of these modern day petroglyphs on my I-Phone, I started to imagine what may have compelled them to act and speculated on their hidden meaning.

Perhaps a stick near a wet cement sidewalk is just too hard for any human to resist. It’s an open invitation for someone to leave their mark. Something that says, “I exist and I was here.” And that’s just human nature.

Dwell on this sentiment for a moment.

Don’t worry about who said it or what place they mean. What’s vital here is the reaction, the feeling of what’s being said.

How do we define our neighborhoods? If you’re anything like me, where you live isn’t where you spend all your time. Around me are the trappings of a major traffic corridor: fast food and chains, a thoroughly random assortment of services, and nothing available by walking. I have a couple spots within a mile that I enjoy, but outside of my immediate neighbors, the people of this area don’t know me and I don’t know them.

My neighborhood is where I meet my friends. It’s the Milk District, Mills 50, Ivanhoe. It’s downtown and the people I know who work there, and Sanford and the people I know there.

If the serving class – the working class that makes up the majority of this city – cannot access the spaces within it, it ceases to be their neighborhood. They are forced into the chains on the corridors, not places to meet, to collaborate, to laugh.

I don’t have the answer to gentrification here, only the observation that placemaking is often about choosing whom to make mad.

People’s attitudes, the zeitgeist of those around you, are also part of your neighborhood. The art of place flows from its people.

The sentiment above is part of its neighborhood.

Forbidden fruit is exactly as nutritious as any other fruit.

Oh, surely, some biochemical ethicist will say that the adrenaline of sneaking around, the thrill of breaking a taboo constricts the blood vessels in your tongue and sharpens the receptors on your circumvallate taste buds papillae, thus inducing the sensation of extra sweetness.

I mean, I don’t know that; I’m just assuming.

But it doesn’t change the chemical composition of the fruit at all, of that I am sure.

Put another way: You don’t improve apples by throwing people in jail for eating them.

All this is to say, I do not walk past No Trespassing signs because I like the rush of being a naughty boy. I am forced to trespass in order to access some of the most beautiful environments in my city.

These are utility access paths for county vehicles to perform regular maintenance on retention ponds and pump houses. These grass lanes are more than 40-feet across in most places, banked by drainage ditches that drop down more than 12 feet.

Or, if you squint just right, it’s the road that leads to Shangri-La. Honah Lee. Neverland. Springfield.

These bright green roadways just off from Semoran promise the kind of adventure I spent most of my childhood looking for around every corner. Cutoff from the traffic that defines Central Florida, these miles of verdant roadway transport hikers to a half-manicured Wonderland, bursting with stories.

Under the right sky, the environment can become, as Baudelaire puts it, “poignant to the point of pain.” Venturing into these surreal grasslands always feels like it should end in a dragon or a wizard or god, but usually it’s just another subdivision.

My point is only that the city around you has more to offer than the paved and the permitted. Look between the buildings, under the rocks and behind the veil.

Where do you want to go? It’s probably already here.