This brings up the issue of supporting local businesses. Tucson will be a more vanilla place without the golf course. ![]() I don’t live in Tucson anymore, but it was always nice to see the whimsical sculptures when I went back to visit family. Wow, Magic Carpet always got me jazzed when I was a kid. Thanks for the post, not to mention for making me feel old. It was a cheap date, especially on weeknights, but still a lot of fun (which should tell you something about my social life :-). We used to go to Magic Carpet a lot when I attended college at U of A in the 70’s. My lord, I’m amazed that the place is still around to be demolished. It’s a way to bond with the city and learn more about it, and a good way to keep my camera at work too! I’m looking forward to a few more opportunities like this, documenting pieces of Tucson that have nearly vanished or are in danger of disappearing soon. In any case, I am indebted to the leader of our group, Carlos, who takes a personal interest in the historic pieces of Tucson that are being quickly reduced to parking lots and sterile chain retail stores. (You can see many more photos on my Flickr album.) I can only hope my photos of Magic Carpet Golf will be half as well received by some author in fifty years. That ordinary snapshot becomes a little piece of history preserved.Įvery detail is important: the car they drove, the clothes they wore, the buildings in the background, uniforms, roadways … my authors often pore over such photos for days, looking for tiny clues to how things used to be, so we can share them with the magazine readers. When I find a family photo of someone’s vacation to the Florida Keys or Niagara Falls taken in the 1950s, it’s like finding a nugget of gold. In Airstream Life magazine we regularly publish articles about the history of Airstream, Wally Byam, travel trailer manufacture, and exotic caravans. I guess I’m getting a particular appreciation for this sort of thing because I am often looking for historical photos these days. When that happens, we’ll have the photos, and they will eventually be treasured by someone who wants to see how things looked in the old days. The undulating greens will be smoothed, the dinosaur and giant monkey will be reduced to powder, the buildings will be torn down and the palm trees will be dug up and sold. Someday Magic Carpet Golf will be only a memory. We found decay and mold, rotten wood and torn “greens”, but also a bit of imagination and fantasy. ![]() ![]() The caretaker let us in (by prior appointment) and we wandered through the grounds looking for history and art. ![]() So about a dozen of us went over to take pictures today. Moving that T-Rex would be an operation akin to removing a real 65-million year-old dino fossil. They are delicate and crumbling, made on-site mostly from wire and concrete, and in many cases firmly anchored to the ground. There is talk of moving the sculptures to another location for preservation, but I don’t see how it will be possible. It became rather shabby toward the end, but still the sculptures stand in testimony of decades of service. The entire place was handmade with fantastic concrete sculptures, colored lights, and exotic scenes. Magic Carpet Golf is one of those places that long-time Tucsonians remember dearly from their childhood. It will eventually be razed to become a parking lot. This old course finally closed recently, ending what I believe was a 50+ year stretch of business in Tucson. Today I was lucky enough to join other members of the group “Vanishing Tucson” at Magic Carpet Golf, on East Speedway Blvd.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |