I was bored and tired of hanging around the house all day like I've done for the past month straight, so I went to follow up on some old leads I never got around to checking out.
The first of these was "The Lost City." In the late 1910's Madison was experiencing a housing crisis, and the Lake Forest Company had a solution. They planned to construct a massive residential neighborhood on Madison's south side that was to be called the Lake Forest Community, built to house a thousand people. They built the roads and laid a few house foundations only to discover a massive problem; the ground was too wet, and the roads began to sink into the earth under their own weight.
Not to be deterred, it was determined that the Lake Forest Community development would go forward. They decided to bring in additional fill material and construct a series of canals to lower the water table, advertising it as "the new Venice." However, this never happened. They didn't use enough fill material, and it would be prohibitively costly to redo all the roads already built or fund the canals. These factors combined with WWI, an economic recession, and political opposition in the city government forced the Lake Forest Company to disband in 1922, and the project was abandoned.
Eventually the University of Wisconsin bought the land in the 1930's, setting it aside for a nature preserve that is now called the UW Arboretum. They allowed nature to reclaim most of the development, with a few roads serving as paved hiking trails. It was nicknamed "The Lost City" and it's been a local legend ever since.
These three pictures are the front porch steps of a house that was never completed and the basement of that same house. The whole area was littered with broken bottles and rusted metal junk from the early 1900s.
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The black and white image below is an aerial photo of the Lost City from the early 1930's, before it became overgrown. The image below it is a screenshot of Google Maps in modern times, showing how the forest has reclaimed most of the streets. You can still see one of the main roads is used as a hiking trail.
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This hiking trail used to be one of the main roads. If you kick away the dirt and leaves you can even uncover the pavement.
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I also stumbled across a junkyard about fifteen minutes away that looked semi if not entirely abandoned. It was mostly construction equipment and old vehicles with probably over 100 dumpsters stacked up in one section. I don't really know any of the history on this place, I just found it on Google Maps that morning.
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Ugh, UER uploader compression is... not great. Anyway, not a bad way to spend a sunny day social distancing.
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