Huntington Beach Was Once a Surreal Paradise Hellhole So Of Course Someone Recreated It In Second Life

Pic by Elizabeth Dovgal

Click here to teleport to a new experience in Second Life that's notably strange and wonderful: A recreation of Huntington Beach in Southern California, at a time in the early-mid 20th century when oil rigs dotted the sky, even down to the beach, making the place a surreal combination of placid beach town and industrial wasteland.

To see what I mean, here's the official Rigs of Huntington Flickr page.

Amazingly, the town was created by Jade Koltai, in real life a French woman who's never actually visited Huntington Beach (she tells me), and instead based it on photos from this article, along with other sources... in about a week. Which is all the more impressive to me, because living in Los Angeles, I've been to Huntington once or twice, and Jade gets a lot of the beach town elements impressively right.

Here's a RL pic to compare with the SL pic above:

Hat tip: In-World Films' blog, which has more info and a lot of great pics.

Comments

[Luther Weymann]

Wow. 424 12st Street, Huntington Beach. 1967. Climbing on the rocking horse oil pumps and riding them like the bulls in the bar while on acid. Good times. Traded a quart of reds for a bag of weed window to window while driving on the 405 with no one we knew. Doing a joint in the back of Mystic Arts World in Laguna then going next door to Taco Bell. Yumm. And the surf at the pier? All my buds had buds in bags on our boards. Angelo answered the knock at the open front screen door while I was breaking down a key into baggies on the living room floor and he turns his head and says this officer won't arrest us if we'll give him some buds. Cost me 4 bags and some rolling papers to get out of that mess. I'm telling you youth is wasted. Oh there is the "on the young part" but I'll just leave it at "youth is wasted". And yeah there was a three day round trip drive to Monterey Pop in the VW van. Memories of Huntington. Thanks.