Let’s get right into it.
So I decided to write a podcast about one of my pet obsessions as of late: the defunct, totally demolished Roseland Park on the north end of Canandaigua Lake. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the city of Canandaigua - a place I consider nearly a second home because of how much I go there - had its own theme park full of rides and attractions. I love theme parks. I know if my time had overlapped with Roseland, it probably would’ve been one of my favorite places in the world. I spent a lot of my childhood going to places that exist now on the same ground that used to be Roseland. I took walks with my mother, totally unaware that the place I was standing used to have tilt-a-whirls and carousels, bowling halls and mini golf courses, and a single unimpressive roller coaster. Finding out about this was like stumbling on a conspiracy. It feels like this park was removed specifically to spite me.
To make a long story short, Roseland Park began life as a dance hall in 1925, founded by area mogul William Muar, who, among other influences, bequeathed his name to two large ponds that are generously referred to as the Muar Lakes. It gradually grew into a theme park, building more and more attractions until it started running out of money and finally went out of business in September of 1985. The Playground of the Finger Lakes was picked apart and auctioned off before the end of the year; its world-class carousel was sold to a mall development in Syracuse that would eventually become the enormous Destiny USA, where it was refurbished and is still in operation, and its single wooden roller coaster, the Skyliner, ended up at Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Roseland was stripped for parts, with all remaining structures being quickly demolished, and is now the site of both an upper-class housing development and parts of downtown Canandaigua’s commercial district. The only remaining structures from the park, to my knowledge, are two support structures from the ski lift-style ride that would take you out over the lake, one of which is now used to support a dock offering boat tours and the other of which stands alone. They’re planning on adding a little sculpture to that one commemorating the park, but it hasn’t been erected as of this writing.
With that important context out of the way, on to the episode. The concept for this series came to me in a few parts. I wanted to do my own analog horror series, or something similar. I was inspired by the alternate history angle a lot of series in that genre take. I’m not exactly a history buff, but I do love to fixate on weird bits of American lore, the kinds of things you find on Atlas Obscura or detailed in a few paragraphs in pamphlets at travel centers. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a fiction podcast. I love retrofuturist aesthetics, and especially the world of tomorrow you hear about in 50s, 60s, and 70s American propagandist imagination (what is generally known as Atompunk). All of this came together into Roseworld.
This first episode introduces and starts to build out the world the podcast takes place in. It’s clear from the opening that something vague and weird is happening in the narrator’s present, and a lot of the story’s core elements are introduced. There’s the retrofuturist element, with this story having AI and other weird technology - like the “personal tabs” mentioned which seem to fill the role of the smart phone in modern society - despite being set in the past, before any of that was possible. There’s the name-dropping of Union County in Pennsylvania. There’s the weird, unsettling image of a sentient theme park chattering apparent nonsense to itself alone in the dark (it’s actually having a conversation, the other half of which wouldn’t be revealed until episode 7). One of the Free family is mentioned. And, of course, this being the first episode makes the meaning of “Roseworld” clear - this whole thing going forward has to have something to do with Roseland Park.
It’s a quick little story that is primarily meant to set the scene for the rest of the show, and I’m pretty pleased with it!