Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape

In Real Places, Grady Clay presents the American landscape in a completely fresh and untypical way. Rather than look at locations, he studies constructed, imaginative sites. Clay explores the fascination of "Fall Color Country," or "Lover's Lane." What draws people to these "generic" landscapes and keeps them coming back literally and figuratively time and time again? Real Places catalogs and describes a unique cross-section of America, emphasizing the beauty and intrigue of these hidden gems. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs depicting the everyday as well as the bizarre, Clay's entertaining Baedeker allows us to see in a new way what has always been "right before our eyes."

"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor

"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."—Boston Sunday Globe

Today's "good address" may be tomorrow's "changing neighborhood", with "drug scene" and even "ghost town" not too far off. The "edge of town" may be overrun with "speculative sites". A "depressed area" could be turning into a "growth area" and "lovers' lane" into a "trouble spot". In these "generic man-made sites", urban observer and commentator Grady Clay discovers the key to understanding our cultural geography. Although they can't be found by name on most maps, these places exist in every city and do similar work. Defined by cultural, political, and economic needs rather than any natural boundary, "Fall Color Country", "The Good Address", and "Disaster Area" are primarily creations of the human mind. These are just some of the places Clay takes us through in this delightful, original guidebook to our ever-changing man-made landscape. Clay explores the deep structure of human adjustment to time and place: to traffic and congestion, war, weather, and machines, and the expanding presence of other people. He also tracks the play of language as it opens up and represents real worlds, showing how place-naming is the key to managing new environments. From the boondocks to the back forty, from gastown to crack corner, we name these places to get a handle on the unfamiliar - to make them our own.