Teeny-Weeny Towns

My daughter forwarded a video about a suburb of Knoxville known as Safety City. In this little town you’ll find roads and traffic signals, businesses and shops, but no cars. Sidewalks are for pedestrians while streets are reserved for bicyclists and other “non-motorized vehicles”. Everything in “SC” is an easy walk, whether to the post office, football stadium, movie theater, or dinner at Applebee’s. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… everything in Safety City is miniature.

Safety City in Knoxville

Safety City is a novel concept because it reduces the real-life aspects of a town down to a dimension children can relate to.  And relate they do.  Entire classes bus over to Safety City to experience vehicular, pedestrian, bicycle, and fire safety at a young age.  So much more effective than traffic school on a blackboard!

I’ve always been a fan of miniatures; a feeling hearkening back to my childhood.  Anyone who read Gulliver’s Travels knows “miniature”, as in the inhabitants of the (literally) small town of Lilliput.  Anyone who ever held a snow globe imagined those little places and figures inside the glass coming to life.

Diorama

I wonder if grade-school children still make dioramas.  What a cool concept for a kid.  Within the confines of a shoebox you create a miniature world of your liking: buildings, people, animals, trees, etc.  Then you cut a peephole in the center of one end of the box and cover the open top with tissue paper.  When you look through the hole you see your little diorama world, with the light filtering through from above.  It gives your creation a startling sense of reality.

“HO”-scale model railroad

Model trains certainly fueled my interest in miniatures.  I remember several friends who collected the popular “HO”-scale sets (1:87, or about 2″-high trains).  They could buy so many accessories (endless tracks, buildings, trees, and figures) they could create an HO-scale world big enough to fill a two-car garage.  Go figure, the only train set I ever owned was the “G”-scale, where the train’s a good 8″-10″ in height.  Not so miniature.

Speaking of model trains, one of my favorite episodes of the old television series The Twilight Zone was called “Stopover in a Quiet Town”.  A couple wakes up in a strange house after a night of partying, can’t get the phone or the lights to work, and find the refrigerator stocked with plastic food.  They walk outside, only to discover the surrounding town is utterly still – no people, no sounds, no movement.  Then the train whistles and pulls into the station, so they hop aboard, hoping to be taken back to somewhere familiar.  But the train merely travels in a wide oval and returns to the same station where it picked them up.  As the couple steps off the train, the giant hand of a child reaches down to grab them, while a mother’s voice can be heard saying, “Be careful with your pets, dear…”  Twilight Zone indeed.

Replicas of miniature cities can be found everywhere, whether Knoxville’s Safety City, Disneyland’s Storybook Land (viewed from canal boats), or Legoland’s Billund Resort, Denmark’s largest tourist attraction outside of Copenhagen.  There’s even a “top ten” of the world’s miniature cities, including “Miniaturk”, 122 famous buildings of Turkey in a park-like setting in Istanbul; “Tobu World Square” in Japan, which showcases the world’s UNESCO world heritage sites in the presence of 140,000 miniature people, and The Museum of Roman Civilization (which I’ve seen myself), a remarkable recreation of ancient Rome’s “Golden Age” thirty-six years in the making.

Legoland

Maybe all this talk of miniatures has you thinking of the recent trend of tiny homes.  Those are an entirely different concept; not at all “miniature”.  A tiny home is like a full-scale house with most of the air sucked out of it.  The components are still full-scale but the spaces are decidedly smaller than normal.  Tiny homes kind of look like shoeboxes to me.  Maybe we should add peepholes on the ends so we can watch the inhabitants try to make a living in their cramped quarters.

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Author: Dave

Four hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

21 thoughts on “Teeny-Weeny Towns”

  2. I haven’t seen too many miniature cities, but the idea is interesting. My brother had an HO train set when we were kids and we just loved it. A friend of ours had the even smaller “N” gage trains.

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  4. I see Tiny Homes on Airbnb but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to rent one. Doesn’t seem much of a vacation if you’re crammed on top of each other. I think there was a museum recently with a bunch of miniature pieces that you had to look through a magnifying glass to see. Would’ve been interesting!

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    1. Didn’t know tiny homes are available for rent on Airbnb but I agree; why would you? They’d have to be located somewhere really unique to capture my interest.

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    1. The builders – whoever they are – have way more time for this sort of thing than I do. I’ll stick to single structures… and LEGO models at that 🙂

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  6. Cool concept for safety training for kids. I wanted that place to be real. I would love to have town where you can walk everywhere. I’ve heard the upper peninsula of Michigan doesn’t allow cars. Maybe I should visit some day. That Twilight Zone is very creative. But what twisted mind comes up with this stuff??

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    1. Twilight Zone was like Stephen King before Stephen King. The little stories seemed charming at the time but in hindsight, “twisted” is a better way to describe them. As for Michigan, maybe you’re thinking of Mackinac Island? No cars – only horse-drawn carriages – and a town small enough to walk. A bucket list place for me, esp. after watching “Somewhere in Time”.

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  7. How fun to have this miniature town and, for a moment, I was ready to move to this pedestrian-friendly place with no cars, although it was sounding a bit like Mackinac Island. You do find the most-interesting items to spotlight (and kudos to your daughter as well). We have a model train group that meets every Saturday. They take up most of the top floor of a City-owned building. Their trains are left there permanently and on display every Christmas for the annual “Fantasyland” Christmas display. In conjunction with unusual houses, like tiny houses, on the news today, there was the first 3d printed house in Detroit. It is a 988-square foot, two-bedroom, one bathroom home going for $224,500. It is a putrid shade of green. Neighbors were interviewed and said “maybe it has great insulation but how long will it last?”

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    1. Adults can tour Safety City, but only on weekends and holidays. I like that restriction – leave it to the kids, right? Yes, I’ve seen headlines here and there about 3D-printed houses (a whole community of them in AZ, if I’m not mistaken). The concept is remarkable – esp. from an architect’s perspective – but I still prefer wood framing, where it’s much easier to get inside the walls if necessary. Maybe the printers will be able to take that approach someday. More like “probably” 🙂

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      1. That sounds perfect to me Dave – the restriction should be related to the kids. This 3D-printed house was a novelty since it was the first in Detroit. I wouldn’t want to pay that price for it not knowing its durability. Best stick to what is tried and true says this non-architect!

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  8. The most impressive miniature display I’ve ever seen was Colleen Moore’s dollhouse (a castle, really) at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Ms. Moore was an actress of the silent screen as I remember. Traveled the world collecting miniature furniture and decorative pieces wherever she went. The dollhouse is HUGE! A large room is devoted to the display, with a walkway around the perimeter so visitors can see into every room. If you ever get to this museum, the dollhouse is a MUST-see!

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    1. What a remarkable story, Nancy! Ms. Moore paid $500k in the 1920’s to have the castle constructed (what would that be in today’s dollars – yikes!), then furnished the rooms with over 2,000 items. The teaser photos on the website are wonderful. Incredible attention to detail, and so much more realistic than LEGO!

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      1. Wow–you researched Ms. Moore’s dollhouse! That IS a high price tag for the castle, especially in the 1920s. How much do you suppose she spent on the whole display?! YIKES! I’m so glad she donated it to the museum, where it’s been enjoyed by thousands over the decades.

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  9. I so enjoyed this post, brought back some memories. My brother had a train set and liked to run the cars, but I was charmed by the little station, houses, trees, and people. There is a little miniature town off Rte 285 in Colorado, Tiny Town, I visited years ago. I just looked it up and it’s still there.

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    1. I just went through the history of Tiny Town on its website. What a fascinating story. The founders, owners, and sponsors sustained so many obstacles (and tragedies) to get the park to where it is today. I can’t believe I never knew about it in all our years in Colorado. We’ll have to go the next time we visit. 

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