The Rise and Fall of Paradise City: LEGO in the Basement

When my brother Andy and I were kids, we had a lot of LEGO. Andy was always better at building than I, but I was the storyteller. Together, we came up with elaborate stories about the residents of Paradise City. I recently found a trove of photographs of Paradise City on an external hard drive, because apparently at age 14 I built a web site to chronicle its adventures and happenings.

This is the best photo of the overall city I could find. (Apparently the photos were taken with a literal potato.) Basically half of the basement was given over to the LEGO city. The train took citizens of Paradise over to the neighboring town of Muddville, which I think was where we let my dad build stuff. Here's another angle:

That table in the background is now mine and Hayley's dining room table! It has been with the Mollmanns since my late grandfather was a boy, I think. The web files I found indicate we had a lot of backstory for every aspect of the city; that sphere in the bottom left of the photo (a Megabloks piece, I think) was an "agridome and power plant":

Paradise City was a hopping town, with a roller coaster...

...a cycle rental...

...a garbage dump...

...a rescue operations center ("RES-Q: Rescue Everything Squad Q")...

...a church (St. Bob's)...

...a drawbridge...

...a very forbidding looking jail ("Mt. Jailus")...

...and even a spaceport!

I seem to recall that the necessity of tying our Space LEGO into the story meant the city was constantly being invaded by aliens. But this also gave us an excuse to blow up the town and rebuild everything whenever we got bored of a particular configuration.

My web site indicates we had histories and personalities for tons of town residents: the owner of the junkyard, the mayor (a Civil War vet, apparently), a guy called the Infomaniac (a character from the LEGO computer game) who had a Q&A newspaper column, and so on. Every police officer was named "Bob."

The best set of developments, though, usually came from my mother. For example, my brother once put window washers on the tall tower in the center of the city. They had a little platform hanging on a string. One day we woke up and one of the strings had disconnected, the window washers were hanging on for dear life, and news helicopters were in position to record the whole thing.

Or another time, we woke up to a shark in the water and a swimmer cut in half and a panicked crowd on the beaches.

The only one my hard drive includes pictures of is when a bunch of protestors sat on the train line and the train ran them all over:

My mother has a macabre imagination, I guess.

Also the town was periodically invaded by Cat Kong.

#159: What things did you create when you were a child?