Not far from the red blinking lights at the intersection, there's a little park with a small hill where, on sunny winter mornings after snow, the children love to go sledding. A thin line of ragged trees edges the park and frames the sledding hill, upraised branches silhouetted against the bright western sky. Never more than twenty yards wide, this feral meander of trees and tangled underbrush divides the park from the neighboring hospital, a lingering memory here of a wildness that's been swept from most other corners of the town.  The low anonymous buildings of the hospital--physical therapy here, chest pain there--are surrounded by long wide aprons of crumbling grey parking lot. During business hours, the sun glints on plastic, glass, and steel, but later there's an emptiness that sweeps everything into an absent embrace. Pain becomes memory. The sky is silent, and trees move mute to unseen breezes. The fading asphalt is cracked and zig-zagged with ribbons of congealed t

  Welcome to Tales From the Crystal City.   It’s a nickname that was bestowed on the town in which I live sometime in the 1880s, not long after the discovery of natural gas reserves led the city fathers to offer it up free to those who wanted to do business here. The place thrived and by the end of the decade, the east side of town was home to several glass companies with names like Canastota, Lythgoe, and (of course) Crystal City [ 1 ].   All too soon, the natural gas ran out, and the Crystal City’s burgeoning glass industry was consigned to a footnote in local history. But the name remains, as a sort of ghostly reminder of a place and time that lives on in the stories that pile up dream deep, sedimented like the wetland mud and glacial clay that lies beneath the parking lot blacktop.   I’ve come to think of the Crystal City as a sort of invisible landscape [2], a spectral twin mapped on top of the present day town, an unseen topography of magic and dread , longing and promises and lo