1956 Daytona Beach Recreational Area Pictorial Guide
DESCRIPTION
Selling a leisurely lifestyle of sport, adventure, socialization, and not much else, this brochure paints Daytona Beach as "Florida's Year Round Playground." Through illustrated faceless figures, photographs of generic scenes, and broadly appealing copy, it encourages the viewer to imagine how living beachside might improve their own life—if even for a week.
The piece's verso, a pictorial map of the Daytona Beach Recreational Area overlaid with major auto routes, paints the region as a destination of escape. Whether permanently retiring to the city or only dropping in for a week-long reprieve from real life, this map presents a spread of leisure activities diverse enough to occupy even the most restless for years. By highlighting repeatable everyday activities like hunting, golfing, gardening, and picnicking rather than individual sites to visit, Daytona Beach is here depicted more as a space for one to experiment with an alternate, totally leisurely lifestyle rather than an exotic location to visit once and check off their list for good. This offer of infinite escape is subtly communicated even in the bottom margin's depiction of homey bungalows one can imagine themself building a life in rather than large, luxurious resorts.
Its recto elaborates on the utopia being sold by the pictorial map. Picturesque photographs of friends and families engaged in the activities shown in illustrations on the reverse prove that the verso's dreamy world is already a reality. A community of like-minded peers is thriving in Daytona Beach and eager for you to join. Complimenting these photographs of smiling, attractive Floridians is copy describing the history and everyday happenings in "Florida's Year-round Playground." Founded by "those who sought a more pleasant way of life than they had known elsewhere," this population of "the friendliest people in the world" spend their days in edifying sport, exploration of exotic landscapes, and attendance at 44 church denominations. Split across two multi-panel spreads, the unique formatting of this copy allows the banner to read either "World Famous Beauty" or "World's Most Famous Beach!" depending on how the reader has unfolded the map.
An Incomplete Invitation
The brochure sells belonging to an audience it never needs to specify, because in 1950s Florida the specification was the law. The entire beachfront shown on this map was closed to Black Floridians. The only beach in Volusia County they were permitted to use was Bethune Beach, some twenty miles south and named for Mary McLeod Bethune, who had founded her school in Daytona Beach and who would later help organize a wade-in against the very exclusion this map quietly assumes.
Daytona before NASCAR
In the verso's lower left corner a small oval marks "Motorcycle and Auto Races" — rendered at the same scale as lawn bowling, shuffleboard, and a family picnic. That oval is the Daytona Beach and Road Course, two miles up the sand and two back down A1A, where stock cars had run since 1936, where fifteen world land speed records had been set, and around which NASCAR had been founded in this city in 1948. By the time this map was drawn the sport was already what Daytona signified to the rest of the country, and the chamber of commerce plainly decided that was not the thing to sell. The renowned spectacle is here reduced to rural pastime. Within two years the last race was run on the sand; within three, the banked superspeedway inland had opened and taken the city's identity with it.
CONDITION
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