Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
On a 2002 trip to San Diego, the artist Glen Eden Einbinder took a detour to visit America’s largest member-owned nudist resort and club. He wasn’t there as a member, nor as an aspiring nudist.
“I was a little nervous of what to tell them,” he remembers. “So I didn’t tell them what I was doing. I just said that I was interested in the place, and if they had any information.”He turned down a nude tour (“I’m not a prude, but I felt a little uncomfortable doing that, as a single man,” he says, laughing) and instead left with a few pamphlets about this “Nudist Resort For All Seasons.” Outside, he snapped a few shots of the signage and surrounding streets, before heading on his way.
In fact, Einbinder was there as a collector. For over 25 years, he’s amassed a treasure trove of objects that somehow incorporate his first and middle name. (The nudist resort in Corona, California, was the Glen Eden Sun Club.) Over the decades, he’s made his way to Grayson County, Texas, to visit the site of the Glen Eden plantation; to the Glen Eden Pilot Park, in Raleigh, North Carolina; and to the corporate headquarters of the Glen Eden Wool Company, in Georgia, to name just a few of his stops. Sometimes he explains why he’s there; on other occasions, he’ll gloss over the truth, fearing a negative reaction.
“I’m shy with a lot of things like that,” he says, faltering.From each place, he’s acquired objects: leaflets, photographs, a square of mottled carpet the color of moss. But not everything in his collection is the product of a journey. Some, like postcards from motels that no longer exist, are bought on eBay. Others are gifts from friends. A New Zealand suburb is represented by a map and a leaflet containing a bus route. Many of these places have been shored up from elaborate searches on Google Images. It’s at once art project and hobby, an odyssey across places real and forgotten.
Einbinder’s parents didn’t name him for a place. Glen, he says, is somehow related to the initials of his ancestors, with the “G” perhaps coming from a Great-Aunt Gussie. And Eden comes from the Jack London book Martin Eden, which his father was reading when Einbinder was born. Though the two together conjure up some pleasant idyll—Glen as a woodland valley, Eden as a garden—he didn’t realize the connection until he started to come across the huge volume of places that share his name.
In person, Einbinder is soft-spoken and self-effacing, with thick, sooty eyelashes and an open smile. He’s small and dark, a little androgynous, and lives alone in a neat, one-bedroom apartment near Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. A piece of his own art, a woodwork of a bower bird’s nest and collection, hangs on the wall. After years of work at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as their Chief Engineer of Exhibits, he now freelances in museums across New York City, helping to design and execute exhibits and environments.
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