Let’s agree upfront that visiting a virtual Chichen Itza can’t come close to visiting the real thing, but few of us will visit the real Chichen Itza even once in our lives. A virtual Chichen Itza has the advantage of being available to us every day to visit whenever we want. This writer has so far never managed to visit Mexico’s Chichen Itza, but has visited Second Life‘s Chichen Itza many times.

Mexico’s Chichen Itza, a Mayan city located on the Yucatan Peninsula, is over a thousand years old. The El Castillo pyramid, pictured on the left in Second Life at sunset, is probably the most well known and widely recognized monument at Chichen Itza, but it’s only one of the structures there. The pyramid has a square base and has one staircase on each side. Three of the staircases are 91 steps, and the fourth is 92 steps, for a total of 365, the number of days in a year.

A short walk from El Castillo, you’ll find the Sacred Cenote. Cenotes, limestone sinkholes, were essential to the Mayans in the arid Yucatan. The Sacred Cenote is one of two cenotes that remain today. It was probably used for human sacrifices to god rain god Chaac. Second Life’s Sacred Cenote is shown in the second picture.

On the other side of the El Castillo pyramid you’ll find the Temple of the Warriors and the Plaza of one thousand columns. The Second Life versions are in the third photo, showing the Temple of the Warriors in the background.

Second Life’s Chichen Itza is located in the Mexico sim, a project of the Mexico Tourism Board. Your avatar can teleport there at slurl.com/secondlife/Visit%20Mexico/197/70/39. The Board has a second Mayan area in Second Life, which I’ll report on in a future article.

I’ve been waiting months to write about Second Life‘s Virtual Harlem, a pair of sims that aim to simulate 1920s Harlem and two of its most historic landmarks, the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater, Both locations are remembered for their contributions to American and especially African-American music, and to write about either building, even their virtual versions, without the music that brought them to life, would be to write in a vacuum. So I waited, and on Memorial Day weekend, it happened. Trowzer Boa and his Robot Band played the virtual Cotton Club.

 Although remembered for its stream of African-American music greats, the Cotton Club was a coldly racist place, as was most of America in the 1920s. Opened in 1923 by gangster Owney Madden, the Cotton Club offered a venue for great African-American musicians including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday to perform, but although African-Americans were onstage, they were rarely allowed to be in the audience. The Cotton Club closed in 1940.

 

Second Life’s Cotton Club is happily not authentic in one way: blatant racism is absent. Unlike the historic Cotton Club, where African-American performers were regarded as exotic savages, in Second Life on Memorial Day weekend, the performer was white (accompanied by AI "robots"!) while African-Americans in the audience danced alongside other races. Playing from his Philadelphia area basement, Trowser Boa and his AI Robot Band were excellent. The music they played wasn’t entirely authentic, some of it having been composed after 1940, including some by Boa himself, but I doubt whether anyone cared. I didn’t. It was good.

Guests were asked to wear "1920s glamor" attire. Most complied. For women, this meant dressing in the styles of the 1920s and while I don’t know enough about style to judge their accuracy – some hairstyles in particular looked distinctly contemporary – the overall effect was one of glamor of a lost age. Men had an easier time dressing for the evening because styles for men on occasions like this haven’t changed much since the 1920s. Most men were suits – I wore a zoot suit – and one wore a sailor’s outfit. The few who didn’t wear suits nonetheless seemed to fit in. This was Second Life, after all, most of the musicians were robots, and the dancers were all avatars. This wasn’t a static museum display. It was the 1920s brought back to life, but in a new century and in a virtual world that no one in the 1920s could have imagined.

I’m looking forward to future events in the two Virtual Harlem sims and in the third sim in the group, Montmartre. These sims are the only place I know of where you can walk out of Harlem, cross a bridge on foot, and find yourself in France, in an entirely different historic period! I expect I’ll be writing more about all three sims in the future. Candice McMillan, events manager for Virtual Harlem, told me that they are antipating about one event a month at the Cotton Club. Second Life members can be assured of learning about them by joining the Virtual Harlem Events and Activities group in Second Life. On Memorial Day weekend, I went as a reporter taking pictures. The next time, I may leave my reporter role behind and take a date instead of pictures. This is a great place to dance, to enjoy, and to get at least a taste of life eight decades ago in New York’s Harlem, minus the racial discrimination of those days.

You can hear Trowzer Boa and his Robot Band at his Second Life club, Firehouse 59; Second Life members can teleport to it by clicking slurl.com/secondlife/Absentia/197/90/22. If his Cotton Club performance is any indication, you won’t be disappointed.

Second Life members can teleport to the Cotton Club by clicking slurl.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Harlem/124/7.