Usually, when buildings are demolished, they simply disappear from the landscape, but when a lost building is part of a string of rowhouses, it leaves behind a memory imprinted upon adjacent party walls. Unless they have been covered over, the imprinted memory, or building ghost details the building’s structure, displaying joist pockets, the placement of stairways, fireplaces and closets, the size and shape of entrance vestibules, even the wall colors that inhabitants selected. Architecturally speaking, these surfaces can be seen as full-scale section drawings.In Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City, Molly Lester and photographer Michael Bixler take note of the wall surfaces that rowhouse demolitions produce. Both come to their task with a deep knowledge of Philadelphia’s urban landscape. Lester is Associate Director of the Urban Heritage Project at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, and Bixler is the Editorial Director and Chief Photographer of Hidden City Philadelphia.Some of the ghosts they show us are visible for a long time, becoming quasi-permanent elements of the cityscape but more often, in parts of the city witnessing a surge in residential redevelopment, building ghosts are fleeting apparitions soon replaced by new construction. As Bixler’s photographs show us a city in flux and a specific landscape that in many cases only existed momentarily, they are not unlike the photographs that city agencies produced, over the past century or so, to document street repairs, work on watermains, and other infrastructure projects. Beyond their need to document building ghosts, Bixler’s photos are often astutely composed to convey narratives. The photos that best stand on their own are those that document a changing landscape, ones taken by stepping back to reveal more of the building ghost’s context, as in his depiction of 1803 Ridge Avenue. Here, he presents the ghost in the center of an image that depicts both adjacent historic buildings and new construction, and a foreground that displays a still-life of construction debris and old tires (85). Also, the more closely cropped views are aesthetically satisfying because they form richly textured abstract compositions (180).As they canvased Philadelphia for building ghosts, Lester and Bixler compared the phenomenon of absent houses in various sections of the city. Lester broke the city into seven geographic regions and wrote an introductory essay on each. In these, she compared the characteristics of residential buildings and building ghosts in different parts of town and the patterns of rowhouse loss in each of them. She considers the city’s policies on neglected buildings and systems that have seemed to favor demolition of buildings over their rehabilitation and reuse. She notes the tendency of the transit-oriented development of West Philadelphia to produce less-dense and more architecturally complex twin dwellings. Here, with building ghosts generated by lopping off half of twins that once possessed a decided symmetry, the loss seems more profound than the rowhouse losses seen elsewhere in the city. In the deindustrialized River Wards of South Kensington and Fishtown, fleeting building ghosts are quickly replaced by generic houses and apartment building that are more grandiose but more ephemeral than the buildings they replace.While some of Bixler’s photos stand without explanatory text, many are accompanied by Lester’s “vignettes,” stories derived from her exhaustive archival research into these now absent buildings. Forty of the 194 building ghosts are paired with accompanying vignettes. But these short essays are more than simple obituaries for lost row houses. Lester’s research brings to light the developers and construction workers who built the city’s row houses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the succession of nearly anonymous working-class Philadelphians who inhabited the buildings that have been wiped away.Through her research, we learn about a family-run funeral home at 1728 Federal Street, a German butcher / real estate developer in the Strawberry Mansion section of the city, and immigrant women, first Irish and later Eastern European, who lived and worked in obscurity on the 2000 block Sansom Street. Taking a deep dive into the building that once stood at 701 South 19th Street brings to light the story of the black-led Foreign Mission Board that from 1915 until 2020 operated from the site, sending missionaries to Africa and the Caribbean.At the end of each geographic section, Lester provides extensive bibliographical references that invite the reader to consult her primary sources for themselves. She brings together information drawn from birth, marriage, and death records, from real estate transactions, census data, city directories, and insurance maps to recapture the often cryptic stories of Philadelphia residents who lived and worked in the lost buildings she surveyed.She understands that a comprehensive story of a city can’t be told by focusing only on the lives, work, and desires of its elites. Obviously, the records Lester consults are the same ones that are used to research the history of extant buildings and those who created or lived in them, so her work provides a roadmap and encouragement to readers who would become researchers themselves and take a similar journey into the archival record that often forms the only tangible evidence of the lives of most Philadelphia citizens.Historians and curators conducted this kind of research to inform the stories told at New York City’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum. They gathered information on the thousands of people who lived at the tenements located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street to assemble case studies of individual families that convey to visitors the history of the broad swath of immigrant communities that populated Lower Manhattan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Within a Philadelphia context, Lester and Bixler’s work recalls photographer Vincent Feldman’s excellent City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia (Paul Dry Books, 2014). Feldman’s evocative black and white photographs are brooding portraits of the city’s decay seen through the often beautifully designed buildings that housed a broad array of institutions and celebrated the city’s civic ambitions. The shuttered and decaying buildings and sites that Feldman photographed had, as their constituents and beneficiaries, many of those who lived in the now-absent row houses that Lester explored and Bixler photographed. Through Building Ghosts, they encourage us, as Feldman did a decade ago, to better understand the city, its residents past and present, and our successes and failures as stewards of the post-industrial environment we have inherited.
Phd Dennis Montagna (Thu,) studied this question.