Here’s yet another photographic essay on the collapsing structures of American cities. Camera-carrying journalists have been documenting the abandoned buildings, the cracked streets, and the blighted landscapes of our urban areas for over a decade now. They’ve even invented a name for it: “ruin porn,” a particularly odious term that does not do justice either to the vast majority of those who take note of such ruins, or to those who try to combat them.
In fact, if the term “ruin porn” maintains its current hold in the popular lexicon, that term will prove to be just another marker of how far away we are from the early 19th century, when “ruins,” particularly those in the British countryside identified with ancient Rome, were venerated in the social sense; acknowledged to be fragments, yet considered to be “complete” in a fundamental way; useful in transmitting the idea that the past wasn’t a dead thing, but was a surviving record of those artifacts and ways of life that had been created before us, capable of being drawn upon by the generations to come for inspiration or correction.
To say it this way may overstate the value of the ruins one may find in urban Detroit, or those ruins in New Jersey so vividly described in the novel Shovel Ready, but the overstatement is necessary as a reminder that valuable historical preservation work is done every day in this country, and not every ruin is to be gawked at as an example of shameful blight. Years ago, I was mindful every time I sat eating a muffaletta sandwich in Napoleon House that I was sitting in a portion of the house that a group of New Orleanians had set aside for Napoleon Bonaparte to live in had their plan to rescue him from exile on St. Helena succeeded. Bonaparte’s death in 1821 intervened, but the house still stands.
Some part of me wants that house preserved, even at the cost of my own life. It is more important than anything I might do, because it stands as a reminder that the death of an individual life is not the end of life itself. Life will go on for a very long time after we are gone, and so will the creation of the record of our existence. Such buildings, such ruins, are a great comfort to see in the midst of such a changing, constantly-troubled world, and that is why there’s always such a hue and cry whenever any such landmark is destroyed anywhere in the country in the name of progress. We must continue to make the distinction between genuine urban blight–ruins under which nothing worthy was ever meant to live–and ruins which stand, however precariously, as a record of the world that was here long before we took our places in it.
Books Here And There 
‘Ruin porn’–this is the first time I’ve heard the term. Wow. I’ve noted that our pleasure in owning property (using the general ‘we’) seems constantly tempered by its resaleability. And historic buildings with beautiful bones disappear because some algorithm finds them unworthy of renewal. Let’s hope we shift away from a strictly bottom line perspective to one where we value both history and craft. Thanks for a thought-provoking post, John!
“Ruin porn” has been around as a term for a year or so among journalists. I first read of it six months ago in an essay on urban decay on Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/will-ellis-abandoned-nyc/, and remembered it when I read the article I linked to in this morning’s post. It’s an inelegant term because it conflates the observations and activities of two very different groups–the gawkers, who see such ruins as a kind of spectacle for entertainment, and the preservationists, who would like to maintain some physical remnants of our past for the sake of cultural continuity.
If I may, the best book I know on the subject of cityscapes and the impact that our choices can have on them is Robert Caro’s first great book, *The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York*. It was Moses, an unelected official, who had more to do than anyone with the development of the freeway system around New York City, and the consequent breakup of all of the little neighborhoods that had knitted the city together for over 150 years. Moses’ plan of modernization was the model followed by other big cities–Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Houston–in the decades that followed. The movement outward–toward the suburbs–led, unintentionally or not, to the abandoned and damaged architectures we see in those cities and in places like Cleveland and Los Angeles. The movement outward is not the only factor, of course, but if you’re looking for the starting point, for the biggest factor, you’ll find it in Caro’s book.
An odious term indeed…! And yet strangely apt to describe, for instance, large parts of Bucharest or indeed Eastern Europe. I understand your motives for wanting the house preserved, John. I think about it every time I contemplate my garden. A couple of years ago, I planted a Ginkgo Biloba near the gate. They’re one of the hardiest species on Earth, some documented to live 1,000 years. By which time, my bones will be stardust…
Yes, but what lovely stardust those bones will be. Ruins, of course, are not limited to Eastern Europe or the Eastern U.S. Key scenes of 1987’s *Robocop* were filmed at an abandoned steel mill in Dallas in the summer of 1986, and a few years later, *Terminator 2* shot its concluding scenes in a similarly-abandoned steel mill near Pittsburgh. The *Terminator* actors have said it was very cold on the days they shot there.
My guess would be that there are ruins well worth preserving in Eastern Europe, Bucharest included. Sometimes a factory is just a factory and an abandoned one needs to be torn down for health and safety reasons, but surely there are spots worthy to be preserved as they are to remind ourselves of the horrors of war or to remind ourselves in the historical sense what kind of a society the Soviet Union once had, and what was there before the Soviets took over.
I can recall that the mathematician and biologist Jacob Bronowski (author of *The Ascent of Man*), who was part of the British team that went in to assess the damage after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued unsuccessfully for the idea that the sites should be left just as they were, as a reminder to all of us of what was done in those places and why we must never do it again. Had his recommendation been followed, I think those ruins would have been the finest example of the Romantic poets’ idea that ruins could sometimes be “complete” despite their fragmentary state–that is, they could still tell a whole story, one needing little or no elaboration. Bronowski’s suggestion was right in line not only with his revulsion toward war, but also with the love he later developed for the poetry of William Blake.
Thank you for reading!