APRIL 2007 » book review

Everything Must Go

Ghostly Ruins: America's Forgotten Architecture
By Harry Skrdla
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006
224 pp; paperback; 250 b&w illus.; $29.95
ISBN-10 1-56898-615-7
ISBN-13 978-156898-615-9

Reviewed by Lynne Lavelle

In the days before the Wall Street crash, the West Baden Springs Hotel in West Baden Springs, IN, was enjoying a banner year. Its 200-ft.-dia. domed atrium (the largest in the world until 1962) and giant Art Nouveau fireplace kept its 700 rooms in constant demand and embodied the early-20th-century belief that things would keep getting bigger and better. Yet just four days after the crash filtered from the trading floor to the world, the West Baden was all but empty, and the Roaring Twenties had given way to the Great Depression. The West Baden had opened to great fanfare in 1902, but there was no press call when it closed its doors 30 years later, and few learned of its sale to a Jesuit order in 1934 for just one dollar.

The West Baden's tale is one of 30 told by engineer and preservation consultant Harry Skrdla in Ghostly Ruins, an obituary to some of the grandest, oddest and unluckiest building ventures in the country. To Skrdla, these ruins are more than curiosities, they are a warning that circumstances can undermine any building as surely as dry rot or fire. With few exceptions, each of these enterprises from the worlds of transportation, industry, commerce, public works, home and amusement enjoyed periods of success. Some were believed to be indispensable. But one by one, all succumbed to economic depression, industrial change or events unforeseen – in short, an inability to predict the future. And with such fickle criteria governing which buildings we maintain and which we discard, Ghostly Ruins prompts the question: Which of today's buildings, towns, department stores or factories will be the last one standing?

If history is any indicator, there are no sure bets. Take the J.L. Hudson department store, for instance, which occupied an entire city block in Detroit, MI, for 70 years. Upon completion in 1928, Hudson's was the second largest department store in the country, second only to Macy's in New York City. Yet its size – 2.2 million sq. ft. over 32 levels – was just one of Hudson's many distinctions, most of which left Macy's trailing in second place. Hudson's was the first air-conditioned department store in the country, and with 76, contained more elevators under one roof than any other building on earth. It had more than 700 fitting rooms, 48 escalators and 18 entrances, with access to more than 49 acres of every imaginable service, including the world's largest beauty salon. And after the Pentagon, Hudson's contained the largest telephone switchboard in the country.

However, by the 1960s, things had begun to change. Hudson's had survived the Great Depression, but it couldn't survive the population drift from Detroit's downtown to the suburbs, accelerated by the Detroit riots of 1967. Many shoppers were afraid to come downtown, and as the suburbs filled with convenient shopping malls, they had fewer reasons to. The ailing store struggled throughout the 1970s as the last major retailer in the now-barren downtown Detroit area, but it closed its doors at the end of another disappointing holiday season in 1982. After lying empty for 16 years, Hudson's set another world record on October 24, 1998 – as the largest building in history to be imploded.

While Macy's continued to prosper, Hudson's was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And of all the wrong places, Detroit may have fared the worst. The fallout of Michigan's industrial decline and social unrest fills almost half of Ghostly Ruins, in the shape of the Packard Plant, The United Artists Theater, Chin Tiki, Hudson's, the Book-Cadillac Hotel and Michigan Depot, all of which closed between 1956 and 1988. Skrdla, a native of Michigan himself, rarely politicizes; there is scarce need to, when the mutual dependence of industrial, commercial, and civic buildings is so plainly illustrated. Instead, he writes with sadness of a bygone age, when "all American cities teemed with life," and before these buildings became "victims of scrappers and politicians." His complaint is that the half-hearted renovations and indefinite closures consigned several of them to an eternity in limbo, stripped of their assets and left to rot. The specter of the Packard Plant still looms over Michigan 50 years after its closure – a dilapidated reminder of past prosperity. And for more than 20 years, the United Artists Theatre has stood empty, save for thieves and vandals.

Ghostly Ruins remembers what was, with dramatic photography of the heydays. There are engines undergoing assembly in the Packard Plant in 1935, families riding the Tumble Bug at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, OH, and a 1920s postcard of the Venetian Dining Room at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, to name a few. But not every building is remembered so fondly, particularly those whose purposes are now reviled. The accounts of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA – described by Charles Dickens as "immeasurably worse than any torture of the body" – and Danvers State Hospital in Danvers, MA, tell of outdated theories of justice and psychiatry – man-made "bad karma." These stories, together with those of buildings that were once loved, make the point at the heart of Ghostly Ruins – that buildings are an expression of human ideals, both good and bad. And without people, they are just bones. TB

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