Architectural Afterlives

A new book explores buildings that have vanished—with a trace.

By JoAnn Greco

All that really remains of the row house that once stood stoutly at 1828 Rittenhouse Square is its outline, forever etched onto the exposed side of a regal Beaux Arts apartment building. Its only distinguishing features are a double chimney and the vague impressions—like thumbprints in cookie dough—of several upper floor windows. “There’s something visceral whenever I see one of these,” says Molly Lester GFA’12, as she peers up at the wall.

And while architectural ephemera like the jagged profiles of torn-out interior staircases or the faded remnants of flocked wallpaper can be visually striking, Lester, a historical preservationist and author of the new Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City, finds true magic elsewhere. “A wall like this makes me want to know more about who was here and how they lived,” she says. “It goes beyond the idea of whether it’s an iconic building that was designed by a famous architect or a place where something noteworthy happened.” 

By revisiting their heydays in this richly photographed volume, Lester reveals that vernacular buildings like the four-story brick Rittenhouse Square row house—or, more accurately, its ghostly outline—contain multitudes.

“This building witnessed the early stages of the careers of two different artists who lived here, sculptor Katherine Cohen and architect Edgar Viguers Seeler,” Lester says. Both were native Philadelphians who spent time in Paris, and achieved some success—particularly Seeler, who designed Penn’s Hayden Hall, the Curtis Center, and the Penn Mutual Life Insurance headquarters on Washington Square. For her four-page examination of this building, Lester cites 16 sources, ranging from the Philadelphia City Archives to a Penn course catalogue for 1894–95 to the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.

The imprints and impressions of building ghosts “juxtapose the solidity of the wall and the void of the vacant lot left behind, the tangible and the missing, the past and the present and the pending (or suspended) future,” she writes. “We look at [them] … to confront the ghosts we’ve inherited and the ghosts we’ve made.” In capsule essays, Lester examines the presence of these ghosts in seven broad neighborhoods across the city, placing them in the context of each area’s changing political and economic fortunes, demographics, and mix of building uses and materials. In North Philadelphia, for example, where some 3,000 buildings were knocked down between 2010 and 2020, she observes that wrecking balls have been unleashed at social problems unlikely to be solved by demolition alone. “There is more to condemn than merely the structures,” she declares. “We did this.” 

Photographer Michael Bixler, editorial director for Hidden City, an online publication that explores Philadelphia’s built environment, offers careful documentation, shooting from a variety of vantage points to include adjacent stores or El lines, idle demolition equipment, or the signature mowed grass and white split-rail fencing that defines lots left behind by the city’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative anti-blight program.) Bixler says he tried to “dignify each ghost and not treat them as objects of ruin. These are architectural remains of homes where real people lived, loved, celebrated, mourned, dreamed, and hoped. They embody loss, for sure—but they are also very poignant reminders of the cycle of life and the history of underrepresented people whose stories would otherwise go untold.”

Their resulting book presents the backstories and images of 40 demolished buildings, and recognizes another 41 through photographs only. This June, the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia will presents its Young Friends Award to the team.

The project began in late 2020, when the duo spent four months driving, walking, and biking up and down just about every block in town hunting for these ghostly architectural traces. They found 194 in all—though some of them vanished almost as soon as Lester and Bixler recorded their locations. In North Philadelphia, at 2546 N. 28th Street, Bixler was taken by swatches of lime green wallpaper and a poster of the rapper 50 Cent that offered a palimpsest of particularly modern sensibilities. For Lester, one standout was 5247–51 Whitby Avenue in Southwest Philly, where a scrawled tag reading RENT STRIKE offered a telling marker of the pandemic era. 

Along the way, Lester hit the books, city directories, and maps, fleshing out the various personalities who once lived in the demolished buildings even as she encountered roadblocks and dead ends—like sussing out relationships between parties and keeping tabs on white women and Black Philadelphians whose fates, addresses and professions were not as carefully tabulated in census tracts and daily newspapers as those of white men.

In her preface, the author remembers the moment she first really saw a building ghost. It was 2013 and her eye was caught by a wall in a vacant Northern Liberties lot with “a stair that snaked its way up the wall; the outline of a former foyer; a series of lines in the attic gable, clearly left over from a set of shelves.” Mesmerized, she felt inspired to “draw on all the same detective skills that I need for my higher-profile research subjects.” But she was never able to find the site again, because when she went searching for it a second time, it was gone, replaced by new construction.

Intent on capturing the images (and stories) of these fleeting ghosts before they vaporized, she began an Instagram account, which garnered submissions from other volunteer ghost-spotters, including Bixler. Securing a grant from Penn’s Sachs Program for Arts Innovation to produce a book, Lester invited him to be her photographer. “There is so much neighborhood demolition and private construction happening in Philadelphia, that it was often a race against the clock to document building ghosts before they were covered up,” Bixler observes. “However, in some economically challenged areas where gentrification and the often-exploitative real estate market have yet to gain a foothold, there are building ghosts that often remain exposed for years, especially if the adjoining building is vacant or abandoned.”

In their book, Lester refers to these most persistent of memories as “legacy ghosts.” As with other long-term placeholders of the urban streetscape, such as community gardens and murals, city dwellers are apt to romanticize them in the face of future development. Lester, though, is quick to emphasize that ghosts of any sort are by definition evanescent. “The intent of the book is not to say let’s freeze them forever,” she says. “It is a reminder, though, that they offer an opportunity to pause and consider what we’re replacing them with.”

JoAnn Greco is a frequent contributor to the Gazette.