Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City [Hardcover]

“Building ghosts” are the idiosyncratic remnants or imprints of demolished buildings, left behind on the sides of neighboring structures. Mostly seen in older Northeastern cities with rowhomes or party-wall adjacencies, they can reveal remarkable things, such as an old staircase going up the side of a building or plaster traces left by a set of shelves in an attic gable. As history in our changing cities is erased and remade, these ghosts can be ephemeral or enduring. They can be quickly revealed and replaced in a neighborhood seeing rapid change or unveiled and never re-covered in a neighborhood that has not seen new construction in a long time.

Building Ghostsfeatures more than 100 striking contemporary color photographs and a deeply researched narrative about Philadelphia’s buildings, neighborhoods, and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city. The text and images in this lavish volume illuminate these lost buildings and found ghosts.Building Ghostsis an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.

Beyond their need to document building ghosts, Bixlers photos are often astutely composed to convey narratives.... Lesters research brings to light the developers and construction workers who built the citys 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.... ThroughBuilding Ghosts, they encourage us...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.Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

By documenting and analyzing the tangible artifacts of the intangible forces of urban change, this ground-breaking, rigorously researched, and visually compelling stul£[