Remains of the day

My photos of all that remains of the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo:





You can actually see the Larkin Factory from I-190 on the south end of Buffalo. The area where the building was located is somewhat deserted--a number of boarded-up buildings--although not abandoned. In my second photograph (of the extant retaining wall, which is a somewhat less elegant remnant), you can see the factory off to the left.

I drove in from the east and bore right on Swan to get to the remaining fence pier. This gave me an opportunity to visualize the missing building, which would have sat aside the triangle of land in a fairly arresting way.

I've seen a few sites misunderstand exactly what this remaining piece of one of the most beautiful office buildings ever built is. It's not a remnant of the building itself--it did not "hold up a corner". It is an intact fence pier. Most of the fence itself (as can be seen in the second photo) remains. The reason is evident once you see the site: there is an embankment behind the fence, and it functions as a retaining wall. If it weren't for that fact, there would likely be nothing left of the Larkin Administration Building at all.

I did not actually get out of my car to visit the plaque at the site, as it was quite snowy and I had not brought my boots. This is what is on the plaque:



I always find these accidental relics to be the most poignant. If it weren't for this rather desolate piece of wall, would anyone have a reason to drive down this deserted street any more?

On Christmas Day

It looks like the historic All Saints Church in Whitby will be saved despite the devastating fire eleven days ago.



Recent reports are that the walls and steeple are stable. The salvageable stained glass has been removed and preparations are being made to cover the roof that was destroyed with a temporary structure. Last night's news stated they'd like to be back by Easter, 2011.

In the meantime, another local church is providing space to them, and donations covered all of the hampers for the needy that were also lost.

Arson is still suspected, but has not been officially confirmed.

Here is a nice Flickr set of the church, both before and after.

Larkin Building pre-visit

I just learned today that if all goes well, I should have a reason to go to Buffalo on Monday. As I mentioned in my last post, I have been planning to stop by the Larkin Administration Building site for some time to photograph its last remnant. I wanted to make sure I knew where it was, however, so I did a little research.

The Larkin Administration Building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1904 and completed in 1906 to house the offices of the Larkin Soap company. (The huge factory buildings adjoining the offices still exist.) The building was the first office building to be air conditioned. If you've ever been to a building with a multi-story atrium that provides natural light from above, you're looking at the legacy of the Larkin Building. Its interior was what was so revolutionary, especially when it was built.



Just as the Depression was not kind to the Darwin Martin family and eventually resulted in the abandonment of the Martin House, the affairs of Darwin Martin's employer, the Larkin Soap Company, were also in dire straits. The Larkin building was transformed into a retail store in 1939, but sold in 1943. Eventually the building entered foreclosure and was abandoned. The City of Buffalo attempted to sell it several times and considered a variety of alternate uses, including government offices and a recreation centre, but in its abandonment the building was deteriorating.




It was eventually sold for a mere $5000 and demolished in 1950. It apparently was a major pain to tear down--it was very well-built.

Here's what the building looked like alongside the huge factory:



Here is a Google map of the site:


View Larger Map

And how the site looks in Google Street View:

View Larger Map

If you head further west along Swan St. in Street View, you can see the remaining fence pier (it was part of the fence that can be seen at the back of the postcard of the offices and factory above) This will be what I'll be visiting next Monday.

Westcott House

One of the fascinating parts of architectural history is just how many of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses have fallen into ruin or disrepair, and that some of his largest projects have been completely torn down. (The Larkin building will get its own entry at some point, once I get over to Buffalo to photograph the sad remaining single relic of its existence.)

Westcott House was one of these. In 2005, the restoration of this house was completed and the house opened to the public. My husband and I visited not long after it opened, being stunned to find out there was a Wright prairie-style house just 45 minutes from Columbus. It is, in fact, the only one of its kind in Ohio. Springfield, it turns out, was once a booming industry town.



What had happened to the house since it was completed in 1908 is sadly not unique amongst Wright houses: The fortunes of the family that built it declined, and it had to be sold. By the late 40s it had been subdivided into apartments, its identity as a Wright house (and a close contemporary of the masterful Martin House, itself a ruin for a time) obscured. A supporting beam on a lower level that was "in the way" was also removed. It was replaced during the restoration, but one can still see the signs on the second floor of the resulting sag that was introduced.

Amazingly, the house was acquired for restoration in 2000 and opened to the public in 2005. My husband and I visited almost exactly four years ago. As a result, I always associate the house with Christmas.

TTC Lunchtime Field Trip

Finally, I had a chance to download the photos I took during my TTC field trip in search of Vitrolite and other such things.

First, as promised, three eras of TTC station design in one photo. On the left is the new tiling (apparently being given a trial run to see how it does). In the middle, the old Vitrolite. On the right, the walls that have been in place in St. Andrew station for most of its life.




You can really see the damage underlying the metal stripping in this photo:


A closeup of the Vitrolite. Hard to believe these are made of glass:


And here's what it originally looked like, from the last remaining Vitrolite TTC Station:






Even at Eglinton Station, the Vitrolite on the interior columns has not survived. However, the inner walls (see the second photo above) are in quite nice condition and give an inkling as to why this material was originally chosen. Too bad it didn't hold up very well.

Fire destroys church in Whitby

All Saints Anglican is on Dundas St. in Whitby, not far from where my PMI meetings take place. In fact, I turned right at the corner where it stands on Saturday. The building is over 140 years old. Early this morning, it was gutted by a fire that looks to be deliberately set.

Some very dramatic video of the fire to be seen here.

I may eventually go by to see the damage. This is the worst kind of ruin of all--death by neglect or accident has a slightly romantic veneer to it, but purposeful destruction of a building cherished by its people is a tragedy.

Accidental relics

I recently purchased a compact camera. My cell phone does not have one (yes, it's nearly five years old and qualifies as a near antique) and you never know when you might see something you'd like to photograph. Today was the first time I found something intriguing. During lunch, I had an errand to run at Dundas and University, so I hopped the subway up the two stops. Waiting for the next train at St. Andrew station, I saw this:



What it is is a relic of the original interior of St. Andrew Station. While I knew many of the subway stations on the Yonge and University lines had been redone, I decided to find out more.

Transit Toronto is an outstanding resource on all things TTC, and where I learned much of the information about St. Andrew station. The panels you can see under the metal stripping at St. Andrew are made of a glass tile called vitrolite. Here is an image from the Toronto Archives showing the original appearance of the station:



The University line opened in 1963. Vitrolite tiles were used in the first two stations constructed--Osgoode and St. Andrew--as they had been used on the Yonge line. St. Andrew featured grey tiles with either black or dark blue banding and lettering. However, the Vitrolite was not the sturdiest of materials and it was replaced in the early 70s with the metal banding that can be seen in both stations today. It's quite clear from my photo (and others I've seen) that the tile was simply covered up rather than removed. You can also see some of the water damage that seems to have been instrumental in shortening the life of the Vitrolite.

An interesting tidbit I found out is that only one TTC station retains its original Vitrolite: Eglinton Station. (The Bloor line stations never used it.) I remember many years ago wondering why the tile in that station looked so much different than any other station. I just may take a lunchtime TTC field trip in the next few days to see it--as well as to take some more St. Andrew photos--because renovations are in progress at the station, allowing the potential viewing of three layers of subway interiors all in one station. The new tiling is evocative of the old Vitrolite, but is definitely not Vitrolite (as one of the reasons why the tile was covered over in the first place is that it stopped being manufactured in North America).

If all goes well, I should shortly have some additional photos to post on St. Andrew and Eglinton stations.

Doppelganger

While I was researching online for the previous post on COPH, I kept coming across photos that purported to be COPH but were labeled "Columbus Institution for the Feeble-Minded." While the buildings were similar, they were in fact different buildings:



The Institute for the Feeble-Minded was not a Kirkbride building or an asylum. What is was was a school for children with developmental disabilities, such as Down Syndrome. It eventually was known as the Columbus State School and then the Columbus State Institution. Finding information on this building, its location and when it was torn down is quite difficult. However, unlike COPH, I remember actually visiting this building, and a little research confirmed its location at 1601 Broad St. It was actually right across the street from COPH, on the south side of Broad.

When I was in either the first or second grade, my dance school did a performance at what my mother still called "the feeble-minded school." I remember it being to some sort of oriental music and we wore paper Chinese hats and eye makeup to suggest almond-shaped eyes (this was the 70s). Other kids in the class had told me there were "Mongoloids" (Downs kids) and "watermelon heads" (children with hydrocephaly) at the school, and I remember looking for them and not seeing anything that odd. This must have been fairly late in the school's history, since by junior high we had developmentally disabled kids attending the same schools I did and the model of institutionalizing the majority of what we then called retarded kids was being discarded. I suspect it was torn down in the 80s, as I don't remember it being there when we did our scouting trips to COPH in 1989.

My first ruin

I was born in the Hilltop section of Columbus--the far western edge of that area, where the houses were modest but well-kept (still are, in fact). When I was in the third grade, we moved to Upper Arlington, a more upper-middle-class suburb. As a result, I never learned about the building on Broad St. that you could see from I-70, right where it curves and goes over Broad. It was a huge brick Victorian structure, and I just always assumed it was a college or university or somesuch (it resembled University Hall at OSU a little bit).

When I was at OSU, I found out what it was: a giant, abandoned insane asylum known as the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital. The Columbus Dispatch used to have a Sunday magazine and they did an article on it, full of interior shots. At that point, the deteriorating north wing had been torn down, and the building was thus truncated. This building was a legend on the Hilltop (and one of the reasons why it was known as the part of town where the crazy people lived.)

This building was huge (the article I read claimed it was the largest under one roof until the Pentagon) and featured such interesting features as tracks in the basement to transport food to all the wings. But for me, this was my introduction to urban ruins. I was fascinated by the building. And one summer day in 1989, the guy I was dating and I drove there, parked in the park at the base of the hill, and scaled its slopes to capture a couple of photos. In the first one, I purposely framed it so that you could not tell the north wing was missing.





The building was torn down in 1991. I had left for Toronto in August, 1990, and was surprised to see it gone on one of my first trips home. I had had hopes that it could be repurposed, but it was too large, probably too decrepit, was missing its north wing, and was just downright creepy to most people.

While composing this post I found out a little more about it. It was a Kirkbride Building, part of an idealistic movement towards more humane treatment of the mentally ill in the late 19th centuries, although they eventually tended to become overcrowded, awful places. These buildings were immense, built to the same floor plan, and most of them are now either derelict or have been torn down. (I just found the website on these buildings, and will probably now have to spend a few days wandering through--I never knew there were so many!) Their page on this building has some excellent photos.

I also found an interesting story on the building.

COPH (or the Columbus State Hospital) retains a fond place in my memories. It was replaced by a huge office complex where Dave and I went to get abstracts of our driving records before moving back to Toronto. I had wondered whether I could still feel the ruins there (in some cases, I can) but unfortunately, they're now too far gone.

A day that shall live in infamy...

Not a lot of time today, but time enough to mention one of the saddest ruins I know:


And the iconic image of how she got there:


She is still leaking about a quart of oil a day to the surface.

Halifax Explosion anniversary

Today marks the 92nd anniversary of the Halifax Explosion. Estimates are that over 2000 people died and 9000 were injured in the explosion, caused by the collision of two ships in the harbour and the subsequent fire, which ignited the WWI-bound explosive carried by the French ship. More people from Nova Scotia died in the explosion than actually died in WWI. Its record as the largest accidental man-made explosion persists to this day--and a one-mile blast radius around the explosion was made uninhabitable.

There are a number of good sites with information about the disaster:
Regional Municipality of Halifax site

Comprehensive site on the explosion

A short film about one of the heroes of the disaster


Here are a few images of the explosion and its aftermath:














(thanks to Micaylah for reminding me of the anniversary!)

Hotel of Doom!

Across the street from my building, the new Trump Tower is going up. Since it's just across the street from the former site of the Bay Adelaide Stump, I've heard people calling it the Trump Stump. All kinds of rumours continue to swirl that they're only building eight floors (well, since there are 11 up now, guess that kind of quashes that one) or that they're going to quit building because The Donald and his hair have pulled out of the project. These people obviously don't know the Toronto Real Estate market.

But it reminded me of my favourite unfinished, ruinous hotel. Yep, folks, it's time to have a look at the Hotel of Doom, the "worst building in the history of mankind", #3 in a recent CNN list of World's Ugliest Buildings:



This is the Ryugyong Hotel, the pride of Pyongyang. It's 105 stories tall and those sides are at a 75 degree angle (described by one commenter as "just plain wrong."). And it's unfinished. It was started in 1987, and was meant to have 3,000 rooms and a casino. Because North Korea is just such a HUGE tourist destination, you know...



It was supposed to open in 1989. It never did. In fact, nothing more than the concrete superstructure was completed. It was abandoned in 1992. After that point it was stricken from maps and residents of the city would not talk about it. It had once been proudly displayed on stamps. Now it was airbrushed out of city views.



It looks even creepier from above:


View Larger Map

You can see from the picture below how the hotel absolutely dominates the skyline--and yet, people would pretend it's not there.



However, you'll note something interesting about this 2009 photo: they've started work on it again. Being North Korea, they're pretty cagy about the whole project, but it looks like an Egyptian company is planning to use it for world's tallest, creepiest cellphone tower. One side of the hotel has gotten its glass claddding, and the top part appears to be finished on the outside. There is serious doubt, however, as to whether it can ever be a functional building due to the poor quality of the concrete used to construct it. The Egyptian company seems to think so...

A thin veneer of the past

You don’t often find ruins and boarded up buildings in downtown Toronto, but until a year and a half ago, you could see one of the city’s oldest buildings at Adelaide and Simcoe St, boarded up and slowly decaying. The group of townhouses known as Bishop’s Block were built around 1829 or 1830, making them some of the oldest extant buildings in Toronto. Their unassuming nature and relative ugliness made them easy to miss—I drove by them hundreds of times before realizing just how old they were. They last saw occupants in the 1970s, but before that were once fashionable middle-class homes in Victorian Toronto and may have even been part of Toronto’s first hotel.

It was that fairly recent discovery that probably saved them—although how much will be saved is up for some debate. They were dismantled, brick by brick, to be resurrected as part of the new Shangri-La hotel now going up on the site. Some fascinating and revealing archaeological excavations also took place on the site.

I found a slightly cheezy but fairly cool set of photos on YouTube that show the building not long before its demise:



The buildings themselves were heavily decayed, and given the articles I’ve read on the project, about the only thing likely to be preserved are facades. (This has been justified on the grounds that the interiors were nothing like what was originally built in the 19th century). The contractor responsible for that part of the project recently completed a more ambitious facading project—the National Building—just up the street from where I work. However, the main architects (ERA) for the Bishop’s Block project are also responsible for the work on two former abandoned sites, the Distillery district and the Carlu, so their historic preservation creds are pretty solid. I’ll be curious to see what emerges.


The National Building was completed in 1926 in the classic Chicago style of early skyscrapers. It never became a complete ruin and had occupants almost right up to the point that it was dismantled, but had apparently been sloppily repaired over the years and, again, was “unsalvageable.” However, the façade had a certain elegance to it and was in keeping with nearby Bay St. architecture, so the decision was made by the architects to save the west and north facades and incorporate them into the building. The facades were carefully dismantled, repaired, and then reerected as part of the new Bay Adelaide Centre.

I’ve taken a couple of photos of the results (although I'll have to post tomorrow as I accidentally deleted them off my new camera). Historical preservation was not really the focus of this particular project, and the whole idea of “facading” as a way to preserve history has not gotten a lot of good press. I do not believe any effort was made to preserve any of the interiors in this particular case. Right now, none of the ground-floor offices are occupied, and the whole structure looks curiously shiny and new.

It should also be noted that just to the south of the National Building was another building of about the same height apparently so forgettable that it doesn’t even appear on Emporis.com. It was torn down floor by floor by welders who carefully took apart its steel frame. You could follow along with the progress as someone had spray-painted the floor numbers prominently on the outside of the structure. This one looked to date from perhaps the 50s and its departure apparently unmourned.

And another “building”—a structure that was a ruin almost from the day it was built—was also torn down. This was the infamous Bay Adelaide Stump:




It was the only remnant of a failed office tower project that was a victim of the recession of the early 90s. I watched this one come down bit by bit from the 10th story lunchroom in my building just to the south and west, and wish I had taken a few photos, as it made a beautiful, if transitory, ruin. Luckily lots of others did.

Ghost Train Stations

Interesting article in the New York Times today (with pictures) of three former train stations (aboveground) in the Bronx. You can read it here.

It's interesting to look at the different fates of the three stations in the article. One is derelict. Another is a gun club. The third is a small strip mall.

I'm familiar with two train stations that were abandoned, then reclaimed. In Columbus, OH there is a very nifty train station that now serves as a fire station.

I remember this particular building when it used to be a Volunteers of America office and was pretty much crumbling.


Unfortunately, the only thing left of Columbus' main train station is the Union Station Arch:




The other reclaimed train station is in Toronto. It was once the Summerhill CP station and is now an LCBO store (and a particularly good one--this where they keep all of the expensive scotch):



Apparently the tower is modeled after the Campanile di San Marco in Venice. It closed shortly after WWII and remained boarded up until its reopening in 2004. Wikipedia tells us over 4,000 lbs of pigeon droppings had to be removed when the restoration was undertaken.

The Ur-Ruin Site

...at least for me.

Until about ten years ago I had no idea that anyone else besides me found decrepit old buildings at all interesting.

Then I ran across the work of Camilo Vergara, specifically the book American Ruins. An article about the book pointed me to what I call the "Ur-Ruin site": The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

Warning: You can get lost there for days upon days.

Detroit itself is a ruin, or perhaps a relic. There are sporadic attempts to rebuild on the old foundations, perhaps like Rome. Rome's population declined from over a million during the Empire to perhaps 20,000 during the Early Middle ages, "reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation." (as per Wikipedia). Is this where Detroit is going?

I realized, of course, when I saw these pictures, that I had seen this before. In 1984 I had traveled to Detroit on a church youth mission trip. I think we were helping a struggling church with some basic painting and maintenance and such. Obviously, that's not what stuck in my mind. We drove downtown. On the way in, we passed neighbourhoods consisting of empty lots and decaying, grand houses (I would later identify this neighbourhood as Brush Park). In the middle of the city itself was a street where nearly every storefront was boarded up. We had entered what Vergara has termed the "skyscraper burial ground." It was quiet and empty and seemed very wrong. Here were buildings that once teemed with life, forgotten.

The word that describes Detroit best is cavernous. It abounds with huge, empty, abandoned spaces--once elegant or functional, now just silent and empty. Tiger Stadium, where I first saw a major-league baseball game on that trip in 1984, was cavernous. It is now almost completely gone.

I will come back to Detroit--to Brush Park and the skyscraper graveyard, in particular, but also to the occasional sign of hope. It still makes me feel like crying.

My life is ruined...

My fascination with ruins can be firmly dated to my final year in high school. I had a wonderful British Literature teacher named Mr Wagner who spent as much time teaching about the lives of the poets and authors and the places talked about in their works as we did reading the works themselves. It worked--I still remember snippets about Chaucer, or Milton, or Keats or Elizabeth Barrett Browning after nearly twenty-five years.

As part of this, we studied Wordsworth, specifically "Tintern Abbey." (The name of the poem is much longer, but that's what everyone knows it as.) If you don't know the poem, it's here.

I particularly liked Wordsworth and the way he evokes nature, but what made it for me is that Mr. Wagner showed us photos he had taken when he had visited the actual Tintern Abbey. It was a ruin. (I later heard it's been called the most romantic ruin in all of England). Here's a website with some lovely shots.

I had fallen in love with my first ruin. It presaged my eventual move to study classical history, which is full of ruins and relics of all sort, but what I didn't realize at the time is that ruins could be found everywhere, and didn't need to be several centuries old to be evocative.

Ruins and relics give us a tangible piece of a different time. We can close our eyes, make open roofs whole again, reconstruct crumbling pillars, and see them once again bustling with activity. Ruins happen for all kinds of reasons. Civilizations rise and fall, the economy changes, disasters and wars happen, or perhaps only peoples' tastes change. Some are made through tragedy, others merely by abandonment and neglect. Some ruins are nearly or completely invisible, but the ghosts of what were once there remain if you listen quietly.

Some ruins and relics are not buildings at all. Some of them are written works. I met several of these while working on my doctorate--the manuscripts that existed in fragmentary form, inviting you to solve the puzzle of what is missing. Some are musical works.

One of these musical works was the source of the name of this blog. One of the very last songs ever written by Joy Division before the suicide of Ian Curtis was a song called Ceremony. It exists in four recordings. Two were made before Curtis' death and are both deeply flawed. One is a live performance where the vocals are barely audible until the second chorus--although the instrumentals are powerful and driving. The other is a studio rehearsal rescued from a scratchy more-or-less home recording, where (again) the vocals are garbled. Two recordings were made afterward by New Order (formed of the remnants of Joy Division) and sound like almost nothing else the group subsequently did. Having no written lyrics, they recreated them by playing the recordings that existed over and over again until they more or less figured them out. Ceremony, therefore, is a musical ruin. Joy Division was a ruin when it was recorded, and like sometimes happens with ruins, a new edifice was being built on its still stable foundations.

The sung portion of the song ends thusly:
Oh I'll break them down, no mercy shown
Heaven knows, it's got to be this time,
Avenues all lined with trees,
Picture me and then you start watching,
Watching forever

Ruins watch us forever. I will be watching them regularly in this space.