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.