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Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City
Photography, building histories, and essays that make visual connections to hidden themes of community heritage, dislocation, demolition, and neighborhood change
“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 Ghosts features 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 Ghosts is an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.
“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 Ghosts features 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 Ghosts is an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2024
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December 15, 2025
Terraced housing is a simple thing, as anyone English will tell you, but American housing policy being even worse than ours, it can become complicated if one house in the terrace becomes incredibly dilapidated, affecting the structural integrity of those around them. This is a book about the holes that resulted from a gradual and then, it seems more recently, mass demolition programme of declining 'row houses' in Philadelphia, and the multicoloured walls and patches of miserable grass that result. A bleak but comprehensive study, animated through the stories of the people who lived in these disappeared houses, with appropriately haunted photographs, but hard not to think 'how can you screw things up this much' upon reading it, until you remember things aren't that much different in lots of the UK, only we had the gumption to call the resulting patches of scrub a 'Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder'.
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