(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2015.)
All along the derelict valleys…
“The DNR Waltz”
Wooden Wand
I’m not really sure how I got on the realtor’s direct-mailing list. I mean, I know what demographic tick boxes probably got me on their mailing list (33, mostly white, male, Master’s Degree, employed in a white-collar job at a local university, straight, single, childless). But obviously that quantified self misses that I am neither willing nor able to spend upwards of $250,000 on a remodeled rowhouse.
I am a fairly late arrival to the neighborhood, Lawrenceville. Moved here two years ago. I showed the postcard to a friend who’s got a few decades on me and who is Lawrenceville born-and-fled. In addition to disbelief about the price, he couldn’t get over the large gray splotch on the front of the building; evidence of some patch job that was never painted red like the rest of the brick.
That patch that hadn’t even registered for me.
I apologize if what you’re about to read is too personal. If Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of spaces is too naive, if applying Walter Benjamin’s “baroque cult of the ruin” to post-industrial space too glib, if the thinking is not (or too) fashionable. Too scattered or too reductive, all I can write is what is first in my mind. If the words don’t reverberate then at least I have done no harm.
I was doomed from the start.
I grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1980s and 1990s, with a melancholy bent that would eventually be medicalized as “Depressive Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified”. That wouldn’t happen until well into adulthood, though – apparently if you tested well, then your grades never fell far enough for people to get too worried about you. Not being particularly ambitious or really understanding the idea of goals…well, anyway.
Connellsville was a town built on coke (the steel-production material, not the drug or the drink). Always a trendsetter, the town started deindustrializing early – changes in steel-making procedures in Pittsburgh moved coke production closer to the mills. It had years to carve its large, turreted houses up into small apartments before suburbanization made that a common rental strategy. But since coke production involved long rows of beehive ovens rather than large factories, there wasn’t much in the way of large, brick buildings lying around. Most of the unused industrial infrastructure was transportational. An out-of-commission elevated train trestle loomed over the west side of the city throughout my childhood (its last pieces were torn down in 2003). Most of those old train tracks are now bike trails, crossing bridges above rivers and junkyards.
I don’t know enough regional US history to confirm, but I suspect the area’s culturally a mix of the urban steel industry of Pittsburgh and the rural Appalachians (geologically situated on the Allegheny Plateau, a subregion of the Appalachian range). While the entire area is not quite LBJ Poverty Tour photo op material, thanks in part to its geographic proximity to Pittsburgh and a constantly-increasing tourism industry, more than a few areas tend towards dilapidation.
So that’s who I am: a child of a region whose architecture might be described as “deregulatory post-industrial vernacular”, whose mind bends easily towards sadness and loss. Key personality traits not present in the demography that suggested I would be interested in purchasing a building whose value was based on an appearance of age. A building whose remodeling was either likely to be cheaply supplied and cheaply installed for maximum profit, or otherwise so historically accurate in its materials and construction that maintaining it would be feasible on a budget much larger than my own.
But I don’t want the remodeling. I want depointed brick and amateur patch jobs and cracked concrete and outdoor/indoor carpet and suspended ceilings and fake wood paneling and linoleum.
“Utilitarian” feels too long term for this “whatever works fastest and cheapest” vernacular. But even still, it’s cultural masculinism, isn’t it? Hostility toward decisions made for surfaces, curtains and throw pillows and area rugs, anything that covers the building materials without knowing its place, these “feminine touches” that soften and deny that which is below, that which forms the barrier between the inside and the outside.
Jane Tompkins West of Everything reads an era of American film westerns as foundational myths of masculinity, origin stories of a nation and the men who made it safe by dividing inside civilization from outside civilization. John Ford framing John Wayne’s form in a doorway at the end of The Searchers becomes a thesis for an entire philosophy: sometimes the man is necessary for civilization even though he cannot come inside it. He does not need it’s comfort and so is free of its bounds. It’s a lie.
But a comforting one to some, and one that has staying power. Of course now it’s not at civilization’s beginning, but at its end. The post-apocalypse is the inverse of the Western, where the necessary behaviors do not predate the society but last beyond it. Those soft spaces were as fleeting as a dream, it says, and anything that benefitted you then was a luxury. But now you will return to what is real, what is outside, what is uncovered.
And certainly the kinds of architecture decay that we can see in our daily life draw on this idea. Like the members of Benjamin’s Baroque ruin-cults, we can latch on to this bit of the past, this proof that something can survive.
And then they patch it up. It’s like a museum skeleton, a blend of fossil and not-sil made to disappear into a whole. The soft tissue is gone; there are no memories here, just the suggestion of them. “Are you that naive? Do you honestly believe those are real fossils?” “Does it matter?”
But being like a museum skeleton is not the same as being a museum skeleton. These are spaces that have been lived through, surfaces and structures that carry a host of their own meanings. There aren’t a whole lot of uses for fossils outside of museums, except as decoration for people who can afford them, and things like tax breaks and robber-baron-guilt-assuaging cultural institutions provide a mechanism for ego and preservation that don’t exclude nearly as many people from seeing them.
In 1976 the Society for Industrial Archaeology published a handbook for “the adaptive use of industrial buildings”, claiming in its introduction that cost-conscious real estate developers would do well to look at unused industrial buildings in urban areas because refitting them could be more cost-effective than new suburban development. Existing building infrastructure could be reused and returning to denser urban spaces would mean less driving.
But it would take several more oil crises and recessions and burst bubbles and a whole host of other socioeconomic factors would line up so that, well, people could make money off of white people moving to cities. Knock down the minimum amount you can, restain some floors and you’re good to go.
What’s getting used in this reuse? Not just inexpensive, solid, reconfigurable spaces that white cube for your expensive cocktail or locavore appetizer, but that idea of a past. Real Work has been done here. Man’s Work. Man-ufacturing. An authenticity not immanent but imminent, ascribed by and inscribed into its age, its survival. The surfaces shout in your face, twisting Darwin just as much as the robber barons who built it originally, say that what has survived is what is fittest and don’t you want to spend a few more dollars?
I tell myself that’s not what I’m doing when I walk through these spaces after they’ve started falling apart, when I point my camera at a wall and reduce it to light and shadow and texture and color. There’s a bit of a thrill of exploration, trespassing and documenting. Like finding an abandoned outhouse in the woods. But what’s the cost, to me and to them?
These spaces strike me. They reverberate (thanks, Bachelard!) with my past and remind me of other times, other places I’ve been and places I haven’t. But also, because I’m a stranger to these decaying places, a temporal tourist, they hold little concrete meaning for me. I didn’t grow up among them, didn’t see them every day and need to get away. I don’t remember the active mills, the fire and smoke and dirt that I expect were already being blown away even while the baby boomers grew up.
They were the first ones who couldn’t follow their fathers into the mill and the mine (my grandfather Mills was an engineer with Westinghouse. Were I of that generation, would I have been, too? Or would I have been -ugh- management? Probably management).
My mouth is too smart and my attitude too proud (and my arms too scrawny and my fingers too pianist) to believe that I would have been on the floor. So not only am I a temporal tourist, I’m an occupational one as well.
It sometimes feels ghoulish, reminds me of being an undergraduate and seriously considering a photo essay of the homeless. Relying on what’s in front of the camera to do the heavy lifting through cliche. But instead of exploiting people’s images to show my own, I don’t know, artistic social consciousness, I’m taking their spaces. Taking their memories. Where I have no history, where there’s no “too contingent history of the persons who encumbered it” (Bachelard, 8).
But there’s an even crueler thing going on. Draping myself in their memories, swaddling myself in their shoulder-chips,I will them to stagnate and decay so as to relieve the psychic pressure of possibility that I find so difficult to deal with. It’s not motivated by not wanting others to have positive change; it’s a fear of bad things happening to me that get a everything all mixed up. Only bad things can come from change, inevitable and entropic, things falling apart; what’s more natural than that?
Because it’s a bad idea to hold onto architecture as something unchanging, a foundation on which a shaky mind can try to stabilize itself, and yet – I guess that’s what photographing them does.
It’s impossible to do these things without romanticizing the space of poverty, at least a little bit. If not romanticizing, then at least reducing. The photographs are disconnections; they don’t capture smells and sounds. They rip away all the events that led to that moment and all the possibilities that could come from it.
And this photography doesn’t even have the reassuring chemical / luminological continuity that was so important to Barthes. You can’t trace a path of light to chemical to light to chemical to light for a digital photograph of a blast furnace like Barthes could with the photo of his mother.
Me, my camera, we can walk into and out of these places. We can take things from them- experiences, images – without putting anything back. We’re not making condos or disrupting service industries. We don’t gesture a smartphone app toward a rusted blast furnace while proclaiming, “this will unkill that!”
I can tell myself that we’re not taking these spaces away from anyone. We’re not telling people that their property will be worth more, with the unspoken, “so sell it and get out”. A walk through a dense brick street, photos of peeling paint and rusting iron; maybe an outsider’s view can capture what’s there, guide others’ eyes without being turned into someone’s scout, someone’s blockbuster.
Do I honestly believe these are reasons and not rationalizations?
Am I that naive?