The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Time and time again, the residents of the Crescents remember the music. James writes:

  My fondest memory might be the solitary one of placing the needle on Power Corruption and Lies for the first time after buying the album the day it came out. To me, barely in my 20s, that record summed up the existential dread of Hulme, along with the freedom and creative possibilities it incited in anyone who could cope with the quotidian smell of piss in the stairwells and lifts and the dog shit everywhere, like a magic carpet of despair.

  James shared his flat with a drummer, and together they blacked out the front room and lined it with egg cartons to form a makeshift recording studio. They weren’t the only ones: Lloyd ran two pirate radio stations out of the third floor in the Charles Barry Crescent, moving his gear to empty and inaccessible flats every time he got wind of a visit from the police. Joy Division came to pose for grainy, gray photographs on the concrete decks; bIG*fLAME, “Britain’s premier jazz fuck trio,” was born in the Crescents in 1982. A Certain Ratio, A Guy Called Gerald, Finlaye Quaye, the Inspiral Carpets, and many other bands jammed in the Crescents, recording and performing in the makeshift studios and clubs that riddled the buildings with endless thrashing, thumping, pulsating noise.

  Around the middle of the eighties the music of Hulme started to change. The new bands weren’t beautiful, and their lyrics weren’t deep. An album from the Happy Mondays was titled Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, and that’s more or less what it was about: it was a drug thing. Punk rock had been a beer thing—at least you threw your pint across the room when you were listening (if that is the word) to it. Tony Wilson’s brand of postpunk was a weed thing: you reverently placed the needle on the record and lay back on your bed, waiting for that sense of existential dread to surge through you. But the new rave music of the late eighties was all about the pills: speed, acid, and, above all, ecstasy—chemicals that kept you dancing and grinning all night, all the next day, and all the way through the night after that. It didn’t matter how stupid the music was.

  And that’s when the Crescents started to eat themselves. It began at a party in 1989. It was just an after-party at first, a few folk getting together in a kitchen after the clubs had closed to dance off the last of their drugs; but before long, things got out of hand. Everyone had brought their mates, and soon the kitchen was so crowded that no one could breathe, let alone dance. Bruce can just about remember what happened: “I recall Jamie taking a jackhammer to the wall of his flat to start a club? . . . But that resulted in him getting all his studio gear nicked?” They had knocked a hole through the wall to the flat next door, you see. And when more people showed up, they did it again. And when still more people turned up, they did it a third time. By the time Jamie put his jackhammer away, they had knocked through several walls and floors, so that the former kitchen was now an infernal cavern rammed with sweaty bodies and thumping bass.

  There was a massive sound system in the front room—the downstairs kitchen had been turned into a bar selling Red Stripe, and the whole block seemed to ooze spliff. Not that it matters because every one is E’d up—gonzoid-eyed and scrunched-up faces leering into the dark haze. Careful as you wander around that staircase that sort of goes to the second floor.

  Soon enough the parties started taking over the whole place, making it more or less uninhabitable for anyone who wasn’t dancing. Gonnie recalls

  the memorable Hulme Demolition Sound System, not so much because of their music selection, but more because they set up in the little shopping precinct to play techno from Wednesday into Thursday morning, after the clubs had closed until the shops had opened, with just one police patrol car popping by to check the proceedings. Desert Storm Danny on the decks and his mate Joe running around to motivate people. While elderly people shuffled past to get their breakfast milk on a grey Thursday morning, there would still be a few people dancing on the precinct roofs and others sitting around on sofas and easy chairs that had been abandoned in flats ready for demolition.

  The city fathers who had destroyed the slums of Hulme in 1934 could not have, in their worst nightmares, imagined the brave new world that had taken their place.

  AS EARLY AS 1986, the Manchester city council had hosted a conference in which they tried to work out what to do with the Crescents. They clearly didn’t hold out much hope for a happy ending: the meeting was titled “Deck Access Disaster.” They’d tried everything. They had established a Housing Action Trust to deal with the renovation of the complex, but the residents ransacked the offices of the team that had been detailed to help them. They paid for a study to examine the social, economic, environmental, and housing situation of the area, but they soon gave up on the effort. Hulme didn’t look like a problem that could be solved, they said.

  It couldn’t be solved by Manchester on its own, anyway, and eventually the city turned to the central government for help. In 1991, Manchester was given a grant to address its biggest problem—not quite enough money to sort everything out, but at least enough to get the city council out of the landlord business. The official goal of the project, stated in bland bureaucratese, was the creation of a “safe, clean, and attractive” physical environment where people could have “accommodation which meets both their housing needs and their aspirations.” Ultimately, the planners hoped, “the local population . . . will have a long-term commitment to the area.”

  It was not not much to ask, one might think, compared to the demands of The Communist Manifesto or the Athens Charter. But for a place like the Hulme Crescents it was a marvelous vision, a future that for years had seemed possible only in the realms of fantasy.

  There was a price to pay, of course: this was a future in which the Crescents themselves could play no part. The city council approached the Dogs of Heaven, a local theater group, and asked them to concoct a crowning send-off, a fitting finale for the hell that the Crescents had become. On a clear night in March 1993, they pushed a car off the roof of the John Nash Crescent and lit the funeral pyre of a utopia that hadn’t turned out as anyone had planned. It was televised on the BBC’s Late Show.

  There is another film, a home movie, that records the events of the day after. It is blustery, but the music is still pulsing away. A ragged crowd is pulling bastard wagons cobbled together from doors and windows, car parts and kitchen units. They pile these fragments at the foot of a gigantic phoenix made from fragments of the concrete building behind them, and they dance as the firebird consumes the offered remnants of their homes.

  The Hulmans said good-bye to their Crescents in time-honored fashion. Graffiti on a concrete wall parodied the pronouncements of a council notice.

  Madchester City Council, cutting jobs, destroying services, selling your home . . .

  We have democratically decided that your homes are not important. Big business and yuppies have offered us large sums of money to have offices, posh shops, car parks, wine bars etc. in Hulme. One or two of you paid the poll tax. We have a few flats to offer you in Wythenshawe. You will not be able to come to the city and spoil our chances of attracting big business and the Olympics. For you scum who pay no poll tax, squat, or are too young or too old to be bothered with, we have a wide selection of park benches and cardboard boxes to offer you as accommodation. We apologize for any inconvenience.

  Go to Hulme today, and you won’t find a trace of the Crescents. Instead you’ll see a neat suburb of brick terraces and tidy gardens which look remarkably like the back-to-back cottages that Engels described, give or take a filthy urchin or two. The future of Hulme resembles nothing else so much as its past.

  THAT DOESN’T SOUND much like the prophecies, does it? But one should always be careful with prophecies. Engels knew that the fulfillment of his dreams could only come after a destructive revolution, and so did Le Corbusier, whose radiant city would have obliterated the cities of his own time. The New Jerusalem, they knew, could only appear at the Apocalypse.

  But they forgot that every future is followed by anot
her—that their blueprints for everlasting utopia would, like all plans, be cast aside in the pursuit of others they could not possibly foresee. It’s something the residents of Hulme found out again and again over the course of a century, as vision after vision was visited on them: crucible of revolution, modernist showcase, anarchist free-for-all, chemical paradise. Each of these is remembered with simultaneous nostalgia and horror by the people who were there.

  “No future, no future,” the Sex Pistols sang in one of their biggest hits. But it was the Futurists who put it best.

  The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

  They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

  But we won’t be there . . . At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

  They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

  Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.

  Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

  The Futurists. It sounds like a band from Manchester, doesn’t it?

  The Berlin Wall

  In Which History Comes to an End

  HISTORY FOR SALE

  A young boy sells pieces of the Berlin Wall, Potsdam Square,

  Berlin, 10 March 1990.

  THE END OF HISTORY

  The Parthenon is dissolving into the atmosphere, but preparations have been made for the conclusion of its story. Bernard Tschumi’s new museum at the foot of the Acropolis contains an empty space the same size as the temple, ready to receive its remains should it ever become necessary to transfer them indoors. This museum already houses all of the sculptures of the Parthenon that remain in Greece, and other plinths in it await the return of the marbles held in London and elsewhere. Once the temple has disappeared from its original location, its history will terminate in this mausoleum.

  The prophets of modernism tried to push the future toward a definitive end, seeking a utopian solution to all human strivings. Marx and Engels, for their part, posited history as a dialectic: a battle of ideas in the process of progressive resolution, century by century, iteration by iteration. The Architect’s Dream is the very image of such a process, in which building follows building in a sequence of improvements, from the pharaoh’s authoritarian tomb to the cathedral made by the willing hands of inspired craftsmen. Once the final revolution had been enacted and the human condition perfected, history itself would come to an end. Then the architect could rest on his column and gaze upon a world made complete, in which nothing need ever change again.

  History did come to an end of sorts, but not quite as the Marxists or the modernists had planned. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 10 November 1989 concluded what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the little twentieth century,” which began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, ran through the horrors of the trenches, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, through Nuremberg and the Prague Spring, and finished in Berlin. The events of that night represent the end of history, a term invented by the political economist Francis Fukuyama. Democratic capitalism defeated autocratic communism, bringing the last great ideological conflict to a close once and for all.

  But unlike the Hulme Crescents, the Berlin Wall, whose spectacular destruction marked Fukuyama’s “end of history,” was not obliterated. Indeed, as hated as it had been, the Wall soon took on something of the preciousness of the marble of the Parthenon, which dissolves and crumbles even as it is gathered. The strange afterlife of the Berlin Wall is the history of the end of history.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, an obscure woman stood on an obscure street in an obscure corner of Berlin. In front of her, section after section of concrete slab stretched away in a space devoid of buildings and people.

  The woman, who had hennaed hair, a broad face, a long black coat, and a cigarette in her mouth, stood on the cobbles looking to the West. She was scanning the concrete wall in front of her. Suddenly her eyes lit up, and she smiled. She waved at whatever, or whoever, she saw; then she glanced to the left and to the right, and her face fell. She turned on her heel with her head down and walked away, back East.

  Ute had never seen the Antifascist Protection Rampart before. Although she lived only a few hundred yards away, her journey to it had been dangerous and had involved months of preparation. She was not meant to be there. She had no idea what was behind the Antifascist Protection Rampart—other than fascists, she supposed, if that was what it was meant to be protecting them from. Ute had a map of Berlin in which, beyond the rampart, there was only terra incognita. The rampart was the western horizon of the world, and on winter evenings whatever was behind it cast a baleful light into the sky, as if even the sunsets had been organized on the cheap by the border guards. No one walked up to, touched, or crossed over the Antifascist Protection Rampart. At least, no one did any of those things and ever came back to tell the tale.

  ONE BRIGHT SUNDAY morning in 1961, a young officer of the German Democratic Republic put on a pair of walking boots. He packed his map, a bucket of white paint, and a paintbrush and headed toward the center of Berlin. Hagen Koch’s path began at the junction of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, and a crowd soon gathered there to watch him. He took out his can of white paint and the paintbrush, dipped the brush into the can of paint, and began a line on the cobbles.

  Hagen Koch was drawing a new meridian, a new equator, a new edge of the world, at which one ideological, political, economic, social, historical system came to an end and another began. The line he had painted was the line of the Berlin Wall.

  The government of the German Democratic Republic issued a pamphlet that attempted to answer questions about the Wall for those who might happen to be curious.

  Did the wall fall out of the sky?

  No. It was the result of developments of many years’ standing in

  West Germany and West Berlin.

  Did the wall have to come?

  Yes and no . . . The wall had to come because they (the West) were bringing about the danger of a conflict. Those who do not want to hear, must feel.

  What did the wall prevent?

  We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin . . . But we prevented something much more important with the wall: West Berlin’s becoming the starting point for a military conflict. The measures we introduced on 13 August in conjunction with the Warsaw Treaty states have cooled off a number of hotheads in Bonn and West Berlin. For the first time in German history the match which was to set fire to another war was extinguished before it had fulfilled its purpose.

  Was peace really threatened?

  It (the protective wall of the GDR) served the cause of world peace since it halted the advance of the German neo-Hitlerites toward the east.

  Who is walled in?

  According to the exceedingly intelligent explanations of the West Berlin Senate we have walled ourselves in and are living in a concentration camp . . . Does something not occur to you? West Berlin mayor Brandt wails that half of the GDR, including the workers in the enterprise militia g
roups, is armed. What do you think of a concentration camp whose inmates have weapons in their hands?

  Who breaks off human contacts?

  Of course, it is bitter for many Berliners not to be able to visit each other at present. But it would be more bitter if a new war were to separate them for ever.

  Does the wall threaten anyone?

  Bonn propaganda describes the wall as a “monstrous evidence of the aggressiveness of world communism.” Have you ever considered it to be a sign of aggressiveness when someone builds a fence around his property?