Think of ruin in two stages. One is the force—neglect or abandonment, human violence, natural disaster—that transforms buildings into ruins. Ruins can be created slowly or suddenly, and they can survive indefinitely or be cleared away. The second stage of ruin is the abandonment or the appreciation that allows the ruin to remain as a relic—as evidence, as a place apart, outside economies and utilitarian purposes, the physical site that corresponds to room in the culture or imagination for what came before. The forces that create ruins have been plentiful in the United States, but the desire or neglect that allows the ruins to stay has been mostly absent. The great urban ruins have been situated on what is, first of all, real estate, more than it is sacred ground or historical site; and real estate is constantly turned over for profit, whereas a ruin is a site that has fallen out of the financial dealings of a city (unless it has become a tourist site, like the Roman Colosseum).
Poverty, Lucy Lippard once remarked, is a great preserver of history. From New England through the Rust Belt, the poverty of lost jobs and old industries has left behind a ruinous landscape of abandoned factories and city centers, as has white flight and urban disinvestment in cities such as Detroit. We detonate our failed modernist housing projects, along with outdated Las Vegas casinos, as though we were striking sets; demolition telescopes the process of ruination from damage to disappearance. Only in the remote places—the abandoned boomtowns of nineteenth-century mining rushes, old plantation mansions, the withering small towns of the Great Plains—is nature allowed to proceed with its program of ruin. And in the destitute ones: descriptions of a ruinous and half-abandoned inner-city Detroit suggest that it is becoming our Pompeii, or perhaps our Antigua, destroyed not by earthquake or lava but by racially driven economic abandonment and its side effects.
This is the paradox of ruins: they represent a kind of destruction, but they themselves can be destroyed and with them the memory of what was once there and what it confronted. Munich and Cologne in Germany, Birmingham and Coventry in England, and many other European cities keep traces of their wartime ruins on hand as reminders of not only the past but the present insecurity and uncertainty of all things, the architectural equivalent of vanitas paintings, those ubi sunt and sic transit gloria mundi statements. Hiroshima’s Peace Dome is a well-known monument to the atomic bomb dropped on that city, a monument with far more meaning than the building had before the bomb, when it was the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall.
In the haste to remove the hundreds of thousands of tons of wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center buildings and replace them with a newly made monument, one can see a deep anxiety about what ruins commemorate: ephemerality, vulnerability, and mutability. The singular urbanist and ex–New Yorker Jane Jacobs commented that we don’t know what the disaster means yet and that it is too soon to build something; the instant memorial seems part of the therapeutic language of “closure” that was deployed again and again in the immediate aftermath of the towers’ collapse, a word that seemed to mean that meaning itself could come to an end, a conclusion. Ruins are open to the eye, the sky, the elements, change, and interpretation.
When the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001, a kind of American innocence, a widespread belief in American impunity, fell with it. This belief was itself shocking, premised as it was on the notion that we were somehow beyond the reach of the forces, natural and political, that devastate other countries, situated in an ignorance or inability to identify with the victims of death squads, genocides, wars, industrial disasters, with the inhabitants of Bhopal, Chernobyl, Guatemala, Rwanda, Iraq. This belief was rooted not only in American exceptionalism but in amnesia—about the swath of devastation Sherman left across the Civil War South; about the devastation of Galveston, Charleston, Chicago, and other major cities by natural forces; about the essential vulnerability of individuals and communities; about mortality itself; and perhaps about the devastation the United States has wrought elsewhere (Kabul and Baghdad were ravaged on a far grander scale than New York, with far more deaths, many eyes for an eye, in devastations that again seemed unfelt and unimagined for many in whose name they were carried out). There is always an implication in American discourses on death and illness that they are optional, that the cure for cancer or heart disease is in some way a cure for death. As a hospice worker once told me, in this country we regard death as failure.
But death is as inevitable to life as ruins are to buildings, and the death of individuals is not the death of communities. The 2002 movie Gangs of New York contains a small commentary on this in its closing frames. Two characters look across the water at southern Manhattan, afire in the draft riots of the 1860s, and a dissolve turns the skyline into the pre-9/11 view dominated by the Trade Towers. This too, these last frames seem to say, shall pass; we shall rise again, as New York has from the far more pervasive devastation of the 1970s and 1980s. Of these destructions, only photographs stand as memorials now.
San Francisco evicted even the dead from its land in the first half of the twentieth century (only a small military cemetery, an even smaller Spanish missionary church cemetery, and the Richmond District Columbarium of cremated remains survive). This was done essentially for economic reasons, but the effect was to eliminate death from the scene along with the dead, those who had inhabited the earlier versions of the city. Of the San Francisco earthquake, no clear evidence exists, only absences: the lack of nineteenth-century buildings throughout most of the city (though in 1906 the southern and western edges were still undeveloped). A number of landmark structures survived the earthquake and fire and were rebuilt, often almost into unrecognizability. But of 1906 ruins as ruins, nothing survives except the “Portals of the Past,” the neoclassical portico from a ruined Nob Hill mansion that was transported to Golden Gate Park, where it looks more like a stage set than a relic, for it now frames foliage whereas once it framed a mansion’s entryway and then the smoldering wreck of the city beyond where the mansion stood. Before and after the 1906 earthquake, the portals framed no vista, opened onto no long view: it is as though only for that moment of disaster was another vision, a more far-seeing sense of place and time, opened up, and the haste to reconstruct was in part haste to close that vision. Perhaps that vision is the view that all ruins offer us.
Ironically, it was earthquake rubble that became the ground of the Marina District so devastated in 1989; landfill liquefies in an earthquake, which is why the downtown and Mission Bay buildings rest on massive pilings driven below the landfill layers. Mission Bay was once a bay into which Mission Creek drained after its meander from near Mission Dolores. That bay was filled in to build the central railyard of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the great octopus that held all California’s politics and economy in its tentacles, and it fell into ruin when the age of the railroads came to an end. The ruins made the place haunted and abandoned—for abandoned is our term for places inhabited by outcasts and wildlife—an open space in the most densely populated U.S. city outside New York. Dream said the graffiti on an old boxcar, and it was a kind of dreamspace, open to memory, possibility, danger, outside the economy, as ruins almost always are. These ruins were destroyed to build the Mission Bay biotechnology facilities at the end of the twentieth century. The railroads tamed the earth on one colossal scale; the biotech industry seeks to do so on another, more intimate one; and the one thing certain is that the labs atop the landfill will lie in ruins someday, by earthquake or by time itself. Perhaps even the buried bay will reappear, carved out again when Mission Creek reasserts itself and rises from its subterranean passages.
THE FIRST TEN DESTRUCTIONS OF SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco was in its infancy during the fire on Christmas Eve 1848, which destroyed more than a million dollars’ worth of property (at 1848 values) and burned down most of the buildings around Portsmouth Square, then the central plaza of the rough little boomtown risen from the Gold Rush. The authors of the Annals of San Francisco described the situation:
> This was the first of the great fires which devastated San Francisco; and it was speedily to be followed by still more extensive and disastrous occurrences of a similar character. Something of the kind had long been anticipated by those who considered the light, combustible materials of which the whole town was constructed. . . . Scarcely were the ashes cold when preparations were made to erect new buildings on the old sites; and in several cases within a few days, and in all, within a few weeks, the place was covered as densely as before with houses of every kind. These, like those that had just been destroyed, and like nearly all around, were chiefly composed of wood and canvas, and presented fresh fuel to the great coming conflagrations.
After this first great fire of San Francisco, five more would follow in the subsequent three and a half years, with the sixth erupting on the summer solstice, June 22, 1851. The third, the Annals recorded, destroyed five million dollars’ worth of property.
But in proportion to the unusual depression was the almost immediate reaction, and the ruined citizens began forthwith to lay the foundations of new fortunes instead of those so cruelly destroyed. . . . As the spider, whose web is again and again destroyed, will continue to spark new ones while an atom of material or a spark of life remains in its body, so did the inhabitants set themselves industriously to work to rear new houses and a new town. . . . From this time forward, we therefore began to notice, that the street architecture gradually assumed a newer and grander appearance.
It also assumed a more fireproof appearance, as brick replaced wood, though brick was a far worse material in earthquakes.
By 1850, the writers could say of a fire damaging about a million dollars’ worth of property, “Elsewhere such a fire might well be called a great one; but it was not so reckoned in the ‘Annals of San Francisco.’ ” The fifth fire was the largest of all, coming after eight months of “comparative immunity from conflagration.” This arson fire began on the night of May 3, 1851, on the south side of Portsmouth Square. It created a firestorm, burning between fifteen hundred and two thousand structures, most of the central city. Then the rebuilding began. (“Sour, pseudo-religious folk on the shores of the Atlantic, might mutter of Sodom and Gomorrah, and prate the idlest nonsense,” said the Annals writers, asserting that the catastrophe was no punishment and that there was no reason why the city should not rise again.)
The sixth great fire came about six weeks after the fifth one. These six fires “successively destroyed nearly all the old buildings and land-marks of Yerba Buena,” the original hamlet overtaken by the Yankees. There’s a saying to the effect that “this was my grandfather’s ax, though it’s had four new handles and three heads since his time,” the idea being that the continuity of use and of tradition is more powerful than the incessant replacement of materials. Something similar could be said of cities, except when memory is swept away with the masonry rubble. Memory is what makes it my grandfather’s ax rather than some worn-out piece of detritus; memory is meaning.
The seventh destruction of San Francisco was the great and oft-forgotten earthquake of October 21, 1868, a rupture on the Hayward Fault estimated at 7.0 on the Richter scale. Five people died, spires and chimneys fell, walls tumbled down, some brick buildings collapsed entirely, cracks opened up in the ground, the Custom House was damaged, and City Hall was devastated. And the city was rebuilt, with little regard for the San Francisco Morning Call’s editorial warning against shoddy construction, the use of cornices and other ornaments that could fall in a quake, building on landfill, and other seismically precarious practices: “The lives lost yesterday are not chargeable to the earthquake, but to the vanity, greed and meanness of those who erected the buildings.” When San Francisco was largely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the sixty-year-old city had already survived a series of destructions and rebuildings. After 1906—the city’s seventh fire and eighth destruction—the destructions would be about social forces out of control rather than natural ones.
At one o’clock in the morning on July 27, 1943, the British Air Force, with support from the U.S. Army, began bombing the city of Hamburg. “The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called,” writes W. G. Sebald, “was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes.” In this, it was eminently successful, and thousands died. On the eve of Valentine’s Day 1945, the same forces began dropping nearly four thousand tons of bombs on the city of Dresden, best known for its manufacture of china dishes, though it also produced gun sights, plane parts, and gas masks. Sixteen hundred acres of the central city, more than twenty-four thousand buildings, and somewhere between thirty and one hundred thousand people were destroyed in the firestorm, the fire so powerful that it incinerated people underground, created its own wind and weather, and moved faster than human beings could run. (Almost twice as many acres, nearly three thousand, were destroyed in San Francisco in 1906.) On August 6, 1945, in the culmination of the Manhattan Project, the first inhabited nuclear ground zero was created when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb killed somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand people in various terrible ways, some instantly, some slowly, and vaporized, shattered, irradiated, and ignited the central city. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In the photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, Nagasaki doesn’t look ruined, as San Francisco did after the earthquake; it looks shattered. Buildings have been torn into splinters and shards in which bodies lie, some of them charred; the force of the bomb is furious, vicious in ways the earthquake was not.
Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are still cities, though not the cities they were. But World War II also changed even American cities that were far out of reach of the war’s violence. The war did much to lift the Great Depression and created a huge demand for factory and shipyard workers, prompting a colossal migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities. San Francisco’s African American population increased ninefold between 1940 and 1950, and still more of these southerners migrated to nearby Oakland, Richmond, and Marin City to fill shipyard jobs. Pushed by discrimination and economics, many ended up in San Francisco’s Western Addition, the flatlands west of City Hall and Van Ness Avenue, which had been partly vacated by Japanese Americans forced into prison camps for the duration of the war.
Ironically, this was the most central neighborhood to have survived the 1906 earthquake. It was made up of wooden Victorian row houses with intricate ornamentation, bay windows, and, often, storefronts built into the ground floor. After the quake, businesses and city administration had relocated to Fillmore Street, the central artery of the Western Addition, while the city to the east was rebuilt. Through World War II and afterward, Fillmore was a lively street of theaters, dance halls, and music clubs, frequented in the postwar years by some of the greatest jazz musicians of the time.
By 1947, however, plans were being laid to erase this neighborhood. The word used over and over until it became a mantra and a justification was “blight,” a word that was supposed to describe the poor condition of the housing and its alleged infestation by vermin but that was in fact a code word for the human inhabitants, just as “urban renewal” was recognized as code for what was also caustically described as “negro removal.” The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency declared, “San Francisco is now developing programs to correct blighted and congested conditions and to deal with an accumulation of housing that is continuously aging and deteriorating faster than it is being rehabilitated or replaced. . . . More than 50 percent of the structures are past middle age with an estimated average age of sixty-seven years. It is this condition which results in neighborhood blight and calls for both major public improvement and private rehabilitation and reconstruction.” Hundreds of wooden Victorian buildings were reduced to splinters, though preservationists managed to relocate some. The “past middle age” houses that survived redevelopment are now more than a century old, handsome, and worth more than a million dollars apiece
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Into the 1960s, campaigns to devastate this neighborhood were carried out. The rhetoric of urban renewal was that bad housing would be replaced with good housing—and good was defined in those squeamish modernist terms as efficient, up-to-date, and orderly. The truly urban mixing of classes, activities, and households was seen as disorderly, as almost a form of blight itself. (Interestingly enough, proponents of the “new urbanism” and other contemporary urbanists seek to restore those qualities of mixed use and vibrancy to the anesthetized cityscapes and suburbias of the modern era.) In fact, though a number of barracklike housing projects were built (most of which have been destroyed in the past several years as inimical to safety and well-being, to be replaced by townhouses more closely resembling the earlier dwellings), many square blocks of the heart of the Fillmore were left vacant for decades, lots full of weeds, surrounded by Cyclone fences.
The agenda all along had not been the creation of better housing for the inhabitants but their replacement by more affluent inhabitants and increased profits for developers and landowners. This debacle and urban renewal’s subsequent destruction of the South of Market residential hotels, inhabited largely by poor single retirees, particularly union longshoremen, constitute the ninth destruction of San Francisco. Like the earlier destructions, this devastation was not complete, but it turned once densely inhabited expanses into wastelands and signified the end of an era—in this case, the era of San Francisco as a blue-collar town. (Earlier, some of San Francisco’s elite had hoped to use the 1906 earthquake as an opportunity to relocate Chinatown, which had been pretty comprehensively destroyed, from the east flank of Nob Hill to a remote edge of the city; happily, they hoped in vain.)
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 39
