American Ruins [Hardcover]

Camilo J. Vergara (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 10, 2003

The deterioration of the American inner city stands in stark contrast to the prosperity characteristic of the United States for much of the twentieth century. Skyscrapers that once defined the modern era stand derelict and abandoned. Massive industrial manufactories lie rusting, their cavernous interiors dark. Formerly vibrant theaters shed bricks and terra-cotta ornaments. These desolate fragments of America's cityscapes are the legacy of decades of proud investment in the urban realm followed by decades of devastating neglect.

Photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara has spent years documenting the decline of the built environment in New York City; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Chicago; Gary, Indiana; Detroit; and Los Angeles. His photographic sequences—images of the same sites taken over the course of many years—show once-sturdy structures as ghostly ruins and then as empty lots or flimsy new buildings. Grand civic edifices—the Michigan Central Railroad Station in Detroit, the Essex County Jail in New Jersey, the Camden Free Public Library—have become empty, roofless shells, dusted with snow in the winter and filled with stray plant and animal life in the summer. Monumental commercial and industrial buildings such as RCA Victor's "Nipper" Building in Camden and the Packard Automobile Plant in Detroit bear broken windows and rubble-strewn interiors. At once a scathing critique of national indifference to the plight of the inner city and a meditation on the aesthetic impact of desolate and neglected buildings, American Ruins stands as a witness to a vanishing era of the American city.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Once proud and often eloquent sentinels of economic prosperity, America's deteriorating inner-city buildings are, in this unflinching socio-photodocumentary, caught in their death throes. Continuing Vergara's poignant eulogy to urban decay--begun with The New American Ghetto (1995) and Silent Cities (1989)--this project features 300 exteriors and interiors of 70 ghostly ruins. His camera deftly captures squalid Beaux Arts public palaces, reinforced-concrete industrial complexes, high-rise housing projects, and the flotsam of stores, factories, and homes. The accompanying text provides building and neighborhood histories, notes on style, an account of the way the buildings changed over separate visits, recitations of local reactions and responses, anecdotes about ghetto photography, and blistering social critique. Vergara proves a knowledgeable and engaging guide throughout. Highly recommended for all academic and specialized architecture, planning, and sociology collections.
-Russell T. Clement, Univ. of Tennessee Lib., Knoxville
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Camilo José Vergara is the author of Twin Towers Remembered and The New American Ghetto and coauthor of Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. He was awarded a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship. Since 1977 he has documented urban destruction throughout the United States as part of his New American Ghetto Archive; included in the archive are the South Bronx, Harlem, and North Central Brooklyn, New York; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; Gary, Indiana; Detroit, Michigan; and Los Angeles County (South Central, Downtown, East Los Angeles, Pacoima, Compton, Vernon, South Gate, and Huntington Park), California. Vergara has received numerous awards, including grants from the New York Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His photographs have been acquired by the New York Public Library, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the Chicago Historical Society, and Avery Library at Columbia University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: The Monacelli Press (November 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580930565
• ISBN-13: 978-1580930567
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 1.1 x 11.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,322,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How can a book on ruins give you hope? Read on... December 20, 1999

By Garrick

Format:Hardcover

Camilo Vergara's latest effort will appeal to those interested in both architectural and landscape photography, as well as urban activists, artists, writers, and even musicians. Vergara has the ability to draw on a variety of inspirations in his thoughtful analyses of forgotten urban America. Nominally about decaying buildings in Detroit, Newark, Chicago, and elsewhere; American Ruins goes deeper--exploring connections between buildings, art, sociology, psychology, and the natural environment.

The book is divided into sections based on ruins typology. This is a good approach, as it allows Vergara to show connections between cities and their related phenomena which might not otherwise have been apparent. His accounts of conversations with wary local residents and (usually) thoughtless politicians and developers invest the book with a jarring realism that juxtaposes effectively with the often dreamy and strangely beautiful photographs.

Another excellent attribute of this substantial book is its readability. In comparison with The New American Ghetto (Vergara's previous book), here Vergara separates his narrative into shorter separate, site-specific analyses, which makes it easy to ingest a few pages at a time and return for more later. It also makes it easy to move through the book in a non-linear fashion, based on your own visual interests.

This evocative work will be required reading for architects, preservationists, and artists. However, the sublime beauty of Vergara's photography should win him fans from many other persuasions. Perhaps in the end Vergara will succeed in his effort to, at least, bring appreciation for not just our sanitized and restored "landmarks," but for our most humble and neglected buildings--those which tell the story of this tumultous century in ways only this book reveals.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Derelict Buildings: Nostalgia or Nuisance February 7, 2000

By Robert Derenthal

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a fascinating book of documentary photography. The author is entranced by abandoned structures. His viewpoint of these tragic, yet often eerily beautiful buildings is made clear by a quotation he provides from a play by Fernando Pessoa, i.e. he fantasizes about the life that went on in them when they were alive. These are pictures from a graveyard, and we, as readers, are attending a memorial service, with Mr.Vergara providing a well-written eulogy.

When first leafing through the book I immediately thought of Jacob Riis, the turn of the century photographer who photographed the New York slums. This thought also occurred to someone providing a review on the dust jacket of the book. I ended up revoking this comparison, however. Mr. Vergara's task here is not to provide social commentary. For the most part he simply loves these buildings. I feel that he would not even care to see many of them restored, but envisions leaving them in a state of arrested decay, like the large ghost town of Bodie in California. Recently, in a series of articles on corporate welfare, Time magazine remarked on the fact that wealthy corporations often easily abandoned obsolete sites, showing no concern over the blight they caused in the community. So here we see derelicts owned by RCA, a company that could afford to tear them down or restore them for community use. My point is that this book may raise many thoughts regarding American community problems, but Mr. Vergara is not here to deal with these issues. And that is really OK, too, as the book is wonderful just as sort of an archaeological document.

My one disappointment is that the book covers only a few cities: New York, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Camden, and the South Bronx. For a sequel I would suggest that Mr. Vergara tour more cities to find some of the other classics that exist. He could photograph the Winecoff hotel, site of the country's most disastrous hotel fire that killed 119 people in 1946. This 16-story structure still stands abandoned in downtown Atlanta. Or he could document the huge Kelso depot that stands empty in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I am certainly looking forward to that book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pictorial essay on the death of America's industrial cities February 13, 2002

By Jeffrey Jotz

Format:Hardcover

Vergara is certainly not like your typical civic booster who is touting the gentrification of former slums and the real estate boom that has overrun most US cities in the past two decades. Vergara doesn't directly argue that yuppies and Gen X-ers are good for today's cities. From reading this book, I am assuming that he doesn't like them too much. He likes grimy, but stable, industrial America that earlier generations knew.

However, Vergara is not an urban planner or a civic leader (although I'd like to see him try his hand at each). Vergara's skill is chronicling through pictures the wholesale abandonment of America's great cities. In his introduction, the author realizes that in many cities with a shrunken tax base, it is simply too expensive to rehabilitate architecturally-significant structures, so landlords (usually with the city's blessing), just demolish or abandon the property. For each renovated brownstone downtown, I'm sure that the author can document a dozen abandoned rowhouses or factories on the "wrong side" of the town.

Call me insensitive, but I was most acutely drawn to Vergara's treatment of abandoned or near-abandoned buildings that were once important to America: the Firemen's Insurance Building in downtown Newark and the Michigan Central RR terminal in Detroit (rather than his examination of the residents of the ghetto as was evidenced in "The New American Ghetto"). The photo of the modern people mover in Detroit gliding by boarded-up buildings says a lot about urban mismanagement and is hauntingly fully of despair. If the "can do" spirit of modern American technology can't save Detroit, what can?

What I found quite unique was that Vergara proposes leaving these buildings to rot, like was done in Rome and Greece. Visitors taken through these ruins would be told that an empty shell of a building once housed an insurance company, a vaudeville theater, or some wealthy merchant and his family. However, as a public employee who has to deal with these structures for a living, there are some health and safety issues that I feel the author seems to forget (abandoned buildings tend to attract junkies, rats and disease and worse, fall down on people after a while). Maybe he is strictly speaking as an artist, but his ideas are very intriguing.

Vergara is a great photographer who thrives in urban areas. I've worked and/or visited many cities in this book, and what I like best about "American Ruins" is how he documents the death of the building over a five or ten-year period, mentioning what the building held in its heyday.

"American Ruins" is a great antidote to those who indiscriminately work to "improve" cities, either through gentrification or through ugly aesthetic improvements to historical buildings (brickface comes to mind). It's a depressing book, but it stirs the mind and challenges the soul.

As I mentioned, this book is a natural progression from his earlier book, "The New American Ghetto," and "American Ruins" complements his work as a photographer and social critic. I've loved all of his stuff eagerly await more books by this guy every time they are released.

If you liked this book, you would also like "A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead," by Judith Schachter Modell & Charlee Brodsky; "Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town," by William Serrin; and "The Destruction of Penn Station," by Peter & Barbara Moore. They all chronicle how this nation has abandoned its industrial cities for a less connected, less public, less community-minded, less responsible, less reliable and more uncertain future.