Customer Reviews

Ghostly Ruins: America's Forgotten Architecture

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A very impressive photo documentary of buildings and places that have been left to uncertainty, the elements, or destroyed. The brief histories given for each place makes for some interesting reading. The photographs are magnificent, I wish I could step into them and see all the photographer saw at the time the places were photographed. It is sad to think some of these places will be left alone to fall apart or destroyed. This book really brings to mind how precious and unique these places are.

Author Skrdla presents his unique vision of the world of abandoned buildings across the USA. Lavishly illustrated in compelling black and white images, the book opens your eyes to the beauty and sadness of the deserted cast-offs of our "throw-away" age.

The book is organized in a series of types of building, from residential to industrial. Skrdla has an ironic and tight writing style which clearly expresses his love for these often dramatic examples of man's ego and confidence. He also makes the reader take stock of the increasingly homogenized, sterile, and industrially functional buildings our society is willing to accept. He makes the stong point that we are losing the pride in civic architecture which is the foundation of lasting meaning and beauty.

A fantastic and haunting look at some once grand and beautiful buildings. An excellent commentary with history, that creates a mood thick with the cobwebs of time. The best I have seen that deals with the wealth of archietectural gems we have lost over the years. After reading, one is so much more aware of the crumbling buildings that surround us all over the nation, and maybe will be moved to save future ruins from total destruction.

Skrdla admits in the acknowledgements section on the last page of this book that it's a compilation, rather than a collection of all of his own photos of vacated, dilapedated, and otherwise ruined buildings or sites. Understandably, if for some sites he was limited to using only those photos made availible to him by the various photographers, then he had to do the best with what he had. However, in some cases, what was availible proved to be darned little. I developed a passive interest in the (now demolished) Danvers State Lunatic Asylum after seeing a film called "Session 9" that was shot on the site. Searching for books about Danvers brought me to this collection, and the preview photo of teetering, derelict cranes at the ship graveyard in Stanten Island, NY, more or less made the sale. Even though Amazon publishes dimensions for each of their books, I was rather surprised, upon opening the box that came in the mail, at just how small this book is (length and width, not thickness, although it's none too thick, neither.) I've gotten used to photo collections being the size of coffee-table books, and this is really just an overgrown paperback. I haven't got a ruler handy, but it's smaller than an 8.5"x11" sheet of printing paper, anyway. What's worse, several pages of this overgrown paperback have two postcard-sized photos sqeezed onto them, plus text. Some of the shots are downright miniscule, especially given the fact that many of the buildings being photographed were reputed for their sheer size in their heyday. I would have shelled out the money for a thicker or larger version of this book that didn't scale the pictures down to such meager dimensions, had I realized what I was getting. I gave this book only three stars, which means that I didn't give it the other two. Size of product, given the nature of the subjects being photographed, resulted in the loss of the first of those.

The second star was lost for questionable subject choice. Maybe I'm biased, since I live only twenty minutes away from it, but did Centralia really deserve to be in a book about abandoned buildings, especially a volume so pressed for space that it already had to shrink some photos down to wallet size? Centralia's history is interesting, and its evacuation and demolition has made it locally contentious and famous as a ghost town. But photogenic it ain't, and to me its inclusion seemed to be a swing-and-a-miss. It wasn't even pretty when it was extant, folks. The ghost town of Bodie is also an odd choice for this book, given that it's also a town rather than a building or site. But, unlike Centralia, at least Bodie has structures left to photograph, and at least Bodie has a surreal western boom-town ambiance. Also, I was expecting some better shots of Danvers, and that has me disappointed. We're given a teensy vintage shot of the center of the complex from the 1890s, a thumbnail of a floor plan, two shots of the exterior that do nothing to convey the sheer size that the hospital possessed (the shot of the derelict admin building is OK, but the establishing picture of one part of one wing looks like it could be any brick building built in the same style,) a picture of a refridgerator cooler door (?), a generic hallway with absolutely nothing interesting in it, and a picture of a cot. That's Danvers, a la Skrdla, or a la his contributor for those photos. If it was worth documenting, and from what I've seen of it in the aforementioned film that gives the grounds much better coverage, it definately was, then it was worth documenting completely. No shots of the cemetary? The tunnels? No exterior shots that indicate just how wonkin' huge that place was? What gives? And why are their so many rail bridges included, given that they all look pretty much alike?

Having done this much to complain about it, I do think that this book is worth a look, and by no means am I planning on tossing or re-selling my copy. Intreaguing Highlights of this collection, in my eyes, include Bannerman's Castle, the Ship Graveyard, the Colonial Ward Pumping Station engines, the United Artists Theatre in Detroit, the remaining columns of Windsor in Mississippi (only two photos, true, but in Windsor's case only two photos are needed to show everything that's left,) Brush Park, and Eastern State Penitentiary. Most of the rest of it ranges from interesting to just so-so; quite a few of these abandoned behemoths look pretty much alike by now -- a big empty ballroom is a big empty ballroom, and run-down hotel lobbies look pretty similar, too.

As is, it makes for an interesting afternoon of flipping through, awed by the grandeur and the decay of long disuse. If it had been larger, or at least hadn't had so many scaled-down pictures, and if it had used the paper wasted on Centralia to show twice as much of the grounds of Danvers, I'd gladly have given it five stars. It's a great idea, and I do thank Harry Skrdla for the intense labor of love that assembling this collection must have been. But anything this worth doing is worth doing right, and he missed a few rusting, half-sunken, long-abandoned boats along the way.

Very nice, a worthwhile endeavor, and worth purchasing if you're interested in the subject. But there'd be room for improvement.

This book is full of interesting places which we all wish we could visit. The photograhy in this book is classic black and white. With the perfect amount of information not to make it boring. I love this book.

This has some interesting pictures/ articles. The author obviously poured alot of time into his research. I found this to be a delight to read and look through. It, however, is not for in-depth research. It provides enough information to commence the research, but that is it. Makes an wonderful gift on this side of obscurity.

Who could not fall for the enthusiasm of Mr. Skrdla? He expertly details the rise and fall of these remarkable ruins, from design to construction to abandonment. He casts a wry eye on how greed often contribute to these ruins' demise. The photographs are very good, particularly when he pairs before-and-after views. Highly recommended for any student of architectural photography, urban affairs, wealth, and just about anything American.

Mr. Skrdla, we need a sequel!

I had the pleasure of interviewing the author on my radio show a few years ago. We talked about this amazing photographic study of his, Ghostly Ruins. Shot entirely in stunning monochrome, the book gives us an unblinking, often saddening glimpse of what we have lost as a nation and a culture, all in various stages of decay. This book seems a simile for the current state of the USA: the greatness and prescience we once had and what became of it. Get two copies: one for yourself and one for a friend.

I loved this book. Even now so long after I read it I still think about it whenever I see a decaying structure. Well worth your time!

GHOSTLY RUINS is a handsome volume of about 30 profiles of American "structures" (broadly defined) that once were grand in their individual ways - monuments of human pride and schemes - but now exist in various states of disintegration and decay, if they still exist at all. The subjects include train stations, bridges, factories, hotels, mental and penal institutions, mansions, and amusement parks. (My favorites are the Schoellkopf Power Station, Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Bannerman's Castle, Dutchess County, N.Y.; Brush Park, Detroit; and Chippewa Lake Park, Medina, Ohio.) The profiles consist of about one page of text and a handful of black-and-white photographs, including one or more from the subject's glory days as well as those of contemporary decrepitude.

The book is far from ideal, however. First, it is somewhat superficial. I would have preferred more in-depth coverage of each of the ruins, even if that meant omitting some of the subjects (and there are some obvious candidates, such as the Polynesian restaurant in Detroit, the town in Pennsylvania that had to be abandoned because the seams of coal beneath it caught on fire, and the ghost town in California). Second, and more problematic, is the rather mediocre text. It veers back and forth between trite sentimentalism and bitter cynicism, with scarcely a trace of the poetic that is called for. (The best the author can do is present Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" as a sort of epigraph.)

Even so, many of the photographs evoke, on their own, meditations on mortality and the ravages of time. W.G. Sebald certainly would have delighted in some of the photographs of architectural decay, although he probably would have shuddered at much of the accompanying text.