Must the library of departed architecture keep growing?

BY DWIGHT YOUNG

The first piece of furniture I ever bought with my own money—I must have been about 13—was a bookcase for my bedroom, and five minutes after I got it home I was wishing I'd bought a bigger one. That's pretty much been the story of my life: too many books, too little space. At my house, every flat surface—shelves, tables, chairs, beds, radiators, floors—bears a stack of books. Some of the stacks have themselves evolved into furniture. I've found that if you put enough coffee-table books together, you've got yourself a dandy coffee table.

My library covers a wide range of subjects—mostly history, plenty of art and architecture, a good bit of travel, a smattering of fiction. Lately, something slightly disturbing has come to my attention: I own a lot of books about demolished buildings.

Some have been around for a long time. I bought the two volumes of Lost America in the early 1970s, when I first started getting interested in preservation. Others followed, their titles chanting a dirge for the heritage of our nation's great cities: Lost New York, Lost Chicago, Lost Boston. More recent volumes—Lost Landmarks of Mississippi, Lost Virginia, Lost Twin Cities, Houston's Forgotten Heritage, Kalamazoo Lost & Found, even Lost London and Lost Europe, to name but a few—map a path of destruction from coast to coast and beyond. What's more, some of the older books are now being reissued in updated (and pretty disheartening) versions. A new edition of Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings includes almost a score of important landmarks that have been smashed to rubble since the book originally appeared in 1979.

Although some of the vanished buildings were hit by fires, earthquakes, or tornadoes, many others fell victim to more mundane disasters: slow deterioration, misguided public policy, the juggernaut of "progress," and just plain apathy. The Richfield Building, an art deco dazzler in Los Angeles: replaced by a bland new skyscraper. The home of Francis Scott Key in Washington: torn down for a bridge ramp. St. John's Church, a little Gothic gem in Glen Allan, Miss.: fell into ruin after years of abandonment. We probably should be grateful that most of the illustrations are in grainy black-and-white, since true-to-life color photos of what we've lost might break our hearts.

Some of these structures have been gone for a long time, but we can't allow ourselves to forget them. The style and technical skills they embodied, the visual variety they provided, the sense of place they helped identify, the opportunity for beneficial reuse they represented—all this disappeared forever when these buildings were reduced to splintered planks and broken bricks. The books remind us of the crushing finality of that disappearance.

But there's a danger. The roster of missing monuments is so extensive that even a cursory reading of these volumes can leave you numb. That's a bad thing, and you can't let it happen. You have to maintain a sense of outrage.

When I first flipped through Lost New York years ago, I was struck by a photo of St. John's Chapel, a tall-spired beauty built in 1803. Then I read that everything in the picture—not only the church but also the houses flanking it and the park it overlooked—had been destroyed to make way for a rail yard and a street widening. I still remember my indignation. Wait a minute. This is gone? They tore all this down? What were they, crazy?

Well, if not exactly crazy, they (whoever "they" might have been) were at least blithely shortsighted and utterly thoughtless. They robbed us blind—all of us in New York and Atlanta and Boise and Albuquerque and everywhere in between—robbed us of something we can never recover. That should make us mad. And if we get mad enough, we'll work to make damn sure we don't get robbed like that again. It won't bring the lost buildings back, of course, but it'll help give their loss even more meaning. And maybe keep my bookshelves from collapsing.

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