‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Over the last year, I have been exploring a very particular set of American ruins: those myriad bunkers, missile silos and radar stations built to wage the war that never happened. Like the Cold War itself, these structures seem at once everywhere and nowhere, silent and unannounced memorials whose historical presence and purpose already seem a mystery.

On the outskirts of most major cities, for example, one can still readily find the ruins of Nike missile batteries, built in the 1950s and 1960s as a presumed “last-ditch” defense against incoming Soviet bombers. Usually barren patches of land marked only by slabs of concrete, metal vents covered in graffiti and the shell of a prefabricated building or two, Nike sites are nearly invisible to the uneducated eye. They sit shrouded in vegetation, while the march of suburban development has brought subdivisions to their very fence lines.

Ruins, whether crumbling missile bases or once-buried Maya cities, present a paradox of sorts: Their presence invokes absence. Ruins commonly invoke feelings of loss, awe and remembrance, but their mere physical presence can hardly restore the time or place that once was.

There is another paradox of ruins, as noted by Michael S. Roth in an introduction to the Getty Museum’s commendable exhibition on ruins, “Irresistible Decay”: What heightens the appeal of ruins is the threat of their disappearance. The aesthetic valuation of ruins by 18th century European nobles was based on an idealized ruin, frozen perfectly in time, neither too intact nor too eroded. But Roth notes: “There were only so many ruins that were well-enough preserved (while retaining the proper amounts of picturesque irregularity) to produce the desired mix of emotions in the beholder.” Hence the “folly gardens” that occurred when aristocrats commissioned artificial ruins for their estates.

The writer and photographer Camilo Jose Vergara, author of “The New American Ghetto” and other works, shares something of the 18th century fascination with ruins; what makes his work so arresting, however, is the salient fact that he is living in modern-day America. As he notes in the introduction to his latest book, “the term ‘American Ruins’ might seem to contradict itself, for the United States is a nation conventionally synonymous with innovation and resilience, modernity and progress.”

The past is deemed acceptable when it is presented in a tidy curated package--for example colonial Williamsburg--but otherwise, America seems content to bask in the same sense of historical innocence observed by Goethe two centuries ago in “To the United States”:

America, you have it better

Than our old continent. You have no ruined castles

And no primordial stones. Your soul, your inner life

Remain untroubled by

Useless memory

And wasted strife.

I am reminded of a comment I overheard on a train as it passed through an old industrial town in upstate New York: “Why, this is one of the worst cities in America,” a passenger remarked upon seeing a place he had visited years before. “They haven’t built anything new here in years.” Nor have they in the historic center of Toledo, Spain, one might guess, so why is one charming and the other squalid?

America, contra Goethe, does have its ruined castles; they just do not look like European castles. During the last 20 years, Vergara has been looking in forgotten corners of cities in search of America’s castles, the ruins of structures that once heralded the country’s vibrant future and now present a disconsolate picture of both the future and the past.

His search is organized along four lines: the grand turn-of-the-century beaux-arts buildings that merged European tradition with the American experiment; the reinforced concrete industrial buildings that were the largest of their type in the world; postwar buildings that ranged from Modernist-inspired housing tower blocks to streamlined Populuxe gas stations; and last, those vernacular structures that Vergara notes “make up the bulk of the built environment and are usually the first to be demolished.”

Through his images and stories, Vergara sketches the contours of forgotten-but-not-gone America, the places that have fallen between the embellishments of historic preservation and the wrecking balls of urban redevelopment.

Vergara’s castles are structures like the Rickel Malt brewery in Detroit’s Eastern Market, active until the early 1960s but demolished two decades later. In one photo, taken in 1994, we see the brewery, a tower ing gray structure that hovers over a bar in the foreground called “Joey’s Meatcutter’s Inn.” A second photo, taken four years later, shows only the bar, which is now simply called “Joey’s.” Both the brewery and the Meatcutter’s Inn (and the meat cutters) have disappeared.

With the brewery in mind, Vergara recalls a haunting observation the Swiss architect Le Corbusier made in 1923: “Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first fruits of the new age. The American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture.”

Le Corbusier, the trenchant Modernist, was not the only European observer convinced that America’s new buildings would eclipse the Old World’s hoary spires. The German architect Erich Mendelsohn, in his 1926 account “Amerika,” marveled that America’s cities were “unbridled, mad, frenetic, lusting for life,” their piercing skyscrapers “splendid” and “arrogant.”

What would Mendelsohn make of cities like Newark, N.J., Vergara asks, a city that at century’s beginning was a thriving metropolis where 280,000 people were once counted at the intersection of Broad and Market? For city boosters, it was “the busiest corner in America.”

Now, Vergara is able to prowl through Newark’s first skyscraper, a 16-story beaux-arts structure that once housed the Fireman’s Insurance headquarters but now hosts a handful of Korean merchants on its ground floor.

He pages yellowing correspondence in one of the gutted offices and takes particular interest in the case of Berenice, a receptionist who, as a three-month series of letters indicates, was fired because of her tendency to lose her voice. It serves as a metaphor for the building itself: this grand repository of history, boarded up, bound and gagged, unable to tell its story, although, as Vergara notes, “it vividly reveals more about Newark and its inhabitants during the past three decades than any official source.”

For Vergara, it is not enough to simply photograph a ruined building; only by digging among its mangled rebar and rotting plaster and by listening to those who dwelt in its Saturnian shadows will the necessary fragments of the story reveal themselves.

The irony of so much of what Vergara has documented is that the buildings--whether neoclassical civic beacons such as the Bronx Courthouse or the Michigan Central railroad station or the equally grand refineries and Packard factories that formed part of the industrial infrastructure that helped the United States to victory in World War II--now look as though they themselves were subjected to aerial bombing.

The two facts may indeed be connected: In an age of mechanized warfare in which cities can be destroyed at the push of a button, what is the use in building anything that will last?

There is, of course, no single answer to why a building becomes a ruin; some were victims of suburban flight (itself encouraged by government policy); others are the ostracized offspring of absentee landlords; some are deemed too expensive to retrofit.

Vergara notes the peculiar problem of “modern ruins”: “[T]raditional ruins like those of Rome or Pompeii have endured because they were built brick upon brick and the force of gravity helps hold them together. Modern buildings are constructed more like stage sets, held together by clips and clamps.” Where the former grow old gracefully, the latter rot with violence.

Whether ancient or modern, there is, finally, the question of what to do with ruins. With the relics of the Cold War, appeals are often made to have sites named to the National Register, restored to their former condition and bejeweled with historical markers. But the Cold War victory is read as a political--not military--triumph, and so there seems little interest in keeping intact these aesthetically displeasing sentinels of anticipated mass destruction.

Some critics, including architect Daniel Libeskind, argue that such restorations can never truly account for history; he proposed that the S.S. barracks of a former Nazi concentration camp, rather than being preserved as a historical reminder, be cordoned off as a “place of ruins” that would “slowly fall into decay.”

(One might note the irony that Hitler instructed his architect Albert Speer to build a Berlin that--like ancient Greece or Rome--would look good as ruins.) In Libeskind’s view, restoration and demolition are both acts of forgetting; ruins may be the most authentic way to evoke the past’s true and ambivalent relation to the present.

Vergara has something similar in mind for his ruins: He wants to create an “American Acropolis,” an “urban ruins park,” where scenes ranging from “the shattered Nipper window of the former RCA plant that I photographed in Camden in 1977” (“Nipper” refers to RCA’s Victrola-listening dog) to “dozens of neon signs ready to fall from their rusted supports” would be displayed.

It seems a sort of “folly garden” for the American Century. If Vergara has an occasional tendency to romanticize ruins and ghettos, taking pleasure in their fallen character, his photos and stories do speak to a larger purpose. For these ruins are not theme parks or folly gardens, they are part of places (even if they appear “empty” to passersby) that at some time were forgotten, and it is only by situating them in a larger narrative, a living narrative, that these faded monuments of a grander age will be truly restored. *

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’