Ghosts

“Building ghosts” are the idiosyncratic remnants or imprints of demolished buildings, left behind on the sides of neighboring structures. Mostly seen in older Northeastern cities with rowhomes or party-wall adjacencies, they can reveal remarkable things, such as an old staircase going up the side of a building or plaster traces left by a set of shelves in an attic gable. As history in our changing cities is erased and remade, these ghosts can be ephemeral or enduring. They can be quickly revealed and replaced in a neighborhood seeing rapid change or unveiled and never re-covered in a neighborhood that has not seen new construction in a long time.
-- Building Ghosts website

We found our first one a block away from the house on our first morning walk after we moved in:

Ghost on Thompson { .img-caption }

Not long after that I learned that we had just missed a talk by the author of the book quoted above, which I really wish I had known about.

Found another one in Center City when I took the bus in to see the Curtis Opera Theater perform Bernstein's "Candide":

Ghost in Center City { .img-caption }

I love the way that the flat shapes imply history and hints at the lives lived inside rooms that are now just an empty void in the air. Back in the 80s, I read Georges Perec's great Oulipo novel "Life: A User's Manual," which is structured around an apartment building in Paris:

One of Perec's long-standing projects was the description of a Parisian apartment block as it could be seen if the entire facade were removed, exposing every room. Perec was obsessed with lists: such a description would be exhaustive down to the last detail. (...) The narrative moves like a knight in a chess game, one chapter for each room (thus, the more rooms an apartment has the more chapters are devoted to it). In each room we learn about the residents of the room, or the past residents of the room, or about someone they have come into contact with.

I think about this book a lot.

I've also found a few ghost signs, faded remnants of old advertisements painted on the side of buildings

Ghost Sign 1 { .img-caption }
Ghost Sign 2 { .img-caption }
Ghost Sign 3 { .img-caption }
Ghost Sign 4 { .img-caption }

I know that most people come to this city looking for colonial or revolutionary-era history, but things like these are much more interesting to me, just echoes of the mundane lives of people living here not very long ago. I'm wondering what I might leave behind that would just add this kind of almost invisible texture to the world after I'm gone.

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