Storming the Gates of Paradise (50 page)

Architecture is the principal victim of earthquakes, architecture and infrastructure and anything alive that is in their way when they come down. Crumbling freeway overpasses and other structures built on soggy land are among the major wreckage of recent California quakes—witness the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway over bay landfill in Oakland in 1989, apartments in the infilled Marina District of San Francisco that same year, and Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Freeway above La Cienega (which means
the swamp
in Spanish) in the 1994 Northridge quake. These are victims, as a recent book by David Ulin has it, of “the myth of solid ground.” Still, the ruins and tragedies in California are dwarfed by quakes of comparable size in other parts of the world—Mexico, Turkey, China, Iran, Algeria—where old and poorly built structures have crushed citizens by the thousands.

Man proposes, earthquake disposes, the maxim might be revised to say, though earthquakes are only one small source of the ruins that are in some ways the inevitable corollary of the very act of building. That nothing lasts forever is perhaps our favorite thing to forget. And forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering, and eventual fading away into nothingness. We don’t quite recognize how resilient cities are, how they arise over and over again from their own ruins, resurrected, reincarnated, though every Rome and London is such a resurrection, or reinvention. So it seems strange to see the ruins of then become the smooth façades of now, to see not the entropy that leads to ruin but the endeavor that effaces it so thoroughly that its ruinous past is hardly believable. Yet this happens again and again: Frank Gohlke’s 1979–1980 photographs of the Wichita Falls, Texas, tornado show a place torn apart by wind and the same place a year later, restored as though nothing had happened (or so that the same
thing can happen again?). Ruins are evidence not only that cities can be destroyed but that they survive their own destruction, are resurrected again and again.

Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin; but the ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasures: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories. Such erasure is the foundation of the amnesiac landscape that is the United States. Because the United States is in many ways a country without a past, it seems, at first imagining, to be a country without ruins. But it is rich in ruins, though not always as imagined, for it is without a past only in the sense that it does not own its past, or own up to it. It does not remember officially and in its media and mainstream, though many subsets of Americans remember passionately.

The Pueblo people of New Mexico remember the conquistadors, and Native Americans generally remember the genocides and injustices that transformed their numbers and their place on this continent. Southerners remember the Civil War; African Americans remember slavery and Jim Crow; labor remembers its struggle for the right to organize and a living wage; too few women remember the battle to get the vote and basic human rights. Memory is often the spoils of the defeated, and amnesia may sometimes be the price of victory (though Germany in its postwar era proved that the vanquished can erase even more vehemently—but most vanquished can think of themselves as wronged, and being wronged is all too fine a foundation for identity).

Much of the North American continent is the ruin of intact ecosystems and indigenous nations, absences only history and its scant relics recall, for most of this ruin consists of absence: the absence of bison, the disappearance of passenger pigeons, the reduction of the first nations to reservation dwellers and invisible populations. These nations built lightly and out of organic materials, more often than not, so their own ruins are faint, except perhaps for the great mounds of the Midwest and the stone architecture of the Southwest, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and the other Anasazi/Pueblo ruins. The Southwest’s ruins are considerable, and even its mesas and buttes were often interpreted as resembling the
architectural ruins of medieval Europe—or, rather, of romanticism’s taste for medieval Europe.

Manhattan is a city founded in the seventeenth century, but it is hard to find traces of the city earlier than the nineteenth century there. Santa Fe is older, and it too contains little that predates the past couple of centuries. But Paris, famously ripped up and redeveloped in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, is still full of buildings from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Peru has Machu Picchu, the ruins of a Quechua city. Guatemala has Antigua, the former capital largely abandoned after the great earthquake of 1773—now a small city or large town, its colonial grid intact, and ruins of splendid baroque convents and churches standing in between the one- and two-story houses—along with Tikal, the Mayan city abandoned long before and visible only because the devouring jungle was pared back some decades ago. Mexico has the ruins of the Aztecs. The United States is curiously devoid of acknowledged and easily recognized ruins. Perhaps some of the amnesia is the result of mobility; people who are constantly moving are constantly arriving in landscapes that do not hold their past and thereby are often read as not holding any past. History is opaque to the deracinated, and enough moves can obliterate both history and the knowledge that every place has a history. (I have learned in my own San Francisco neighborhood that people who move every few years believe that they move through a static cityscape; those of us who sit still for longer periods know that it is forever changing.)

Think of ruin in two stages. One is the force—neglect or abandonment, human violence, natural disaster—that transforms buildings into ruins. Ruins can be created slowly or suddenly, and they can survive indefinitely or be cleared away. The second stage of ruin is the abandonment or the appreciation that allows the ruin to remain as a relic—as evidence, as a place apart, outside economies and utilitarian purposes, the physical site that corresponds to room in the culture or imagination for what came before. The forces that create ruins have been plentiful in the United States, but the desire or neglect that allows the ruins to stay has been mostly absent. The great urban ruins have been situated on what is, first of all, real estate, more than it is sacred ground or historical site; and real estate is
constantly turned over for profit, whereas a ruin is a site that has fallen out of the financial dealings of a city (unless it has become a tourist site, like the Roman Colosseum).

Poverty, Lucy Lippard once remarked, is a great preserver of history. From New England through the Rust Belt, the poverty of lost jobs and old industries has left behind a ruinous landscape of abandoned factories and city centers, as has white flight and urban disinvestment in cities such as Detroit. We detonate our failed modernist housing projects, along with outdated Las Vegas casinos, as though we were striking sets; demolition telescopes the process of ruination from damage to disappearance. Only in the remote places—the abandoned boomtowns of nineteenth-century mining rushes, old plantation mansions, the withering small towns of the Great Plains—is nature allowed to proceed with its program of ruin. And in the destitute ones: descriptions of a ruinous and half-abandoned inner-city Detroit suggest that it is becoming our Pompeii, or perhaps our Antigua, destroyed not by earthquake or lava but by racially driven economic abandonment and its side effects.

This is the paradox of ruins: they represent a kind of destruction, but they themselves can be destroyed and with them the memory of what was once there and what it confronted. Munich and Cologne in Germany, Birmingham and Coventry in England, and many other European cities keep traces of their wartime ruins on hand as reminders of not only the past but the present insecurity and uncertainty of all things, the architectural equivalent of vanitas paintings, those
ubi sunt
and
sic transit gloria mundi
statements. Hiroshima’s Peace Dome is a well-known monument to the atomic bomb dropped on that city, a monument with far more meaning than the building had before the bomb, when it was the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall.

In the haste to remove the hundreds of thousands of tons of wreckage of New York’s World Trade Center buildings and replace them with a newly made monument, one can see a deep anxiety about what ruins commemorate: ephemerality, vulnerability, and mutability. The singular urbanist and ex–New Yorker Jane Jacobs commented that we don’t know what the disaster means yet and that it is too soon to build something; the instant memorial seems part of the therapeutic
language of “closure” that was deployed again and again in the immediate aftermath of the towers’ collapse, a word that seemed to mean that meaning itself could come to an end, a conclusion. Ruins are open to the eye, the sky, the elements, change, and interpretation.

When the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001, a kind of American innocence, a widespread belief in American impunity, fell with it. This belief was itself shocking, premised as it was on the notion that we were somehow beyond the reach of the forces, natural and political, that devastate other countries, situated in an ignorance or inability to identify with the victims of death squads, genocides, wars, industrial disasters, with the inhabitants of Bhopal, Chernobyl, Guatemala, Rwanda, Iraq. This belief was rooted not only in American exceptionalism but in amnesia—about the swath of devastation Sherman left across the Civil War South; about the devastation of Galveston, Charleston, Chicago, and other major cities by natural forces; about the essential vulnerability of individuals and communities; about mortality itself; and perhaps about the devastation the United States has wrought elsewhere (Kabul and Baghdad were ravaged on a far grander scale than New York, with far more deaths, many eyes for an eye, in devastations that again seemed unfelt and unimagined for many in whose name they were carried out). There is always an implication in American discourses on death and illness that they are optional, that the cure for cancer or heart disease is in some way a cure for death. As a hospice worker once told me, in this country we regard death as failure.

But death is as inevitable to life as ruins are to buildings, and the death of individuals is not the death of communities. The 2002 movie
Gangs of New York
contains a small commentary on this in its closing frames. Two characters look across the water at southern Manhattan, afire in the draft riots of the 1860s, and a dissolve turns the skyline into the pre-9/11 view dominated by the Trade Towers. This too, these last frames seem to say, shall pass; we shall rise again, as New York has from the far more pervasive devastation of the 1970s and 1980s. Of these destructions, only photographs stand as memorials now.

San Francisco evicted even the dead from its land in the first half of the twentieth century (only a small military cemetery, an even smaller Spanish missionary
church cemetery, and the Richmond District Columbarium of cremated remains survive). This was done essentially for economic reasons, but the effect was to eliminate death from the scene along with the dead, those who had inhabited the earlier versions of the city. Of the San Francisco earthquake, no clear evidence exists, only absences: the lack of nineteenth-century buildings throughout most of the city (though in 1906 the southern and western edges were still undeveloped). A number of landmark structures survived the earthquake and fire and were rebuilt, often almost into unrecognizability. But of 1906 ruins as ruins, nothing survives except the “Portals of the Past,” the neoclassical portico from a ruined Nob Hill mansion that was transported to Golden Gate Park, where it looks more like a stage set than a relic, for it now frames foliage whereas once it framed a mansion’s entryway and then the smoldering wreck of the city beyond where the mansion stood. Before and after the 1906 earthquake, the portals framed no vista, opened onto no long view: it is as though only for that moment of disaster was another vision, a more far-seeing sense of place and time, opened up, and the haste to reconstruct was in part haste to close that vision. Perhaps that vision is the view that all ruins offer us.

Ironically, it was earthquake rubble that became the ground of the Marina District so devastated in 1989; landfill liquefies in an earthquake, which is why the downtown and Mission Bay buildings rest on massive pilings driven below the landfill layers. Mission Bay was once a bay into which Mission Creek drained after its meander from near Mission Dolores. That bay was filled in to build the central railyard of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the great octopus that held all California’s politics and economy in its tentacles, and it fell into ruin when the age of the railroads came to an end. The ruins made the place haunted and abandoned—for
abandoned
is our term for places inhabited by outcasts and wildlife—an open space in the most densely populated U.S. city outside New York.
Dream
said the graffiti on an old boxcar, and it was a kind of dreamspace, open to memory, possibility, danger, outside the economy, as ruins almost always are. These ruins were destroyed to build the Mission Bay biotechnology facilities at the end of the twentieth century. The railroads tamed the earth on one colossal scale; the biotech industry seeks to do so on another, more intimate one; and the one thing certain is
that the labs atop the landfill will lie in ruins someday, by earthquake or by time itself. Perhaps even the buried bay will reappear, carved out again when Mission Creek reasserts itself and rises from its subterranean passages.

San Francisco was in its infancy during the fire on Christmas Eve 1848, which destroyed more than a million dollars’ worth of property (at 1848 values) and burned down most of the buildings around Portsmouth Square, then the central plaza of the rough little boomtown risen from the Gold Rush. The authors of the
Annals of San Francisco
described the situation: