Photography, building histories, and essays that make visual connections to hidden themes of community heritage, dislocation, demolition, and neighborhood change
“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 features more than 100 striking contemporary color photographs and a deeply researched narrative about Philadelphia’s buildings, neighborhoods, and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city. The text and images in this lavish volume illuminate these lost buildings and found ghosts. Building Ghosts is an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present.
“Building Ghosts gives us an accessible new language to critically analyze urban spaces. Shifting the focus of architectural history from the ‘canonical’ to the vernacular—and examining what remains when everyday apartment buildings and homes are destroyed—Lester and Bixler deepen our understanding of the communities impacted by the often-prejudiced forces of redevelopment and ‘renewal.’ Detailed and vivid vignettes make this history immediate and relatable, teaching us to recognize these ghosts in our own communities and to see them as poignant symbols of loss—and sites for reparative opportunity.”
—Adam Paul Susaneck, Founder of Segregation by Design: An Evolving Atlas of Spatial Injustice
“Molly Lester and Michael Bixler mine the crevices and seams of Philadelphia’s rowhouse blocks for signs and stories of the past. The surprising result of their effort is a collection of short essays and photos that reads like an alternative history of the city. In Building Ghosts, the walls really do get to speak.”
—Inga Saffron, Pulitzer Prize–winning Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic
“Building Ghosts offers a layered, nuanced, and meaningful study of Philadelphia’s built environment, inside and out. Author Molly Lester and photographer Michael Bixler push us to reconsider the long-standing imprint of our city’s iconic rowhomes and what happens as people and places experience shockwaves of growth and divestment. By reading in-between spaces as evocative and informative, this book drives home the ways memory lives with us.”
—Paul M. Farber, Director of Monument Lab
About the Author
Molly Lester is a historian of the built environment, and currently serves as the Associate Director of the Urban Heritage Project at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design. Her research interests include the ephemeral traces of "building ghosts" in the built environment and the role of women in shaping the American built environment in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular focus on architect Minerva Parker Nichols (1862-1949) and the She-She-She Camps of the New Deal. She is the author of Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City (Fall 2024, Temple University Press) and the co-author of Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (2024, distributed by Yale University Press).
Molly Lester
About the Photographer
Michael Bixler is the Editorial Director and Chief Photographer of Hidden City Philadelphia. His writing and photography is focused on creating dialogue and documentation of the built environment and how it relates to history, culture, and the urban experience. Bixler is the photographer of Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City (Fall 2024, Temple University Press).
Michael Bixler
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