Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919

Abstract

Henry James famously complained that Americans had nothing to write about: “no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied-ruins” (p. 259). Nick Yablon, however, reveals no shortage of written and visual depictions of American ruins, many generated by anxieties such as James's. What made New York so disturbing in 1904, when James returned after two decades abroad, was the rapidity of urban transformation. Skyscrapers replaced his childhood haunts. Capitalism's premium on novelty was hardly offset by cheap gestures to previous architectural styles. This engaging, densely typeset book analyzes ruins—and meditations on them—ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville's encounters with abandoned frontier cabins to Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) to postapocalyptic science fiction serials in early twentieth-century magazines. Such real and imagined ruins are “untimely”: most involve deliberate demolition or disaster, not deterioration over time. Produced instantly, modern ruins are quickly mourned, spoiling the nostalgic pleasures associated with classical decay. By 1900 it seemed modern buildings would never have the pleasure of becoming ancient. Americans worried that any surviving ruins would be incoherent to future archaeologists. Furthermore, the media depicting them had become ephemeral. Yablon follows Walter Benjamin in reading for the anxieties and utopian fantasies of earlier urban dwellers: “suppressed voices, secret hopes, and lived experiences of everyday people, even marginalized ones” (p. 16).