Jeff Byles

Not quite what I expected, but interesting nevertheless. Since the subtitle is “Unearthing the History of Demolition”; I was hoping Rubble would provide technical details on how the Egyptians disassembled the mortuary temple of Khufu to provide the stones for the Pyramid of Amenemhat I, or how the Romans went about destroying Carthage before plowing salt into the ruins. There’s none of that; instead we have capsule biographies of various people in the demolition business, both those who actually undertook the work and those who ordered it done. Thus we read of Baron Haussmann, who supervised the elimination of many of the rabbit-warren streets of Paris and there replacement with broad avenues (which, coincidentally, provided excellent fields of fire for Napoleon III’s artillery, just in case the sans-cullotes got uppity again) and Albert Volk, who undertook the removal of many of the buildings in turn-of-the-century New York. These gentlemen operated the old-fashioned way, with hammer and wrecking bar, and also recycled a lot of the material they removed (in fact, in some cases demolition contractors paid for the privilege of demolishing a building, since the debris had considerable value). Alas, like most other recycling efforts, disassembling a building is labor-intensive and not especially safe; thus the modern method often involves explosives. Here the Loizeaux family of Controlled Demolition Incorporated is (as author Jeff Byles put it) “The Flying Wallendas of Demolition” and film clips of their projects appear so often on television that rivals joke bitterly about “the Loizeaux Channel”.


Equally interesting, and rather sad, is the discussion of the politics of demolition. The award for individual demolition poster child has to go to the Pruitt-Igoe Homes in St. Louis, a 1955 $36M subsidized housing project that kept being described as “award-winning”, even though nobody was actually able to come up with an award it had won. In this case, the inhabitants undertook their own demolition project long before the government got around to it, with debris, vermin, and dirt covering everything. This project had two basketball courts for 5000 children, and the wading pools quickly filled with debris and were destroyed to make a new street. At this point the Federal government came in to help and amended housing laws to insure that no tenant paid more than 25% of income for rent, which left Pruitt-Igoe without even enough money to cover minimal maintenance. When the end finally came in 1972, the demo contractor was asked how much money would come from salvage; his response was “That seems to have been taken care of before we got here”. Even the aftermath was tragic; although various schemes were suggested to turn the site into a park, it’s currently still fenced-off vacant land, and despite the project’s demise in 1972 HUD was still paying off construction bonds until 1995.


If Pruitt-Igoe takes the individual demolition award, the team effort prize has to go to Detroit. Abandoned building were so rampant that entire neighborhoods took up tools and demolished them on their own (for which they were promptly arrested by police who couldn’t be bothered to show up when the same buildings were in use a crack houses). Every successive mayor promised to do something about the problem, and every one found out that there just wasn’t enough money to cover demolition costs and that the city bureaucracy in charge of demolition permits couldn’t issue them fast enough to keep up with the rate of building abandonment. (An example given is a house that was condemned in 1988 but didn’t get a demo permit until 1996 and wasn’t actually torn down until 1998). The most intriguing suggest about what to do is – nothing. Fence off the blighted area and turn it into an “architectural ruin park”. Wildlife and plants would take over, you could charge admission to take guided tours, and the whole thing would become sort of an American Acropolis or a Monument Valley for buildings. Not likely to happen, alas.


The book is surprisingly free of politics (for an author who writes for the New York Times. Although nobody gets off particularly easy, there’s no wholesale condemnation of “rampant developers despoiling our history” or “terminally dysfunctional government bureaucracy”; reading between the lines is enough to let the reader draw conclusions. Recommended.… (més)

This is a pretty good survey of how cities come apart. I was particularly struck by Byles description of what has happened in Detroit, a city I lived in for 18 years. Certainly, the destruction of the J. L. Hudson Department store was a big symbolic demolition. Hudson's closed its doors as the major department store in Detroit in 1982. At the end, the only suburbanites still shopping dowtown wer those who lived in Grosse Pointe, not enough to maintain such a large store, given the huge population loss within the city of Detroit, and the abandonment of the city by the rest of the suburbs. I was the Manager of Scheduling for the Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority, and we could track the decline of ridership by time of day. When I first got to Detroit in 1971, SEMTA and the city system (DSR - Detroit Street Railways) were still adding extra service during shopping nights in the Christmas season in December. By 1982, that had long past, and the store was essentially empty after 6 PM.

The story of Pruitt-Igoe I had never fully read. The shoddy cutback on basic quality in the building of this huge project seems almost criminal. It seems useful to realize that most of the projects in New York City are still standing, so the concept was not altogether undesirable, although I agree with Jane Jacobs on the dehumanizing these buildings bring about.

But many of our big cities have emptied out, and no one really knows what to do, except to tear more dangerous building down.… (més)