Jeff Byles
Auteur de Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition
Œuvres de Jeff Byles
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 2
- Membres
- 82
- Popularité
- #220,761
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 4
- ISBN
- 4
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.… (plus d'informations)