Tag Archives: ruins

When “icons of urban decay” are demolished

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One well-known site on Chicago’s southwest side will soon be no more:

Photo by Jan van der Wolf on Pexels.com

For some in the city’s cultural community, the demolition of the historic grain silos represents a visual gut-punch. The structures — icons of urban decay as they sat empty for nearly five decades — have been a popular backdrop for filmmakers, musicians and skyline photographers and served as a canvas for many graffiti artists who ignored the “No Trespassing” signs. The silos even appeared in the 2014 movie Transformers: Age of Extinction…

Whether you think of them as eyesores or historically significant structures, the Damen Silos will soon vanish from the Southwest Side’s skyline. By the end of last week, a squat building along Damen Avenue had been reduced to rubble. Heneghan Wrecking’s crews were working next to the tall silos, where the noise of a jackhammer rang out. Workers sprayed water to prevent clouds of dust from filling the air.

“We are extremely disappointed about the demolition,” said Kate Eakin, managing director of the McKinley Park Development Council. “It represents a gross lack of imagination about what the site could be, as well as failures of government at several levels to communicate with each other.” Eakin’s local neighborhood group hoped to see the site transformed into a music venue and park that could host festivals. Other grain silos have been repurposed in similar ways: An art museum fills a former silo in South Africa, while Minneapolis left a silo standing in the middle of a popular tourism district…

“The Damen Silos are among the last remaining reminders of the agricultural trade that literally built the city,” said Tom Leslie, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Losing the Damen Silos means yet another lost opportunity to celebrate the city’s history as the center of agricultural trade.”

This single case hints at multiple interesting questions communities consider. At what point does an abandoned building or property become worth preserving? Which buildings can or should be repurposed for cultural or recreational use? Who should make these decisions and who can or should fund decisions?

But this case also involves ruins, industrial ones at that. This is a different kind of case than a once opulent theater or a once thriving neighborhood. How many industrial sites in the United States are preserved? There would be no shortage of such sites across American cities, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast.

The Robert ruins in Gallery 218

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The Art Institute of Chicago recently featured on social media a painting by Hubert Robert:

Among the many worthwhile works on the second floor of the Art Institute are these four works in one room. I have always enjoyed them. Building off yesterday’s post about how today’s buildings could become tomorrow’s fossils, these paintings romanticize ruins from past civilizations. Imagine walking through such structures. There may have been centuries when people could wander through such ruins in Rome, Greece, Egypt, and more. Today, such a site would be hard to find as many ruins are swarming with tourists.

What always impressed me about these paintings was the scale of the buildings. As the social media post notes, the people at the bottom are very small. The buildings are massive and impressive. They connote great civilization and activity. Imagine this building above with a full vaulted ceiling and full of people. The buildings have lived on even as the individual leaders and residents changed.

The Diderot quote above is an interesting one. These buildings are falling apart and time will conquer them. At some point, the pillars will fall, the arches will be no more, and the scene will look very different. But, rulers and leaders construct such buildings in the first place so that the structures outlive them. They will not last forever, but even as ruins or remains in the ground they can still attest to a past era.