Event – Detail

“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.

Author Molly Lester and photographer Michael Bixler will be at The Athenaeum to discuss their new book, Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City (Temple University Press, November 2024) and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city.

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 and the co-author of Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (2024, distributed by Yale University Press).

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.