I recently wrote about the phenomenon known as “ghost buildings,” or the remains of part of a demolished building in the shared wall of an adjoining building. Like this:

I was in Hyattsville, Maryland the other week to meet a friend at a coffee shop (which I also wrote about), and I passed this neat example of a ghost building along the main drag:

Here’s a closeup of that back wall:

I can’t actually find what address this was—my phone didn’t record the location properly and there’s nothing in the picture I can use to identify the exact building. But you’re looking at an underground portion of the building, and you can see the imprint of the staircases, and even the still-hanging exit sign, on the interior wall that has not been completely torn out yet. It’s weird seeing the inside of a building like that, visible only because the building itself is gone.

It reminds me of the time I walked around on the exposed floor of a demolished department store at a defunct mall. The top left is the central corridor through the store; the bottom right is the old bathroom floor. (I wasn’t trespassing; there was no sign and no fence. It was just there.)

Here’s a neat article in Atlas Obscura about ghost buildings in Philadelphia. Because so much of the city’s housing is attached rowhouses, Philly has a lot of these. These ghosts are formed whenever one attached structure is torn down, and that happens often. The article profiles a photography project by architectural historian Molly Lester, who found a sort of strange and curious beauty in these images. I like this bit:

“Building ghosts are a fascinating way to get a sense of an interior life of a place that, when it’s standing, you really don’t get to see,” says Lester, who imagines the private dramas that once unfolded behind walls that are now public-facing.

Also this:

Some of the buildings have been especially visually memorable, retaining what Bixler calls “traces of life”—lasting personal touches like moldings and colored paint from a demolished home visible on the exterior wall of the rowhouse next door. “One home in North Philadelphia still had vibrant, lime green wallpaper from the 1960s,” he recalls. “And a poster of rapper Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs still hanging.”

This image from the piece is really interesting. This one is not a rowhouse but a duplex. Because of the thick shared wall (called a party wall), it’s possible to tear down one half. But because of the roofline, when one half is torn down, the other half doesn’t totally stand on its own. I bet that little enclosed porch area was added on later, too. It’s possible the other half had some different detailing—divergent evolution of a sort, which can make cookie-cutter housing grow into itself and display a surprising amount of variety and customization.

Here’s a story that links to a Flickr group dedicated to photographing ghost buildings, and which notes how these can sometimes become occasions for public art (painting furniture or décor onto the exposed walls, etc.)

In terms of helping to illustrate something about the built history of a place, look at this one, shared in the piece, originally from the Flickr group. Probably, the ghost building revealed in the wall predates the larger building still standing. Who knows how many bits and pieces of different structures are contained somehow in these walls.

And here’s a piece about ghost buildings in New York City, which I linked in my original piece. This one goes into some detail as to what’s actually going on structurally/architecturally, which is interesting.

I like this because it’s something you see fairly often (at least in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic cities), but don’t really ever give much thought to. I love these hidden stories, both for their own value, and for the things they can be a starting point for—the architectural details of how attached buildings actually work, the bits of wallpaper or tilework that can be exposed and date a building’s interior to a specific era, or just the sort of weird thought that you’re looking at something that was once a home.

I suppose it’s not much weirder than all the former rowhouses in Washington, D.C. whose basements or first floors are now restaurants, lounges, or stores. Was the restaurant bathroom in the same spot as when the building was a house? Is my table in an old children’s bedroom? If you pulled the interior walls off, I wonder how much original detailing might be covered up, still intact, behind them?

I like anything that reinforces and illustrates the idea of buildings not as products that are manufactured, worn out, and thrown away, but as raw materials, things that can be adapted and reused, full of possibilities of life—or afterlife.

Related Reading:

A Lesson in Adaptive Reuse

The Phylogeny of the Watch

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