Untimely Ruins

American urban ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in debates about home foreclosures, images of 9/11, or postapocalyptic movies. Nick Yablon argues that this association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation - from accounts of failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to popular fiction and cartoons that envisioned disintegrating skyscrapers and bridges - Yablon challenges the myth that ruins were absent or at least insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the past, American ruins often appeared unpredictably and disappeared before they could accrue an aura of age. In doing so, they generated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the new kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative depictions of these untimely ruins everywhere from the archives of photography clubs to the pages of pulp magazines, Yablon reconstructs crucial debates about America's economic, technological, and cultural transformation in an age of urban modernity.

ISBN 0226946649   Pages 416 ISBN13 9780226946641 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The University of Chicago Press   Weight (grammes) 544 Imprint University of Chicago Press   Published in Chicago, IL Format Paperback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 12 Feb 2010   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2009017799   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY 307.76097309034   Academic level Undergraduate DEWEY edition DC22

Introduction		Of light bulbs and bathtubs : excavating the modern city		1
1		Crumbling columns and day-old ruins : specters of antiquity on the American Grand Tour, 1819-1837		19
2		"Even Eden, you know, ain't all built" : paper cities, British investors, and the ruins of Cairo, Illinois, 1837-1844		63
3		The petrified city : antiquity and modernity in Melville's New York, 1835-1865		107
4		Relapsing into barbarism : labor, ethnicity, and ruin in prospective histories of urban America, 1865-1906		147
5		"Plagued by their own inventions" : reframing the technological ruins of San Francisco, 1906-1909		191
6		The metropolitan life in ruins : architectural and fictional speculations in New York, 1893-1919		243
Epilogue		Toward the posthuman ruin		289
		Notes		295
		Index		363

"Untimely Ruins is a magisterial work of scholarship, brimming with intelligence, insight, and interest on every page. Nick Yablon's scholarship is prodigious. His extended meditation on the meanings of American ruins explains why they are distinctive, what they reveal, and how they matter. This is a book of exceptional historical expanse and interpretive ambition that is at the same time remarkably lucid from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and page to page." - Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City"

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