Lost in America Photographing the last days of our architectural treasures

Once upon a time in America, a federal administration responded to a massive economic catastrophe and the impending loss of historical structures by hiring unemployed architects to travel the country and document "interesting and important architectural specimens." The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) is now "the longest operating Depression-era government agency," its enormous collection held by the Library of Congress. By the late 1950s, professional architectural photographers were recruited, including Cervin Robinson, Richard Nickel, Marvin Rand, Jack Boucher, and Carla Anderson, and it is their strikingly composed, finely detailed, black-and-white images, many taken in "a race against the wrecking crews," that fill these handsomely produced pages. Cahan and Williams, intent and expert explorers of vast national photo archives and creators of many exceptional books, selected stunning images that preserve the last days of 100 buildings razed in the delirium of urban renewal, which valued expressways and development deals over architecture and neighborhoods. Cahan and Williams crisply and affectingly tell the story of each building and its demise, including churches, schools, court houses, banks, city halls, post offices, train stations, theaters, stores, hotels, stadiums, mansions, a Carnegie library, and a Native American dance lodge. In a time of worsening wildfires and floods along with earthquakes and wars all rampantly destroying lives and buildings, this incisively curated record of wantonly obliterated architectural marvels showcases our creativity and our destructiveness.

In this arresting collection, historians Cahan and Williams (coeditors of River of Blood) spotlight architectural jewels of America's yesteryear in photographs taken between 1933 and the present by the government-run Historic American Buildings Survey. Sober black-and-white shots capture spaces "on the verge of destruction," including a row of lonely looking rooming houses in 1960 Los Angeles's once wealthy Bunker Hill neighborhood, which in the early 20th century devolved into "an old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town," a description the authors pull from Raymond Chandler's 1942 The High Window; the 10-story, fortresslike Erie County Savings Bank in 1965 Buffalo; and a 1981 Detroit church that was displaced by a General Motors factory. The photos capture important public hubs, including New York City's iron-and-glass Penn Station, built in 1910 and razed in 1963, while also highlighting minor architectural details, including the "lavish" ironwork of the Brooklyn Fox Theater and a hypnotic spiral staircase in the opulent Metropolitan Opera House, where "virtually every great singer" performed until its 1967 destruction. While a dignified beauty suffuses these pages, a looming sense of tragedy is inescapable as well: "a number of these structures were fought for... most slipped away unnoticed." It's a bittersweet record that gives worthy due to the spaces that shaped a bygone era. (Nov.)