China's deserted fake Disneyland

No way I can improve on the reporting from Reuters' David Gray, so I'm going to shamelessly reprint. Original article here. More of Gray's China reporting here.

Along the road to one of China’s most famous tourist landmarks – the Great Wall of China – sits what could potentially have been another such tourist destination, but now stands as an example of modern-day China and the problems facing it.

Situated on an area of around 100 acres, and 45 minutes drive from the center of Beijing, are the ruins of ‘Wonderland’. Construction stopped more than a decade ago, with developers promoting it as ‘the largest amusement park in Asia’. Funds were withdrawn due to disagreements over property prices with the local government and farmers. So what is left are the skeletal remains of a palace, a castle, and the steel beams of what could have been an indoor playground in the middle of a corn field.

Pulling off the expressway and into the car park, I expected to be stopped by the usual confrontational security guards. But there was absolutely no one to be seen. I walked through one of the few entrances not boarded up, and instantly started coughing. In front of me were large empty rooms and discarded furniture, all covered in a thick layer of dust, along with an eerie silence that gave the place a haunted feeling – an emotion not normally associated with a children’s playground.

Once outside again, I came across some farmers who originally owned the land and are now using it to once again to grow their crops. Their tracks and plantations can be seen running through and surrounding the uncompleted buildings. Walking further, I came across a rather farcical sight of some farmers digging a well next to a castle; a moment I will always savor as a photographer in a place like China where castles are not in huge supply. I explained this to the farmers and they just shrugged their shoulders, oblivious to a photographer’s happiness. I asked them what happened, and they simply answered the developers ran out of money, and they are getting back to doing what they do best. They are even slowly starting to plant trees and build shelters near the buildings, adding they think it is now safe to think the developers are never coming back. This I can believe, as the absence of any security (something very rare in China) leads one to think that even the developers have given up on what is already there.

All these structures of rusting steel and decaying cement, are another sad example of property development in China involving wasted money, wasted resources and the uprooting of farmers and their families. It is a reflection of the country’s property market which many analysts say the government must keep tightening steps in place. The worry is a massive increase in inflation and a speculative bubble that might burst, considering that property sales contribute to around 10 percent of China’s growth.

Ruin Porn: Greek Orphanage, Büyükada

Büyükada is one of the Prince's Islands, in the sea of Marmara just outside of Istanbul. The Büyükada Greek Orphanage (Büyükada Rum Yetimhanesi) is one of the world's largest wooden buildings, now a stunning semi-ruin. Built in the 1898-1899 by French-Turkish architect Alexandre Vallaury, it's the largest and one of the finest examples of Ottoman Beaux-Arts architecture. Vallaury, the head of the architecture department of the School of Fine Arts ("Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi", now Mimar Sinan University), also designed the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and was a friend of Osman Hamdi Bey.

They're serious with the dogs and guards, otherwise I would have been in here in a hot second. The orphanage was used as a government building in the 1940s, and was abandoned in the 1960s. After a lengthy court battle, title to the building was returned to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate last year.

I've had trouble finding interior photos, but this one from the Turkish Forest and Environment Ministry's website gives a taste of the incredible interior decor. There's vague rumors of restoration plans, but I have trouble even imagining the expense involved.

Ruins of Detroit: Michigan Central Station in NYT

From the New York Times, the latest on the iconic ruin of Michigan Central Station:

Michigan Central is in a class of its own. Some city officials consider it among the ugliest behemoths to pockmark Detroit and have ordered its demolition, but others see it as the industrial age’s most gracious relic, a Beaux Arts gem turned gothic from neglect but steeped in haunting beauty.

Now Detroit has become embroiled in an urgent debate over how to save what is perhaps its most iconic ruin — and in the process, some insist, give the demoralized city a much needed boost.

“People compare it to Roman ruins,” said Karen Nagher, the executive director of Preservation Wayne, an organization that seeks to protect architecture and neighborhoods around Detroit. “Some people just want it left alone. But I’d love to see that building with windows in and lights on again.”

Having lost nearly a million people in the last 60 years, Detroit has a backlog of thousands of empty office buildings, theaters, houses and hotels. Downtown alone, more than 200 abandoned buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. Most are examples of the Art Deco and neo-Classical styles that were popular before World War II, when Detroit was booming.

The great lobby (NY Times)

Detroit's moronic rush to purge itself of any building of historical interest is an American architectural tragedy. The notion that bulldozing abandoned buildings would cure the city's problems is a strange form of shamanic thinking - that appearance will create essence.

Some kids from Cass Tech made a cool video tour that gives you a good sense of the space:

The hobby of exploring abandoned buildings ("urban exploration") has gone from fringe to mainstream over the last decade, with its own organizations and even conventions. Detroit, with its forest of abandoned factories, is a prime destination. I first visited Michigan Central in 2002 and have been back every couple years. There's _always_ a group of eager young explorers in it these days, despite the razor wire and stern "Homeland Security" signs everywhere. There's a lively discussion about the site at the station's Facebook page (15,000 fans!), and there are serious discussions about turning the place into an official tourist attraction.

The cultural role of urban exploration is very complex and totally archaeo-pop. It's an interesting mix of archaeological tourism, industrial nostalgia, and the ascendance of "authentic" experiences as markers of the true self. In the American context, it also carries a frisson of class and race transgression, as white "explorers" enter racialized spaces like inner-city Detroit (which is 85% African-American).

I'll have a post about the genealogy and development of the hobby one of these days, but in the meantime check out infiltration.org, the zine and later website that helped catalyze urban exploration as a culture (RIP Ninjalicious, we miss your spirit.)

Me on the roof of MCS in 2003, gazing across the bridge toward Canada.

Swallowed from inside: a metaphor for Detroit?

Eulogy for the American Mall

I've been fascinated this week with genre of blog I'd never seen before: the proto-archaeology of the dead shopping mall. The work of photographer Brian Ulrich, featured in The Morning News, captures the eloquent silence of empty retail space:


Rolling Acres Mall 1 (Brian Ulrich)

Between the recession, internet shopping, and the aging of America's inner-ring suburbs, a lot of once-pleasant malls are collapsing and altering the social fabric of their communities. As Ulrich notes in his interview, there are few good options for dead malls:

Some buildings can be repurposed but so many cannot. Retail design and use is not only based on the space itself but also location. When a few stores go down often many others in an area go with them—a retail ghost town if you will. Though one can repurpose one space it might sit in a vast area of blight. The problem lies not in what we should do with what we have already but it seems more important to get a lot stricter about what new retail spaces we allow into our communities. The promises are always jobs and tax revenue, but that won’t help in the long run if the store folds or relocates to the next township who offers an incentive.

If archaeology is about the intersection of space and material culture, then the shopping mall is ground zero for an archaeological understanding of the 20th century in America, a time and place that was pivotal in world history. What Ulrich suggests above is a transformation in the spatial organization of consumption - zoning for quality retail rather than growth at any cost. In other words, he's suggesting we start a new cultural horizon.


Dixie Square Mall (Brian Ulrich)

The awesome thing about being an archaeologist interested in the present is that you can track changes in material culture in real time, thanks to the Internet. For instance, the Dead Malls Blog reported last month about the final demise of the JC Penney catalog, which joins the Sears catalog in the graveyard of pre-internet distribution technologies, while leaving a legacy of millions of objects spread across every part of the United States and Canada, a terminus ante quem for future archaeologists. We can see the line of division right in front of us!

Or check out Labelscar, "The Retail History Blog", which has lovingly-rendered histories of shopping malls. Recently: the rise and fall of Empire Mall in Sioux Falls (1975) and Winrock Shopping Center in Albuquerque (1961).


"Pep Boys 3" (Brian Ulrich)

The speed at which material culture is changing is something that archaeologists are going to have to grapple with pretty soon. (Especially in the United States, where Federal law marks anything up to 1959 as potentially having historic significance: every pile of beer cans, a historic monument!) What does it mean for our discipline when material testimony of the past is not vanishingly scarce traces of palaeolithic life, but the too-plentiful bounty of millions of remote controlled-cars from the JC Penney catalogue?

Labelscar in particular has a rich collection of comments from people who remember, personally, bygone eras of the American Mall and are already engaged in commemorating and memorializing these periods. Do they make the archaeologist obsolete?

Urban Ruins: The Fort Mason Tunnel

This old railroad tunnel is nestled under Fort Mason in San Francisco. Built in late 1914, it was the western extension of the old State Belt Railroad, connecting the Port of SF to the Presidio. The Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 was about to go down, and they needed a way to get the thousands of tons of building materials from the port over to the marina. It also made it much easier to ship military people and materiel into the Presidio.

There's not much left of the Belt Line now. You can still see some tracks in the pavement near the east side of the Fort Mason hill. The tunnel is most of what's left, and makes a fun short jaunt into San Francisco history. Some photos from a recent expedition with a friend of mine.



The west exit, near the Marina Safeway:

Celebrity Cribs: Abandoned Edition

Between the economic downturn and the vicissitudes of celebrity life, there’s been a lot of news about abandoned buildings lately, including lots of examples of creative reuses of urban landscapes. (The Foreclosed Backyards National Skate Park, anyone?)

Downturns hit the rich and famous, too. As a delightful side effect, we get to see the very beginnings of the archaeological process at work in a few now-abandoned cribs of powerful people. These houses provoke a rich set of feelings: voyeuristic pleasure, combined with the beauty of decay, and the poignancy of a fall from grace.

Take Mike Tyson’s mansion in the Firelands of northern Ohio. The TV is busted, the indoor pool green and scummy. For some reason I’m reminded of touring a medieval keep somewhere in Ireland – the same sense of exotic opulence and privilege, now emptied of its power and open to prying eyes. Tyson's lawyer made Illicit Ohio take down their full photoset, but there's lots of copies floating around the web.



Fergie’s former palatial manse in Berkshire (this is the non-singing Duchess (of York), and the English Berkshire) now lies in not-so-picturesque ruins, with some photos courtesy of the intrepid reporters at the Daily Mirror. What a hideous carpet.


The granddaddy of them all, and by far the most bizarre and breathtaking, is Michael Jackson’s former home at Neverland. Stop what you’re doing right now and spend some time looking at my friend Tunnelbug’s story and photos from the place. Astonishing how it is beautiful and totally insane at the same time.


It seems pretty unlikely that these structures will be preserved as well as the great celebrity cribs of the past – our modern mania for tearing down and rebuilding makes the chances pretty slim that Neverland will be the new Domus Aurea or Masada for some lucky archaeologist in 4009 CE. I guess we'll just ahve to imagine those future ruins into being.