Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City by Molly Lester and Michael Bixler

“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. 
 
Building Ghosts: Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City, authored by Molly Lester and Michael Bixler and published by Temple University Press in November 2024, features more than 100 striking contemporary color photographs and a deeply researched narrative about Philadelphia’s buildings, neighborhoods, and the ghosts that reveal new truths and provocations about the changing city. The text and images in this lavish volume illuminate these lost buildings and found ghosts. Building Ghosts serves as an invitation to see the city differently, with the past clinging visibly to the present. 

About the Exhibition

The companion Building Ghosts exhibition at KieranTimberlake interprets photography and essays from the publication with an installation incorporating 400 pounds of reclaimed material from Revolution Recovery, a construction and demolition waste recycling company in northeast Philadelphia. This single site processes more than 600 tons of building waste material per day. Access to the site was graciously made possible by RAIR, the artist in residence program whose mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art and industry. 

About the Authors

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 (Fall 2024, Temple University Press) 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 (Fall 2024, Temple University Press).

WATCH: Building Ghosts exhibit at KieranTimberlake on WHYY’s You Oughta Know 
Video produced by Monica Rogozinski as part of the series You Oughta Know on WHYY TV