Dennis Maher
The body which thou hast now is called the thought–body of propensities. Since thou hast not a material body of flesh and blood, whatever may come—sounds, lights, or rays—are, all three, unable to harm thee: thou art incapable of dying. It is quite sufficient for thee to know that these apparitions are thine own thought–forms.
—Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
From 2004–2009, I earned a significant portion of my living by working part-time as a demolition laborer in the city of Buffalo, New York. Within this city of 20,000 vacant properties, where the mayor has aimed to demolish 5,000 buildings in five years, demolition has, ironically, been considered an industry of growth. Here, shifting relationships between expansion and contraction and creation and destruction saturate the urban landscape with material, social, as well as psychological effects. In an environment of intense unmaking, the movements of matter can splinter the mind’s perceptions. While working on sites of demolition, I came to know a strange, even perverse, sense of freedom. As materials were indiscriminately pushed and pulled, the world acquired an elastic quality. There was a lightness implicit in destroying that which we ordinarily regard to be solid and stable, in setting change in motion, and in sensing irreversibility. When rigid organizations of material were released, ensuing new orders beheld a fresh looseness. Moments of revelation occurred when objects, hidden within the walls, became suddenly revealed. I found liberation in opening up space beyond previously perceptible limits. Most of all, there was a thrilling, precarious tension between my body and the instabilities of walls, floors, and ceilings.
During the time that I worked on demolition sites, I never thought about demolition as an instrument of death. For me, it was a creative catalyst. Death, after all, has many currents, and the forces of change have malleable, sometimes grotesque, physical guises. In Buffalo, and in other comparable post-industrial cities, the territories of urban life and death are our most maligned masks. Beneath artifices of the body, hidden layers of the built and unbuilt are continuously reformulated. But when the city outwardly presents itself as a constellation of deaths and rebirths, it is rare that its movements, as well as its monuments, do not take one side or the other.
Within contemporary public discourses, vivacity and mortality are frequently projected upon buildings to legitimize underlying agendas. When contested sites are at stake, the terms life and death are used by preservationists, architects, developers, concerned citizens, and others as political fulcrums. Preservation advocates, groups of whom are very active in Buffalo, have perhaps by necessity become prone to adopting this nomenclature. Their views are often pitted against proponents of development, or “progress,” who, by a similar turn, see few alternatives for a building that has lost its use and, therefore, its life. Failed space—marked by decay, vacancy, structural failure, or collapse—is cast as deathly territory. And so, “mothball,” “ruin,” “wasteland,” and “eyesore” have come to embody the death drive of the post-industrial city.
This language of life and death, in spite of its implied physical immediacy, has two more subtle effects: it underscores a general disciplinary aversion to the inherent temporality of buildings, and it eschews the generative possibilities of failed spaces as urban and architectural catalysts. During those instances when the disciplines of architecture and preservation have been able to operate within frameworks mediated by time and change, they have often become trapped in discourses of prediction. Similarly, our collective imagination for failed space seems to act principally through resistance, rather than embrace. In this essay, I confront the subject of post mortem architecture in search of new models for architecture and preservation after life. I follow the bizarre story of St. Gerard’s church in Buffalo, a building that is now vacant and has, for all intents and purposes, been declared deceased. While journeying with St. Gerard’s into the afterlife, I draw upon three examples to uncover relationships between the body, the building, and the threshold of death.
The case studies, which include the visible boundary of absolute death, the treatments of bodies during funerary rites, and the United States Federal Witness Security Program (WITSEC), are not instances of true finality, but moments of transition. They address the post mortem condition from points of view that oscillate between the physical, the social, and the psychological. While filtering St. Gerard’s through these respective lenses, I speculate how each example might support an alternative future for the building’s stones. Finally, I present a project that I executed while working on the demolition and restoration of Buffalo’s Farrar Mansion from 2004–2009, a post mortem proposition for a building—and a city—that recalibrated temporal, spatial, and material discontinuities. The collected examples begin to identify a trajectory for an architecture that questions the efficacy of building livingness and that reveals the interrelated physical, social, and psychological processes by which we inhabit less–than–visible worlds. To willingly enter death’s arena may contradict the vitality that preservation is charged with protecting, however; this is precisely the challenge. By shifting architecture to the other side of its vital threshold, perhaps architects, urbanists, preservationists, and concerned citizens might expand their capacities to steward failed spaces in and out of time.
The idea of the city as an organism imbued with life and susceptible to death gained widespread popular appeal among urbanists, as well as the general public, with the publication of Jane Jacobs’s seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Jacobs’ treatise established metaphoric relationships between the qualities of cities and the actions and dramas of living beings.1 Recently, the discussion of cities as complex living organisms has shifted from a metaphoric reading to a more performance-based analysis with research by a group of physicists and economists led by Geoffrey West.2 West and his colleagues have been analyzing urban data from a metabolic point of view, using fractal geometry and scaling relationships to speculate about the laws by which cities function. That this research involves an interdisciplinary group of practitioners far removed from urban studies indicates that the idea of the city as a living thing stretches across the spectrum of human knowledge and imagination. Indeed, material on the subject of living cities abounds within the realm of popular culture, and, at times, fascination with urban death has precluded that of life.
An article published in Forbes Magazine in 2008, entitled “America’s Fastest Dying Cities,” expounds on the death cycles of select American cities, many located in the former manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt, with a list of ten near-casualties.3 This list considers the statistical categories of population loss, unemployment, and economic prospects as barometers of urban life or death. In 2010, urban activists who objected to the article responded by formulating an alternative symposium event, entitled Ten Living Cities, which took place in the so-labeled dying city of Dayton, Ohio. This event to celebrate urban vivacity was ceremonially opened in Dayton by Joshua Zumbrun, author of the Forbes article. As if to re-enact an ancient motif, the harbinger of death returned to the stage to confer new life. Skeptics, meanwhile, mockingly referred to the gathering as “Deathfest.”4 Clearly, the Forbes list and the resulting symposium organized in protest demonstrate that, for many contemporary cities, life and death are meaningful, albeit contested, concepts.
The contested nature of urban life and death was made poignantly evident in Buffalo, site of a feud spanning two cities and 900 miles for the ownership of St. Gerard’s church, a one hundred year-old work of neo-classical architecture. St. Gerard’s, constructed of limestone, travertine marble and granite, is a one-third scale replica of the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome. It has been vacant since 2008, when the Archdiocese of Buffalo sanctioned the shuttering of thirty of the city’s less-attended churches. Vying for ownership of St. Gerard’s is Mary Our Queen Parish in Norcross, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. The group is lobbying to disassemble the existing stone edifice block by block, transport the remains southward, and re-erect the structure for a growing congregation of southern Catholics.5 To do so would cost one quarter of the price of a new building of similar stature. The scale of the effort would make this the largest building moved from one place to another within the United States.
Grave robbing is, of course, nothing new. Neither is the appropriation of architectural fragments from a devastated or conquered territory for the purposes of rebuilding elsewhere. The piecemeal relocation of buildings also has due precedence, as evidenced, for example, by the London Bridge, rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, in 1971. However, the case of St. Gerard’s is particularly noteworthy for the way that the proposed transposition has been publicly framed in terms of life and death of place, and for the associated consequences for the afterlives of architecture. Through public statements, propaganda, and staged events, Mary Our Queen Parish in Norcross has exploited the popular mythology of the dying city to craft a new mythology of a rejuvenated corpus, positioning the Atlanta suburb as the preferred site for receiving the journeying body of the church. The revivifying story of St. Gerard’s must confirm the death of Buffalo to restore the decaying building’s livingness. Rather than sanctioning this rite of passage from the realm of the dead to that of the living, I propose a close examination of after-death relationships between the body and the building, and the projection of correspondences toward a stewardship of architecture’s afterlives.
Reactions to the proposed relocation of St. Gerard’s by some Buffalo-based preservationists are as unmoving as the Atlanta camp has been iterant. “Build your own church. We have enough vacant lots,” was the response of David Franczyk, president of the Buffalo City Council.6 Tim Tielman, director of the Campaign for Buffalo History, Architecture and Culture, is more explicit about the deadening effects of the proposal: “They want to harvest our architectural heritage and put it in a box.”7 The proposed moving of the church raises intriguing questions about the fate of historic architecture in the economically impoverished Rust Belt and intensifies debates of public versus private stewardship of culture. Supporters of the plan point to the progressive nature of “preservation by relocation,” a provocative moniker considering that the attempt to preserve architecture usually signals the stilling of place, rather than an embrace of displacement. Detractors condemn the proposed move with premonitory attention, citing the potential flood of historically significant buildings outside of their local contexts, leaving stressed communities unhinged and void-stricken in the aftermath. The resulting feud over the fate of St. Gerard’s effectively places Buffalo on the front line in the battle over the spoils of America’s Fastest Dying Cities.
In constructing their argument to acquire and move St. Gerard’s, the Norcross-based Parish of Mary Our Queen is particularly effective in crafting messages that emphasize Buffalo’s decline and its inability to effectively deal with a significant relic for which no current use exists. Simultaneously, these messages de-emphasize any interpretation of the church as a spoil, and of its transportation as cultural looting. This has been accomplished through consistently referring to the church not as a relic or ruin, or even as an edifice, but instead as a body. A visit to the website of Mary Our Queen highlights a particularly animating statement about the proposed transposition of the house of worship: “… [I]t is more than a journey. It is a pilgrimage. On this pilgrimage, it is the church itself that is moving.”8 That the parish bills the dismantlement and reassembly of the forlorn church as a spiritual event is not, in and of itself, surprising. But, by recasting the edifice as a mobile body whose fate is to enact a ritual journey, a new story is brought into being. The journey from deathbed to renewed life would not be lacking in appropriate preparations. The parish in Norcross promises that an enlivening armature, in the form of a new steel skeleton, will receive the transported fragments. “The structure is ready for disassembly, transfer, and re-establishment on a new, stronger superstructure 900 miles away in Atlanta. By itself, this new skeleton will add centuries to the building’s life.”9 Note that the emphasis is not on the structural importance of a new steel frame, but rather on extending the building’s lifespan. The parish is adamant about the vivifying dimension of their project. “Disassembling, moving and reassembling the church will ensure its life continues as originally intended,” the church website asserts, suggesting that the so-called ritual passage is part of a natural course of events.10 In a recent newspaper interview, Father David Dye of the Norcross Parish is even more direct as he emphasizes the sickliness of the body. “It’s like an organ transplant,” he states. “You don’t want someone to die but if they are dying, it would be nice if their organs were reused and they lived again.”11
The new narrative has been strengthened by the parish’s underscoring of contrasts between the cities of Buffalo and Atlanta. “Today, Atlanta’s suburbs are the fastest-growing in the country, perhaps in the history of the world, according to some scholars,” boasts the Parish of Mary Our Queen.12 That characterization contrasts with the depiction of Buffalo as a city–in–decline: “The church’s almost certain fate there [in Buffalo], amid the harsh elements, is deterioration, decline and, eventually, destruction.”13 In making the matter an issue of life or death, Mary Our Queen has suggested that the transposition would involve a temporal, as well as geographic shift: “A priest and his parish are seeking to move one of America’s great churches 900 miles into the future,” reads another of the parish’s promotional statements, advertising unsubstantiated claims of social and cultural progress.14 The media have been captivated by the associations. “Old Buffalo church to be reborn in Atlanta suburb,” reads an Associated Press headline.15 The strategy of Mary Our Queen has been to leverage the livingness of Atlanta against the death of Buffalo, proposing that a ritual journey southward, as a funerary event leading from the land of the dead to that of the living, is the future of the mortal edifice. This mythology is even clearer upon close examination of both the existing Buffalo site and the proposed site of relocation. Oppositions resound between the two contexts. The current site of St. Gerard’s is a corner plot of an urban intersection, one where the visibility of surrounding dereliction is a reminder of the forces of urban change. By contrast, the proposed site of relocation in Norcross is a fifteen-acre plot of grass and trees. Architectural renderings of the church relocated in the affluent Atlanta suburb depict a bucolic, country-like setting, fully cleansed of any urban trace. These drawings convey a temple–on–a–hill image, devoid even of the parking lot, which would necessarily accompany the structure. Erasure of any other architectural or urban features effectively severs the church from its rust-laden past. The body passes from the city of the dead to garden paradise.
12.1 St. Gerard’s Church, Buffalo, New York (left), source: Dennis Maher, and Norcross, Georgia (right). Source: Mary Our Queen Parish
With a strategy predicated upon renewed life, Mary Our Queen Parish in Norcross has positioned the contested church in ambiguous territory: en route from decaying architectural relic to rejuvenated corpus. Meanwhile, Preservation Buffalo Niagara, the region’s strongest preservation organization, has acknowledged the complexities of the situation, but has acquiesced to dismantlement and transposition in the face of more difficult urban stewardship. “This proposal illustrates Buffalo’s dilemma,” the group states. “It highlights the city’s architectural richness while also underscoring our economic distress and shrinking population.”16 Architectural richness and economic distress are thus positioned as mutually negating attributes. The irony is that by embracing Norfolk’s strategy of revivification, the Buffalo group is only really sanctioning another, more severe form of loss—the death of death’s potential. Architectural critic Herbert Muschamp, writing of the often-ignored qualities of the void, remarked, “Postindustrial cities that are seeking to remake themselves as cultural centers might also benefit from pondering the success of failure: the glamour of their own collapse.”17 According to Muschamp, “Emptiness, obscurity, failure, bleakness, pallor—such noir terms are not found in the vocabulary of civic success with which urban revitalization programs are typically promoted. But, these terms should be permissible wherever culture comes up.”18 So, too, should these terms be permissible whenever culture comes down, and most certainly when it is transported and re-erected elsewhere. Preservation theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos suggests that remaining open to external, incomplete forces is of critical importance for dealing with historic structures today. “How we retain that unfinished openness of the past, while critiquing the idea that the new is ever outside of history, is an important challenge that lies ahead for the field of historic preservation,” he writes.19 The statements of Muschamp and Otero-Pailos are suggestive for post-industrial cities such as Buffalo, where an abundance of significant architecture and a lack of monetary resources necessitate creative propositions for the management of constructed cultural heritage. Following these observations, I believe that the disciplines of architecture and preservation must look beyond life for new models of building stewardship. In the sections that follow, I examine three post mortem case studies alongside the body of St. Gerard’s, to expose parallel physical, social, and psychological undercurrents. In so doing, I aim to catalyze the urban imagination for failed spaces, while positioning building temporality as a creative frontier in architecture.
When the scientific vision looked at death, it became bound up in a preservation project from which it has yet to escape. In his research on the medical gaze, Michel Foucault describes how Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) observed pathological phenomena with precision, and fostered a new conception of death that was “multiple, and dispersed in time.”20 Bichat recast disease as the inner function of living processes, away from the idea of death as an exteriorized unknown threat. He observed that individuals possessed living and dead tissue simultaneously. Within the terms of Bichat’s decentralized vitality, death was chronologically successive as well as spatially interactive, not absolute or fixed. Foucault notes that “With Bichat, knowledge of life finds its origin in the destruction of life and in its extreme opposite; it is at death that disease and life speak their truth: a specific, irreducible truth, protected from all assimilations to the inorganic by the circle of death that designates them for what they are.”21 By reframing the failure of the body in relation to living processes, Bichat lifted the veil of dark mystery that had previously shrouded death.
Bichat’s observations of physical death accompanied psychological consequences, many of which are noted by George Behlmer in “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death.” Behlmer recounts that the entirety of nineteenth century culture, not only the science, was saturated by ambiguous bodily conditions. Terminologies such as “trance, coma, syncope, catalepsy, insensibility, suspended animation, human hibernation, and anesthesia were only the most common labels for what appeared to be corporal frontiers.”22 This ambiguity reveals a deep confusion within the time period about the nature of human physiology, a confusion that legitimized and encouraged Gothic fantasies by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe. In his masterfully orchestrated short story, “The Premature Burial,” Poe captivates the paranoid imaginations of those for whom the final end was anything but final. The narrator of the story, who suffers from the condition of catalepsy, goes to extreme measures to ensure survival in the face of premature entombment. Precautions taken by Poe’s protagonist, in the form of highly specific modifications to the family vault, transform the subterranean box into a veritable room:
Among other things, I had the family vault so remodeled as to admit of being readily opened from within. The slightest pressure upon a long lever that extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portal to fly back. There were arrangements also for the free admission of air and light, and convenient receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault–door, with the addition of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty. Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse.23
Light, air, openness, nourishment, warmth, comfort, touch, sound—in short, an entire range of bodily needs and sensorial experiences are accounted for. The mechanisms of Poe’s narrator are designed to accommodate vitality in the face of death’s illusory appearance—to sustain the body beyond the limits of visual determinacy. The nineteenth century popularity of safety coffins, mortuaries, and humane societies are all such manifestations. In a curious inversion, present-day medical knowledge and technology have made death’s boundaries equally uncertain, as debates on the subject now focus on the use of life-prolonging technology with respect to bio-ethics. The realization of organ transplants, for example, often depends upon establishing a relationship between the dead brain and the dead person, with associated moral implications. Marc Alexander, in his historical analysis of signs of death, observes that:
the contemporary problem is less one of “false negatives” resulting from insufficient knowledge of the predictors of death, than one of “false positives” resulting from a surfeit of medical technology. Life prolonging technology creates the danger that an overbroad test for life signs will cause the physician to treat a corpse as a living person, thereby morally affronting the individual person or his memory, and wasting scarce resources. Consequently, attention has focused on the need to choose among the indicators of death, as well as on the more traditional need to develop refined indicators of death.24
The persistently liminal boundaries of death, from the origins of modern science through to the present day, demand a more nuanced analysis of the indicators of St. Gerard’s morbidity, and a discussion of the place of death in relation to the life of the church. In each of the previous examples, the ambiguous definition of death’s determinacy is conceived, either physically, psychologically, or ethically, beyond the world of immediate appearances and in precise relation to living processes. While Bichat’s gaze was focused on zooming into what his eyes could methodically record, Poe’s was turned inward, away from what his distrustful eyes failed to behold. Bichat, fixing his vision on observable evidence, transformed death into complex, vital interrelations of spatial and temporal phenomena. Poe, by contrast, motivated by inner doubt and anxiety, projected an entire environment for an existence beyond apparent death. Both of these approaches tested the imagination of death’s vitality, resulting in post mortem representations—scientific and artistic—that unfolded in space and time. In the case of Alexander, however, the faculty of vision is superseded by that of moral choice—one must decide what indicators to follow according to ethical, not visual, concerns. These projections beyond the realm of apparent death hint at how the body of St. Gerard’s might be re-imagined, even as outward appearances fail to indicate a vital presence. Just as in Bichat’s analyses, “the medical gaze pivots on itself and demands of death an account of life and disease, or its definitive immobility of their time and movements,” so too the stakeholders of St. Gerard’s might pivot on their own pathological predispositions to confront, with the scrutiny of their eyes, the “definitive immobility” of St. Gerard’s failure. “If we work to stop this move, we are likely to see accelerating damage,” reads another statement issued by Preservation Buffalo Niagara, asserting that, against what our eyes would have us believe, disassembly of the building is a non-damaging act and—in a forceful castigation of the visual frame—impending damage must be removed from sight.25 Clearly, time and failure have yet to be recognized as integral components of architecture’s own clinical boundaries—the story of St. Gerard’s revivification is preservation’s pathological substitute. What are the precise signs of St. Gerard’s death or vitality? Who is the physician charged with this diagnosis? Is it the preservation community, and if so, what is the relationship between the physician and the patient/building? What risks are involved in the diagnosis? What is the role of popular opinion with respect to issues of choice? Such questions extend the discussion beyond simplistic assumptions of finality or livingness. For architects and preservationists, new possibilities for stewardship might emerge if building failure is cast against our visual threshold, in relation to living processes. The environmental mechanisms designed by Poe’s narrator, subterranean mirrors of contemporary forms of life support, hint at ensuing architectural implications. What this might mean for St. Gerard’s can only be imagined in the absence of movement, in its most absolute sense.
If the moving of St. Gerard’s constitutes a funerary event—a rite of passage from the dead city to renewed life—then an analysis of the social dimensions of funerary practices can allow us to understand the proposed transposition within an alternative framework. Anthropologist Seth Richardson, in his writings on death, dismemberment, and discorporation, has contested the emphasis traditionally given to funerary rites within his field, instead focusing his attention upon the port mortem treatment of bodies.26 Richardson argues that our fears of not performing rites upon the corpse in accordance with socially and culturally accepted standards are an under-recognized aspect of funerary practice. He writes that “the proper treatment of the dead body in burial must be uncovered as a form which (like other cultural practices) derives its meaning and force not only through ideal observance, but also through social knowledge and fear of non-performance, denial, or inversion.”27 In pointing out the fears associated with acting in a socially and culturally unacceptable manner upon the corpse, Richardson emphasizes that “violation of normal funerary practice, like proper burial, is an ambivalent and changeable symbol, with a range of emphasis and importance within the rhetorical systems which construct them.”28 What would such violation mean for St. Gerard’s? What other symbols might be brought forward from animate or immobilized stones? Could the field of preservation shift from its ritualized confirmations of renewal, toward the issue of how the remains are treated? By denying the possibility of restored life, architects, urbanists, and preservationists might expand the social and cultural mechanisms by which preservation now operates. Richardson elaborates on a range of alternative ways of regarding the corpse, with respect to burial as the norm:
Our texts about burial already do not so much document practice as they project idealizing and normative precepts, and the exceptions are those instances in which they deal with deviations from the norm. This being the case, we are obligated to do more than look at burial as an “ideal type” purely upholding social inclusion, but also investigate instances in which the treatment of the body was intended to discorporate social elements through violations of burial: the display or exposure of the dead body, head, or (more rarely) other pars pro toto, without burial; corpse abuse and dismemberment; corpse abandonment; burial–as–trophy; disinterment ….29
Discorporation of the body, then, is intricately bound to discorporation of social structures. Along these lines, there are numerous precedents for sculptures, monuments, and buildings that have been proposed or constructed from post mortem remnants to critically respond to social conflicts. In the wake of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David proposed a monument made of the rubble of vandalized royal statuary. Elaborating upon the symbolism of his proposal, he wrote, “… let disorderly piles of the truncated debris of their statues form a lasting monument to the glory of the people and their debasement, so that he who travels through this new land with a didactic purpose, will say; ‘I once saw kings in Paris, the objects of a humiliating idolatry; I went there again, and they were there no more.’”30
In the 1960s, artists in Los Angeles united under the curatorship of the sculptor Noah Purifoy to create “66 Signs of Neon,” three tons of smoldering rubble from the Watts riots re-formed as collective assemblages. The traveling exhibition constituted a powerful response to the destruction of the rioting, and introduced an activist practice into the discourse of the art world.
Since the end of the Soviet Empire, there has been much discussion about how to deal with Soviet monuments scattered throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. In 1992, the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid issued an open call to artists, asking for proposals on saving and transforming the monuments, as an alternative to their destruction. They argue, “Soviet monuments loomed over our childhood, we fear we may vanish with them. That is why we are trying to prolong their existence.”31
Le Corbusier likely had quite a different, but not unrelated, view in mind when the much revered thick walls of his chapel at Ronchamp, Notre Dame du Haut, were constructed from the remains of the previous church on the site, a structure that had been destroyed during World War II. In each of these propositions, French Revolutionary, American, Russian, and French post-war, operations upon post mortem remains become a means of engaging the social conflicts that the remains signified. This is not simply a matter of reassembling or re-valuing ruins. Rather, the aforementioned examples point toward the calibration of materials, environment, and collective memory in formulating a post mortem proposition for place.
How could the afterlife of St. Gerard’s intensify the memory of social conflict? What consequences would such an approach have for the stones? The crisis that has beset Buffalo and the Rust Belt in general since the 1970s has been one of suppressed, non-corporal violence. Thomas Sugrue argues that this ongoing conflict consists of “[t]he convergence of the disparate forces of deindustrialization, racial transformation, and political and ideological conformity.”32 And now, the church of St. Gerard’s is poised to become the first saved body of this non-corporal contest. The persistent mythologizing of the church is ultimately a foil for the social, political, and economic aspects of St. Gerard’s abandonment. According to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, “Mythical history is itself in the service of the struggle of structure against events and represents an effort of societies to annul the disturbing action of historical factors; it represents a tactic of annulling history, of deadening the effect of events.”33 The living St. Gerard’s, a substitute for the dead city, obscures the very crisis that has rendered the building a casualty. How might the memory of failure—the physical failure of the building and the social and economic failure of the city—be preserved as a structured proposition? In 1995, cultural critic Camilo José Vergara incited controversy for his “skyscraper ruins park,” a proposal to set aside twelve square blocks of downtown Detroit as a center for the preservation of urban deterioration and emptiness. Vergara’s project refocused the danger of doing nothing in the face of large-scale urban failure, channeling ambivalence into a gesture of suspended uncertainty. In so doing, he returned the will to act to the ground of its cultural premise. Violation of burial became its own recalcitrant symbol.
Returning to the realm of funerary practices, an exemplary case, and one with direct consequences for St. Gerard’s, is the Tibetan “sky burial” practiced on the Himalayan plateau. Accounts of sky burial refer to the act of carving up the body of the dead, sometimes even mixing the remains with barley flour, and exposing the pieces to carrion birds. The relationships between socio-cultural and environmental dimensions of this practice are relevant to this study. Anthropologists such as Daniel Preston Martin argue that a shortage of arable land (limiting sites available for burial), a shortage of fuel resources (making cremation expensive), and a growing population upon the Tibetan plateau encourage sky burial as much as if not more than any socio-cultural forces.34 Hence, the natural ecology of the region likely exerts profound influence upon the formation of this aberrant practice. The alignment between treatment of the dead body and environmental considerations, especially in conditions of scarcity, resounds with the St. Gerard’s case. In sky burial, the dead body, physical discorporation, social and cultural tradition, and resource scarcity collectively constitute an ecology of the post mortem. It is within just such a system that architectural richness and economic distress should also find shared ground.
Ironically, the United States Federal Witness Security Program (WITSEC) originated in Buffalo. In the late 1960s, Buffalo gangster Pasquale “Paddy” Calabrese testified against fellow members of the Mafia after he was arrested for a heist at Buffalo City Hall. Calabrese was relocated to a secret location and provided with a new identity to safeguard him against retaliation. This pioneering system of protection was later formalized as the Witness Security Program with the introduction of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. The early stages of the program were highly criticized; an unintended victim of the Calabrese case was Tom Leonhard, whose children were relocated along with their informer step-father. Leonhard’s frustrating attempts to find his displaced children was chronicled in Leslie Waller’s Hide in Plain Sight (1976), and later fictionalized in James Caan’s 1980 film of the same title.35 Fred Montanino, who has thoroughly studied such social and psychological consequences of WITSEC, equates the identity transformations of program participants to social death and rebirth.36 According to Montanino,
It would not be unreasonable to use the word “extreme” in describing the transition that protected witnesses and their family members undergo. They find themselves in a position where their past social identities are obliterated as completely as possible. Their personal past biographies cannot be shared with others. They face a future of social relations with others that is dominated by concealment concerning who they have been and pretenses as to who they are. They are plucked from the communities in which they reside and secretly relocated great distances, to other communities where they can, for a substantial period of time, remain social strangers, “hidden in plain sight.”37
The protective measures amount to a fracturing of the relationships between biological and social life cycles. “In order to maintain biological existence, protected witnesses and their immediate (nuclear) family members must end social existence in the context in which they have known it.”38 Montanino goes on to propose two categories of distress, social and personal, that result from relocation and the loss of past identity.
At this point, it is relevant to reintroduce the St. Gerard’s case, to examine the parallels associated with the church’s proposed new place and identity. In August 2010, twenty members from the former Parish of St. Gerard made the 900-mile journey to Norcross, presenting to their southern counterparts candles, a crucifix from the Buffalo building, and the key that had been used to seal St. Gerard’s after the final mass. The parishioners from Buffalo participated in a “Passing of the Key” ceremony in Norcross, before and after which recordings of St. Gerard’s bells were broadcast throughout the Norcross church.39 “We were taking them not only the spirit of the original builders of the church, but the spirit of the people who last used the church,” said St. Gerard’s parishioner Richard Ciezki, organizer of the trip.40 The visit by the Buffalo-based pilgrims was clearly an attempt to maintain the relationship between the biological life and the social life of the building. Through the transportation of the key, crucifix, and candle, a host of symbols began to establish the viability of the new site, in advance of the building’s move. In describing the significance of these actions, parishioner Ciezki, with echoes of previously noted WITSEC problems, remarked, “You want to know where the child will be residing in the future.”41 Ciezki unknowingly confirmed what Montanino analyzed, namely, that the breaks induced by such social forms of death as the witness protection system necessitate appropriate countermeasures.
Delivery of the symbolic effects followed the transport of a 1,900 pound statue of St. Gerard and a paschal candle, both of which were introduced at Easter mass in Norcross. Uncannily, the statue’s head was accidently severed during the move, an event that has been alternately cast as a willing second martyrdom, or an act of resistance on the part of the saint, the contrasting views reflecting either support or protest of the church’s migration. It should by now be clear that the stakeholders of St. Gerard’s have been re-enacting the identity transformations associated with WITSEC, with one all-important distinction: their actions have been coordinated so as to counter the onset of social death. For the church to live in a new setting, with a new identity, the physical transportation must be accompanied by a set of social continuities. Montanino, in his analysis of witness protection, warns that social divorce, when identity transfer is at stake, amounts to a form of amputation:
The protected witness experience teaches us further that the process of social legitimacy is not monolithic, that there are many “gatekeepers,” and that, in fact, we all may be counted upon to act in contributing integrity to the process whenever we interact with one another. We cannot escape responsibility for own past performance, nor can we easily assume a rightful place in collective social life without some recognition of it. We cannot totally divorce ourselves from others who have been part of our social life without losing that part from which we seek to divorce them.42
Even St. Gerard’s proposed new name, Mary Our Queen, has been related to its former life. Father Dye describes that his encounter with a large fresco featuring the Virgin Mary in the apse of St. Gerard’s indicated that the church is willing to make the proposed identity transformation.43
While social identity has been stressed through the actions of St. Gerard’s former parishioners, as well as by the aspiring new congregants in Georgia, identity of place has been ignored throughout the entire process. Under the terms of Mary Our Queen’s “preservation by relocation” strategy, physical context is inconsequential when the building’s life is at stake. The actual site of St. Gerard’s—the earth upon which the church rests—has been physically, conceptually, and even economically divorced from the building’s stones. Future plans indicate that the resulting 19,000 square foot vacant lot in Buffalo will be sold separately, and will host a plaque or other such marker. This separation of building from context is not without its own form of distressed familial associations. The likely buyer of the lot is Gerard Place, a transitional shelter for homeless single-parent families located in the old convent next door.44 The stakeholders, in an attempt “to know where the child will be residing,” will leave the site behind to be adopted into another form of parental estrangement. The relocated body of St. Gerard’s, necessarily accompanied by social continuities, equates to a sacrifice of site for the livingness of program. Under the guise of life, preservation here divorces itself from its own context and asserts the primacy of that which is most variable and transient about a building: its use and function. But what does this mean for the identity of place? Identity is a complex set of interrelations between environment, groups, and individuals. In Buffalo, where the stability of place is challenged by the disappearance of matter, inhabitants, and memories, the city’s identity—and that of its citizens—is perceived against an ever-shifting background. When context is so willfully sacrificed, what are the psychological ramifications? Could we re-frame St. Gerard’s failure as an opportunity to intensify, not undermine, a place’s identity? Can the site be protected from its own self-divorce? How can the witness confront the trauma of remaining in place?
Liminal boundaries of absolute death, physical and social dimensions of funerary practices, witness protection and constructed identity—each of these post mortem case studies has exposed analogical relationships between the death of the body and the stones of St. Gerard’s. Beneath the mask of death’s domain we have discovered a network of physical, social, and psychological reformulations that might instigate new possibilities for failed buildings and spaces. If architecture and preservation can be dislodged from their perfunctory attachments to life and death, perhaps we can find synchronous relationships to the afterlives of architecture’s vital currents. The ethical imperatives that I advance in this article seek to return architecture to the exigency of time and to embrace the potential of failure as catalyst of the urban imagination. It is fitting, then, that the post mortem case studies collectively point to an ever-present tension between death, time, and ethics. It is in the very malleability of the city—not in its false solidity—that inhabitants of places such as Buffalo can feel, as never before, connected to the mutable processes of transformation, in which they play an indisputable part. The shifting indeterminacies of vision, of the remnants of memory, and of place’s identity might be formulated as the fluid armature of a city’s emergent post mortem core. This exposes a paradox that the communities and preservation advocates who are divided on the issue of St. Gerard’s must be prepared to address: while preservation is traditionally regarded to be an issue of life, the range of ethical issues associated with St. Gerard’s transposition are deeply buried in death’s time-worn arena. It is not a matter of choosing between life or death. It is a matter of recognizing the ethics at stake when the boundary is crossed.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a funerary text that reads as a navigator’s guide to the afterlife, the confrontation with death is framed as preparation for an alternative form of non-corporal circulation. The living subject must anticipate post mortem movements to successfully negotiate the afterlife—its passages and thresholds, openings and closings, entries and departures. The ethics, in this case, have to do with preparedness for movement through an ethereal time space. How the stewards of St. Gerard’s confront such an ethical challenge—in material, social, and psychological terms—is the subject of this essay.
In conclusion, I would like to introduce a post mortem project that I undertook from 2004–2009 in Buffalo. Off and on over that six year time-span, I was employed as a laborer at the site of the Farrar Mansion, a long-vacant, historically significant structure located in the center of the city. A relic of Buffalo’s prosperous, industrial past, the mansion was undergoing a restoration of its original 1870s core and a gutting of its early to mid-twentieth century additions. I worked on the restoration effort from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the going hourly rate. My work was primarily surface-oriented, directed toward protecting and highlighting the mansion’s hand-carved woodwork, repairing plaster, and restoring windows. Each day, I sanded, patched, primed, sealed, and coated. During the nights, I returned to the site to work within the back half of the building, where I had secured permission to construct a series of installations with demolition debris. Therein, I collected and reassembled discarded building materials gathered from demolitions and renovations from other sites around the city. A range of sprawling, aggregated environments thus took shape within the building’s gutted insides. In contrast with the surface operations of the mansion’s front half, the residual accumulations were spatial propositions. Materials were cut and re-cut, layered and re-layered, assembled and reassembled. While constructing each assemblage, I pushed and pulled components, initiated breaks and collisions, and opened up gaps and fissures. Meanwhile, during the days, the original restoration effort continued intermittently within the building’s street-facing front half. There, the surface reparations eradicated all differences. Gaps were filled. Rough edges were made smooth. Cracks were covered over. This work—uniform, precious, and finite—was the precise opposite of that undertaken at night.
As the front half became more homogenous, the back of the mansion grew more dense and diverse. During the nights, I shifted material from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, and back. During the days, material disturbances—broken glass, or chipped paint and plaster—were removed and replaced. In the front of the mansion, I walked on newspapers to avoid scuffing the refinished floor. Lighting was provided by period fixtures. In the back half, which was illuminated by construction lamps, a plywood subfloor registered innumerable violations. Over the course of six years, the Farrar Mansion was opened to the public on multiple occasions—once in collaboration with a local gallery—for the viewing of the two contrasting post mortem operations (Figures 12.2–12.8). The public presentations were formulated as a response to the city’s aggressive yet random demolition efforts and to the restoration projects ongoing in the city. In 2010, having filled the back half of the mansion to near-capacity with debris, the realtor informed me that “potential tenants could not discern the difference between the building’s interior and the surrounding installations.” I was instructed to clear the property of all detritus and to vacate the premises.
The Farrar Mansion Project challenged a unilateral view of preservation and restoration by constructing a post mortem dialectic. On one side of the mansion, synergies were developed between residual matter and residual space, and between acts of un-building and re-building. Erasure was recast as efflorescence, waste as vital resource, and dismantlement as catalyst for reassembly. With urban detritus, I sought to rebuild the city from the inside. On the other side of the structure, change over time was steadfastly resisted. Walls were treated as rigid boundaries—as solid and enduring impediments to temporal legibility. The city’s perceptible image, a transitional vision that encompassed acts of construction, demolition, and restoration, came into view between visible and invisible iterations. Arrested decay became not a visible phenomena, but an absent dividing line, lying somewhere between the pristine, protected surfaces of the mansion’s front half and the rough, continuously reassembled fragments of prior urban destructions. It is my hope that the Farrar Mansion Project might hint at new possibilities for architecture and preservation within our culturally embodied attitudes toward material ends.
12.2 Farrar Mansion Restoration, 2004–2009. Photos by author
12.3 Dennis Maher. “Bloom.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.4 Dennis Maher. “Mantis.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.5 Installation view of Farrar Mansion Project, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.6 Dennis Maher. “Vessel.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.7 Dennis Maher. “Crest.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.8 Dennis Maher. “Feather.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
Richardson, Seth, “Death and Dismemberment in Mesopotamia: Discorporation Between the Body and Body Politic,” in Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, ed. Nicola Laneri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Ricoeur, Paul, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 27–70.
1 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1992).
2 Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times Magazine (Dec 17, 2010).
3 Joshua Zumbrun, “America’s Fastest Dying Cities,” Forbes Magazine (August 5, 2008).
4 “Fastest Dying Cities Meet for a Lively Talk,” Wall Street Journal Online, accessed June, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011106498326993.html.
5 Rick Hampson, “NY Church’s Move to Georgia. Preservation by Relocation?” USA Today (February 4, 2010): 1A.
6 Ibid., 1A
7 Ibid., 1A.
8 “Moved by Grace,” The Parish of Mary Our Queen, accessed June 2011, http://www.movedbygrace.com.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Carolyn Thompson, “Old Buffalo church to be reborn in Atlanta suburb,” Associated Press (May 29, 2010).
12 “Moved by Grace.”
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Thompson, Associated Press (May 29, 2010).
16 “Moving St. Gerard’s,” Preservation Buffalo Niagara, accessed June 2011, http://www.preservationbuffaloniagara.org/page/deconstructing-and-moving-st-gerards-church.
17 Herbert Muschamp, “Public Space or Private, a Compulsion to Fill It,” New York Times (August 27, 2000).
18 Ibid.
19 Jorge Otero-Pailos, “The Contemporary Stamp of Incompleteness,” Future Anterior (New York, 2004), viii.
20 Michel Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1994), 174.
21 Ibid, 179.
22 George K. Behlmer, “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death.” The Journal of British Studies 42, 2 (April, 2003): 206–235.
23 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial,” The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper 2, 28 (July 31, 1844): 1.
24 Marc Alexander, “‘The Rigid Embrace of the Narrow House’: Premature Burial & The Signs of Death,” The Hastings Center Report 10, 3 (June, 1980): 31.
25 “Moving St. Gerard’s.”
26 Seth Richardson, “Death and Dismemberment in Mesopotamia: Discorporation Between the Body and Body Politic,” in Performing Death, ed. Nicola Laneri (Chicago, 2007): 189–208.
27 Ibid., 190.
28 Ibid., 191.
29 Ibid., 192.
30 J. L. Jules David, Le Peintre Louis David 1748–1825, trans. Akane Kawakami (Paris, 1880).
31 Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, “We Remember, or So It Seems,” Monumental Propaganda (New York, 1994).
32 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-war Detroit (Princeton, 1995), 11.
33 Paul Ricoeur, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin. (Evanston, 1974), 41.
34 Daniel Preston Martin, “On the Cultural Ecology of Sky Burial on the Himalayan Plateau,” East and West 46, 3/4 (1996): 353–370.
35 See Leslie Waller, Hide in Plain Sight (New York, 1976).
36 Fred Montanino, “Protecting the Federal Witness: Burying Past Life and Biography,” American Behavioral Scientist 27, 4 (March/April, 1984): 501–529.
37 Ibid., 503.
38 Ibid., 504.
39 Joseph Pronechen, “On the Move,” National Catholic Register (Oct. 3, 2010).
40 Ibid.
41 Shelia M. Poole, “Former St. Gerard’s parishioners to visit new site,” The Atlanta Journal–Constitution (August 12, 2010).
42 Montanino, American Behavioral Scientist 27, 4 (March/April, 1984): 523.
43 Pronechan, National Catholic Register (Oct. 3, 2010).
44 Ibid.
