Room for Romanticizing: What’s in an Abandoned Building? (Part II)

Read Part I here

So, what did I mean?  In what way is an appreciation for the Pittsburgh aesthetic anything like the thrill we get out of watching a Rob Zombie movie? … okay, maybe not a Rob Zombie movie, but you get the idea.  At what point is creepy cool?

While I was traveling these past two weeks, my friends and I made a point to stop at places along the way that are more or less unanimously considered “beautiful” or awe inspiring.  Take Yellowstone National Park for example.  Every year millions of people flock to the park to catch a glimpse of something beautiful, something unique that has been preserved there - In other words, a place where life has endured and continues to thrive, a place not unlike a booming metropolis with preserved ethnic neighborhoods.  But as you drive through Yellowstone, or any other national park on the west coast for that matter, you’ll inevitably come across a piece of forest that has been ravaged by wildfires - a lifeless and desolate shell amidst the flourishing land of which it was once a contributing part.  So why do people still stop to look and take pictures of these grim, inhospitable pieces of land?  Why do some of us write about creepy Carrie Furnace as much as the New York Times writes about the preserved authenticity of, say, Bloomfield.  When we see these “creepy places,” we find ourselves uttering the same word we did when we caught our first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains - “Wow.”  Sure, it’s the difference between the “wow” we give to someone who’s just completed a marathon, and the “wow” we give to someone who just lost their job in a mass layoff.  And in this sense, our reaction is one that is dictated by surprise and to a greater degree scale.  But our reaction and our curiosity, I argue, has much more to do with what’s there, what’s not there, and what will be there - In other words, questions of Absence, Presence, and Potential.

Stay tuned for Part III: Absence.