‘Ghosts’ of long-demolished Philly buildings have stories to tell

All that’s left of 2716 N. 12th St. in North Philadelphia are sun-bleached rectangles of plaster clinging to the party wall of an adjacent house that still stands.

Traces of stairways, shelving, joists, and tilework overlook demolition sites in the city’s older neighborhoods — like illustrations for a story about depopulation, disinvestment, mass demolition, and loss.

The story of a tenant named Elizabeth Cornog at 2716 N. 12th also had been lost until the 2024 publication of Building Ghosts by Temple University Press. Cornog’s is among several dozen vignettes in the book about some of the people who lived in what are now empty spaces.

The authors will speak May 12 at the Philadelphia City Institute at 19th and Locust on Rittenhouse Square.

Written by Molly Lester, featuring photographs by Michael Bixler and subtitled “Past Lives and Lost Places in a Changing City,” the book suggests new ways to look at the stubbornly durable artifacts displayed on party walls across Philly.

“They’re slices of life,” said Lester, associate director of the Urban Heritage Project at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. “These places aren’t there any more, but they aren’t blank slates.”

Building ghosts, she added, attest to “centuries of human life in Philadelphia.”

Said Bixler, editorial director and chief photographer of Hidden City Philadelphia: “I sought to dignify the buildings and dignify the people who lived in them. I wanted to take a humanist, more compassionate approach when photographing these remains of people’s homes.”

During an April interview on North Fourth Street in Northern Liberties at a “double ghost” — their term for a midblock demolition site with party walls on either side — Lester and Bixler said their book aims to spark public conversations about demolition in Philadelphia.

“People need to ask why there are so many ghosts in North Philadelphia, and why are so many of them the results of [mass] demolition programs,” Lester said. “We need to not treat demolition as the only option.”

State Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia), the main sponsor of Pennsylvania’s 2022 Whole Home Repairs legislation, welcomed publication of Building Ghosts.

He said one of Whole Home’s goals is to stave off housing abandonment by helping property owners pay for essential repairs.

“We need to reflect on the historic loss of housing stock, particularly where it is most prominent,” Saval said. ”North Philadelphia and other neighborhoods have seen high levels of disinvestment and, I would say, intentional neglect. We need to think about what we can do differently."

Bixler said he chose to take most of his photographs on sunny days to better capture the fossil-like traces on the party walls and to provide context by showing their surroundings.

Many of his images also suggest the resilience of the rowhouses and other structures whose companions have been amputated, leaving wound-like emptiness in between.

Bixler and Lester also said they were determined to avoid the voyeurism and melodrama associated with the “ruin porn” genre of urban photography that became a cliché in late 1990s.

“The book isn’t a study of decay,” Lester said. “It’s about the homes people created for themselves and their families in these places.”

Urbanists both, Bixler and Lester separately became interested in what they chose to call building ghosts (also known as ghost buildings). They became acquainted after Lester wrote a piece for Hidden City and decided to do a joint project on the subject.

Lester received a seed grant for research from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation at Penn, and they began to survey the city for building ghosts on what turned out to be the eve of the pandemic.

They spent five months hunting for ghosts in Center City, as well as North, South, West, Southwest, Northwest, and Northeast Philadelphia. They found 194 and opted to include 81 in the book.

Of those, half include material about the owners, residents, or evolving uses of the structures. Deeds, other public records, and what Lester described as “registration cards issued during World War II” helped assemble the narratives, Lester said.

“The traces of these lives require a different kind of investigation than buildings with famous names and famous architects,” Lester said. “This kind of detective work is what I love the most. It’s the fun part.”

Elizabeth Cornog was living in a rented room at 2716 N. Sixth St. when a three-alarm fire broke out at the nearby Cookman United Methodist Church on the night of Aug. 7, 1926. A secretary at the church, Cookman ran inside the burning church and “rescued as many records as possible,” Lester wrote.

A rowhouse at 701 S. 19th St. in South Philadelphia that was constructed in 1866 housed a family-owned bakery for decades before becoming the headquarters of the National Baptist Convention’s international missionary operation for 105 years until it was demolished in 2019.

And 7127 Woodland Ave. in Southwest Philadelphia, a three-story rowhouse built in 1897, gradually evolved from being the residence of an “undertaker” and his wife into a funeral parlor, remaining so until 1949. It was demolished in 2019.

The book offers “a unique window into our city’s past through the lives of everyday people, using tangible and very visible remnants of the buildings in which they were born, lived, worked, and died,” said Aaron Javsicas, the editor-in-chief of Temple University Press.

Some of the building ghosts documented in the book have disappeared since the authors did their field research five years ago due to new development, Bixler said.

In other parts of the city, building ghosts seem likely to linger for decades.

Whatever the case, “when these walls aren’t covered, they can hasten the demise of an adjacent house and affect the quality of life in the neighborhood,” he said. “They should be covered over with stucco to protect them.”

📅 Mon. May 12, 2025, 5:30 p.m. 📍 Philadelphia City Institute, 1905 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa. 🌐 freelibrary.org