THE NECESSITY FOR RUINS

[OFFERING TO ESU-ELEGUA]

At the crossroads stands the orisa Esu-Elegua, the trickster who mediates between God and man.  Always with a voracious appetite, always impish, sometimes irrational, he must be sated first before communing with the orisa Oya.  He favors coconuts, palm oil, rum or gin, cigars, smoked fish, bitter kola nut, yams, honey or any other sweets.  Oya  assists the transition from life to death.  A cunning warrior and guardian of the cemetery, she has ultimate authority to withhold the last breath.  Though loyal to her children, she can wreak great vengeance upon the dishonorable with powerful winds, hurricanes, tornadoes.   To supplicate her, offer female goat, eggplant, cooked corn meal, grape wine, grapes, gin, rum, kola nuts, plantains, palm oil, rooster, black beans with rice, anything spicy, fruit, okra soup, fish, cornstarch porridge, and akara.

[OFFERING TO OYA]

When the South Street Bridge functioned as a connector, a canvas, a viewing platform it tended to recede from our consciousness. Undoubtedly, its workaday humility assisted its recession. It was, in a way, gone before it was demolished.

A structure is most legible at the points of birth and death; its interconnections are more discernible as they are added to and then subtracted from. In this way a building is more public in disuse, more open to interrogation in deconstruction, more candidly explanatory of its parts in dismemberment.

Having images of the South Street Bridge’s birth and death, being able to see girders emplaced in 1923 on a cold Saturday in 2009 produces in the words of the mnemonist S.V. Shereshevskii, “the shock of the short circuit of time.” While this leads to the commonplace observation that the past isn’t so far away, these two moments exist outside irreversible profane time.

We can interpret destruction and rebirth at the same important site to be a kind of preservation of the universe by perpetual re-creation.

If it recoiled from our perception as an object, now the bridge is paradoxically present as absence. A project like the South Street Bridge demolition lures us in with its great yawning absence growing ever larger. Curiously we are captivated by openness: absence where there was once confinement, enclosure, and presence.

This sense, though, is fleeting.  On a practical level the city can only be understood as a series of concrete realities in space.  For things to mean anything—for us to make meaningful lives we are drawn to this basic reality rather than to vacancy.

But there is value to demolition beyond inducing melancholy. “We concentrate on inauguration,” the environmental psychologist Kevin Lynch writes, “so singlemindedly.” Demolition presents an opportunity to develop a past conversant with present and future, to feel know the process of building more intimately, to register our appreciations and to feel, alternately, the quickening sense of time and standing outside of normal time.

Flashing back to the late 1990s, an unknown enterprising nightclub operator saw promise in an untapped market.  While most of the city no longer earned their living from the docks and wharfs of the city’s rivers, this operator heard the silent clamoring of the city’s youth for a sexy yet salty nighttime party experience.  The records shed no light on whether the S.S. Philadelphia nee Sandria was docked at pier 40 north or was brought to this slip, the ex-ferry S.S. Philadelphia came into being to convey yearning partygoers to all the romance of Philadelphia’s waterfront.

Though there’s a bit of buyer beware not heeded here, in the defense of whomever tried to breath life into this nautical Frankenstein, there are structural obstacles to adaptive reuse of former working river craft.  The S.S. United States, arguably the apotheosis of the transatlantic liner, has not attracted the attention of developers.  The Schuylkill has had more success in appearing more coastal than the heavily industrialized Delaware.  The disaster at Heat in 2000 also probably weighs heavily on investors.  The fact is that while the impulse for reinvention of our riverfronts is strong, the reality of sunken tugboats leeching oil and burned out ferries mars the image of our rivers as a Jimmy Buffetized chill zone.

Ther may have been something to partyting on the S.S. Philadelphia and all things have their time and place but who can deny the dubiousness of packing an old ferry with crowds pulsing to “All I Have to Give” while the rank odors of the oily Delaware waft over the party patios?  The hot tub situated at the stern of the S.S. Philadelphia is just as perplexing.  Alcohol has an ability to take you away but perhaps not far enough.

Philadelphia’s only ferry boat nightclub, the S.S. Philadelphia, is not long for this world.  On August 28, 2008 the Army Corps of Engineers authorized a plan by West Highland Holdings, L.P. to construct a 43 story, 264 unit high rise on the 40N pier.  What’s standing in the way of this move is the poor S.S. Philadelphia, which caught fire in 1999 and whose being strangled by her own mooring.  Highland proposes to scrap the ferry and demolish the whole of the pier 40N structure to build a new public park and the high rise on new pier on 949 steel pilings.

Until then, the S.S. Philadelphia lies a moulderin’ in its grave.