Scattered throughout New Jersey are remnants of history that are being reclaimed by nature or destroyed by vandals. Author and photographer, Kathleen Butler, takes the reader on a journey back through time to rediscover the little-known history of these forgotten places. Most are deep in the woods of New Jersey; one is only known to the author and is exclusive to this book. Discover ruins from iron-making industries, mills, the railroad, and more. Some of the ruins are from industries that were at their peak, but fell hard when the market was no longer in their favor. They ultimately abandoned their businesses, or they rediscovered another market and moved elsewhere. Some companies tried to establish themselves only to find that the area was not suitable, leaving their failed community behind, or simply went bankrupt. Now, nature is taking over, and soon, these abandoned ruins will disappear forever.

Distributed to some depository libraries in microfiche.

From Manhattan and Brooklyn's trendiest neighbourhoods to the far-flung edges of the outer boroughs, Ellis captures the lost and lonely corners of New York. Step inside the New York you never knew, with 200 eerie images of urban decay

A photographic record of almost three decades of Detroit's changing urban fabric

Originally published: New York: Viking, 1939.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

"Featuring more than 100 locations, from ghost towns to amusement parks, roads to railways, hotels to hospitals. From war to chemical disasters, from grand follies to changing fashions, the story behind each striking image is explained."--Page [4] of cover.