Why do I love ruins?

There is something compelling about ruins -- not just the famous ones known around the world and studied endlessly, but the small, almost insignificant ones -- the ones you see on a daily walk along a river path, for example. What is that crumbling concrete abutment? Why is it here, in this spot? Was it once part of a dam, part of a factory long ago washed away in a flood?

There are answers to these questions, perhaps... but perhaps not. Maybe these bits and pieces of lives once lived will always hold a certain amount of mystery. Some of them hold virtually no importance to current times and the lives of people in the present... but at one point, they DID mean something.

This blog will be dedicated to an exploration of the fascination with ruins… or perhaps I should say, MY fascination with ruins. I don't intend to make a study of the attitudes of others.

There are ruins everywhere. As I said in a comment to one of my wife's writer/blogger friends:

"When we really stop and look around with an eye for picking out ruins, it seems they are all around us, in one form or another. In our area of the rural Northeast, there are hundreds, probably thousands of old stone walls, some out in the middle of heavily wooded forests… and they were once boundary markers, dividing different fields of farms now long vanished.

It's also not uncommon around here to see ruins on rivers -- old mills mostly washed away, leaving behind bits of themselves -- crumbling stone walls, dams and spillways, the occasional stairs to nowhere.

When Jeannine and I lived in New Hampshire, we would occasionally drive back to the Northampton/Amherst area to visit friends and family, and I often wondered about the more modern "ruins" we would see along the back roads -- the abandoned businesses, shuttered and weed-grown, the paving in their empty parking lots split by the relentless growth of grass and saplings. I would imagine the people who once worked in these places, or who owned them, or who patronized them, for whom these now-empty shells were once a vibrant and perhaps necessary part of life. These types of ruminations provoke a certain delicious melancholy.

One of my favorite ruins in this area was the concrete dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus, I think, which stood on the edge of Route 5, in the shadow of Interstate 91, heading south from Northampton. It was a promotional sculpture for a place called "Nash's Dinoland", a roadside attraction my parents took my dino-loving young self to at least once. For years that thing stood there, bits and pieces of it falling away as the winters ravaged it, the paint flaking furiously under the baking sun and pelting rain. Then it was gone."

That was the beginning of an exchange which proved to be the impetus for the creation of this blog. I would like to thank Amy Greenfield for her help in pushing me down this path. -- PL

(Note: The "A Study in Decay" header graphic is something I drew and it comes from a paper I wrote in an art history class while I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA in the early 1970's. I hand-lettered the entire paper and created several illustrations of ruins for it. I'll probably post all or part of it on this blog. -- PL)