When my parents were here in NY a couple of times we went past sites where they were demolishing six, seven, eight, or nine storey buildings, whilst at the same time leaving the neighbouring structures standing and completely operational. Its a kind of surgical demolition, whose proximity to still-present and functioning buildings (shops, offices, apartments) seems to multiply its violence.

To me there’s always something weird about sites like these, in the middle of a city. mentioned it my mum as we were in a taxi going somewhere… And she said yes.. That she’d noticed these places too on our walking around the day before and that the second one we’d seen she had realised what for her was so strange about them. She explained that she’d started to think about ghosts – and how the ghosts of such a demolished building would not leave because the space of the building still exists – defined as a gap between two others. I guess its different when a stand-alone structure gets demolished…. In the sense that there’s nothing there once its gone – no place. But what my mum said seemed true to me – that the missing building is still there as a negative space, at least in an ad-hoc construction-industry meets Rachel Whiteread kind of way. Ghosts from such a building my mum said, as we sat there in the taxi, would have no way to leave, no ‘nowhere’ to disappear into.