'City Abandoned' spotlights America’s racial and architectural history

This spring will mark the 30th anniversary of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and when photographer Vincent Feldman watched the recent PBS film about the tragedy, Let the Fire Burn, he recognized himself in the crowd that day.

Standing in a Hamilton Hall gallery at University of the Arts the day before the opening of his latest show, City Abandoned, Feldman talked with BSR about his memories. A college student at the time, he happened to be out with his camera in the neighborhood and ducked through the police lines. To this day, he can see the police car that pulled up next to him. When the trunk popped open, it was full of ammunition. Despite the terrifying melee that followed, he still asks himself why he didn’t snap that picture.

"City Abandoned" at UArts

In the following decades, Feldman, a Philadelphia native, has used his large-format view camera and black-and-white film to build an unparalleled look at the crumbling of our city’s civic buildings, from Holmesburg Prison to Germantown’s Town Hall, which appears on the cover of his 2014 book, City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia.

The UArts exhibition, which runs through February 7, features one gallery of large-format, black-and-white photos from Feldman’s book. These are rendered with astonishing texture, dimension, and detail, from tumbledown stonework to graffiti, creeping swaths of ivy, and the desolate, thwarted invitation of boarded-up doorways.

The other gallery digs deeper into the American legacy of what Feldman calls “deferring to the racists.”

Its centerpiece is the master lecturer photographer’s first three-dimensional piece: a model of the Pennsylvania Hall that opened in May of 1838 at 6th and Haines Streets. It was the country’s first dedicated meeting space for abolitionists. Enraged by the mingling of male and female activists, both black and white, a mob of over 10,000 people ransacked the building and burned it to the ground just a few days later, as police and firefighters stood by. Feldman’s model is scarred with laser-cut burns, and the sticks of charcoal laid inside infuse the gallery with their smoky smell.

The scent “gives a more emotional charge to it,” Feldman says.

Racism and urban decline

One wall displays the city maps of the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created in 1933 to address the nationwide foreclosure crisis at the time. Maps for 239 American cities between 1935 and 1937 feature areas coded in red, which “equated the occupancy of Americans of African descent with blight and decline regardless of income or social status,” according to the exhibition.

Feldman displays them now to reveal the government and real estate industry-sponsored “American Apartheid” still reflected in dilapidated edifices around our city.

“Unfortunately, racism is at the root of urban decline in America,” UArts says in a release about the show. “This is perhaps the first exhibition of its kind to connect the precipitous decline of urban America with the commercial and public policy of racial exclusion that dominated this nation’s 20th century.”

Vincent Feldman’s “City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia” is on display at University of the Arts, in Hamilton Hall’s Hamilton and Arronson Galleries, 320 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, from January 17 through February 7.

Above, at right: Feldman's 1997 Germantown Hall. At left: his 1994 Ile Ife Museum of Afro-American Culture. Images courtesy of the artist.