The effect is meditative and fine the book will appeal to anybody acquainted with the pleasures of the unseen. There's a wonderful photograph shot from an upper floor of the abandoned Hudson's building, before it was imploded-a view that none but 'ghosts' will ever look out upon again. (Skrdla) is investigating the architecture of 'forgetting,' in the present tense, confronting us with the 'ruins' our way of life seems bound to produce. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Ghostly Ruins is a record of the souls of yesteryear and a chronicle of America's haunted past. The town is empty now, just as the many other abandoned places in this chronicle. There is the entire town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a trash fire set inside an old mine in 1962 morphed into an underground inferno that incinerated the town from underneath more than forty years later, the subterranean fire still rages. There are the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary and Bethlehem Steel factory in Pennsylvania, the Packard Motors Plant and Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, and Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion from the 1964/65 World's Fair. Like a seasoned teller of ghost stories, Skrdla's words and images reveal what lies beyond the gates and beneath the floorboards. Author Harry Skrdla gives a guided tour of these marvelous structures at their peak of popularity juxtaposed with their current state of haunted decrepitude. Ghostly Ruins shows the life and death of thirty such structures, from transportation depots, factories, and jails to amusement parks, mansions, hotels, and entire towns. Where once these structures were teeming with lifecommuters, workers, vacationersnow they are disused and dilapidated. These are the ruins of America, filled with the echoes of the voices and footfalls of our grandparents, or their parents, or our own youth. We've all seen them but might have been too scared to enter: the house on the hill with its boarded-up windows the darkened factory on the outskirts of town the old amusement park with its rickety skeleton of a rollercoaster.

Ghostly Ruins by Harry Skrdla