| This dissertation examines the practice and discourse of building demolition by tracing wreckers, their tools, and the product of their labor (buildings subjected to demolition), from the final decade of the nineteenth century to the final decade of the twentieth century. In so doing, I have identified the period between the 1890s and 1940 as the era of creative destruction, and the period following World War II as the era of urban renewal. Where the era of creative destruction ushered in the wrecking ball, the era of urban renewal culminated in the practice of explosive demolition, or implosion.;Urban renewal, both in practice and as a way of periodizing the history of cities, reinvigorated the ideology of creative destruction and gave rise to demolition as spectacle. Although the technique of explosive building demolition had been used as early as the turn of the century, demolition as spectacle did not reach its fullest expression until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The cultivation of sidewalk superintendents, also present in an earlier period, developed into a more aggressive program to transform citizens into spectators and evolved in conjunction with the post-World War II practice of building implosion.;Technological innovations, such as the wrecking ball and explosive demolition, allowed wreckers to realize the dominant, capitalist ideal of rapid turnover in the built environment. While the exigencies of capitalism dictated that buildings would be viewed as ephemeral containers, it also impacted the perception of wreckers and the residents displaced from buildings scheduled for demolition. Demolition narratives sought to naturalize the destructive side of capitalism by equating the life cycle of the built environment with stages in the human life course. In the earlier period, this manifested itself in the depictions of boyish wreckers and manly engineers, and in the era of urban renewal in the conflation of an aging population with an aging built environment. "Ephemeral Containers" will deconstruct the narratives produced in support of building demolition to reveal the contradictions of an ideology aspiring to hegemony. |
