Artist Julia Christensen peers through the ceiling of an abandoned auditorium in Gary, Indiana. (Photo by Anne Barnes)
We often take the buildings around us
for granted – that is, until those factories,
schools, or big retailers close shop and
people around town are left wondering –
what’s going to happen to that place?
One photographer’s making a career out
of documenting the surprising ways
people deal with this. Shawn Allee met her in the heart of America’s Rust
Belt:
Transcript
We often take the buildings around us
for granted – that is, until those factories,
schools, or big retailers close shop and
people around town are left wondering –
what’s going to happen to that place?
One photographer’s making a career out
of documenting the surprising ways
people deal with this. Shawn Allee met her in the heart of America’s Rust
Belt:
I meet Julia Christensen in Gary, Indiana.
She’s here for an art project: She’ll photograph buildings in Gary and ask people how they could be re-used in the future. I’m supposed to be the chauffer.
Christensen: We’re going to 5th avenue.
Allee: Where is that, exactly?
Christensen: Right. Uh…
Well, I’ll get to her current project in a sec but with all these wrong turns – I’ve got a chance to ask about her artwork in general.
I mean, what’s the point of documenting how people re-use buildings?
“Looking at use of urban space. It’s a structure we all share. No matter how you interpret it, there it is on he ground in front of you.”
Christensen’s got plenty of examples. She’s done photo exhibits of buildings in several cities, and she wrote this book called Big Box Reuse. It’s about how people reused buildings abandoned by Wal-Mart, K-Marts and other big retailers.
She photographed one big box store that got turned into an indoor go-cart track. Another became a school. And one store turned into a museum dedicated to the canned meat, SPAM.
“What it did was create this niche tourist industry. Over 10,000 people a year come to the SPAM museum and they spend money in the town, and it’s actually done something toward revitalization of this city, you know.”
Christensen says the point is that when big box stores get abandoned, they’re often a blight – kinda like one-building ghost-towns with enormous parking lots.
She found people assumed they were the only ones facing this problem.
“They’d be like, ‘huh, that’s interesting. You mean other people are dealing with this? How did they deal with those glass panes and those central pillars?’ And I became story-telling person who had information about big-box re-use.”
Christensen says she’s got a new art project. She’s interviewing people about old industrial sites, commercial buildings and homes. She’ll write stories about how these buildings could have totally new uses thirty years from now. Then, she’ll put photos and text together for art exhibits or maybe a book.
“It’s like an exercise to take these photos and write a caption for them in the context of the next thrity years, so it’s a little more exploratory.”
Right now, Christensen’s touring Rust Belt cities that are dealing with abandoned buildings. Gary Indiana is just one stop.
“So, we’ll turn left at Broadway.”
Christensen got a tip about a closed building.
“It is a closed performing arts school. It’s closed a few years ago when the city had to consolidate the schools.”
Christensen and I meet a young man named John. He lives nearby and he tells Christensen the closed school’s kind of an open wound.
“Kids just running through there, trust me. You see how the windows broken in?”
But Christensen asks John, What about the future? What could it be?
“I always thought of this being a recreational center for the kids. People can be indoors and play basketball and stuff all year round, stuff like that.”
Christensen notes all this and takes some snapshots of the building.
She’ll do this again and again in Gary and other Rust Belt towns. Christiansen says she wants to return some day – maybe with a book or photo exhibits. She wants people talking about what could happen to these places.
“People can come to arts and access a photo or a sculpture or a creative website from across the board, so I see the arts as central in the conversation about what our future is going to look like on the ground.”
Christensen says documentaries or art can’t solve all the problems people face with abandoned buildings but maybe it could be a good place to start.
For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.
