What We Can Learn From Urban Nostalgia

There’s an abandoned cable car bridge in Seattle (pictured here in multiple views) that’s long captured my imagination, and I think I’ve finally worked out why.

In 1980’s "The Necessity for Ruins," landscape essayist J.B. Jackson explained that such leftover edifices often inspire us "to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty.” I've often written of Jackson's advocacy for the use of ruins - not for what we now call "urban exploration" of abandoned places, but to reclaim what worked before.