Interview: Cities Between Memory and Demolition
A Conversation Between Anthony Hamboussi and Kyong Park
Conducted between August and January, 2002–2003
Intro
In this reflective conversation, artist and photographer Anthony Hamboussi speaks with urban theorist and architect Kyong Park, founder of the International Center for Urban Ecology and former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture. What begins as a personal meditation on the demolition of the Maspeth Gas Holders in North Brooklyn unfolds into a layered discussion of memory, urban erasure, global capital, and the metaphysical status of the city in a post-industrial age. Drawing parallels between New York and Detroit, the conversation touches on topics ranging from deindustrialization and controlled demolition to the role of photography in preserving the spirit of vanishing places.
Transcript
Anthony Hamboussi
The first image in my book was taken the day the Maspeth Gas Holders were demolished. In that photo, the tank lies crumpled on the ground. The next two images show the tank footprints—emptied spaces where memory still lingers.
I remember watching the demolition from a rooftop in North Brooklyn. The neighborhood had changed; new residents—“hipsters,” mostly—cheered as the holders fell. But for me, it felt like mourning. These were Brooklyn’s own twin towers in a way—symbols of the city’s industrial past and part of my childhood skyline.
Two months later, I found myself on another Brooklyn rooftop, watching the real Twin Towers fall. The disorientation was total. The city I knew had become unrecognizable. Still, my memories remained—my childhood discoveries, the hidden city that raised me.
Born to Egyptian immigrants, I grew up in a New York where I was always something of an outsider. The version of the city I knew wasn’t the one you saw in guidebooks or on postcards—it was a parallel universe, full of grit, warmth, and contradiction. In 2001, as I started photographing this vanishing New York, I realized: she was disappearing. This book is my epitaph to her.
Kyong Park
Detroit. That’s another city where the past lives on in oral histories, not just architecture. Detroit had the largest industrial workforce in history, and now it might have the highest density of resident historians—self-taught, oral, local.
So many have left the city, leaving behind not only their homes but their belongings, their memories. And in that vacuum, stories take root. It’s more than deindustrialization. It’s a kind of spiritual dematerialization—a severing of mental identity from physical space. When a city dies, as Detroit arguably has, its people become half-invisible. The city becomes a ghost of itself.
Controlled demolition? Detroit has been in one long, drawn-out version of that for fifty years. It looks like it’s been bombed—but there was no war. Or was there? Just like 9/11: was it an attack, a self-inflicted wound, or a symptom of political decay? Was Detroit sacrificed so that capital could find new places to grow? Maybe it was always a kind of urban test site, a tabula rasa planned decades in advance.
Anthony Hamboussi
Do cities die? Maybe. Or maybe they evolve. Deindustrialization is part of a larger global shift. But I agree—this is a kind of war. Not fought with bombs, but with laws, markets, and trade agreements. Governments act like mercenaries for multinational corporations.
Peter Hall, the British urban theorist, called it a Marxist inevitability: capital always demands new terrain, aided by the state. He said the city’s form—its land use, its patterns—is shaped by capital in pursuit of profit. And when capital stumbles, it calls on the state to help it reproduce.
Some cities—like New York—get remade into global command centers. Others—like Detroit—are left behind. Cities now live or die based on their utility in the global economy.
Kyong Park
Yes, cities have died. But others are being born—Shenzhen, Dubai. What makes a city? Not just population. Maybe it’s performance, imagination, representation.
In Detroit, in our project Worlds, Images and Spaces: A Language for a New City, I argued that memory and absence—the things we can’t see—are now the building blocks of cities. When Detroit emptied out, it revealed what a city really needs to live: people, yes—but also care, spirit, attention.
Ruins can speak. New buildings often don’t. That’s the power of time, of personal memory embedded in place. Like clothes that move from commodity to heirloom, buildings can accumulate soul.
But cities today are becoming disposable—commodities like any other. Detroit may be the first disposable city in this era of hyper-consumption. Yet cities are resilient. Rome, for example, shrank from over a million to 20,000 and then back up to 3 million. In China, entire cities are being manufactured. What gives a city staying power?
David Harvey would say neoliberalism didn’t expand wealth—it just relocated it. Privatization stripped governments of their redistributive power. Post-Keynesian ideology, backed by think tanks, convinced people that markets work better than the state. But who benefits from that belief? Not the public. Not the displaced.
That’s the thesis behind my video Detroit: Making It Better for You—that Detroit’s destruction was planned to enable profitable redevelopment. The corporations say: “We’ve found a way to seize land without using armies. We’ve written a new chapter of colonialism—urban colonialism.”
Anthony Hamboussi
I want to talk about the imaginary city. Most people only know fragments of their own city—home, work, a few social spots. The rest comes through movies, media, novels, history. Cities are shaped as much by imagination as by brick and mortar.
Photography plays a role here. My images show both the actual and the abstract city—a psychological landscape, not just a literal one. Cities are lived experiences. They exist in memory as much as they do on a map.
As you said, "our mental existence is intrinsically attached to space." I’m interested in how cities function as symbols, how they tap into collective memory or subconscious perception. Like Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan in Invisible Cities:
“You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours... or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer.”
Kyong Park
Yes. Cities are invisible even to those who live in them. Most people don’t really experience their cities. They observe other cities more acutely as tourists than they do their own.
And cities themselves are becoming more invisible. Designed for cars, not people. Viewed through windshields and screens. We navigate them with GPS, but do we feel them? Know them?
Like Newtown Creek in your photographs, or Detroit’s overgrown ruins—these are landscapes of absence. Emptied out. And as we lose our physical presence in cities, they take on a metaphysical quality. They become spiritual.
Detroit speaks louder in its emptiness. The buildings cry out. They want to be lived in, cared for. Ruins hold emotion. New structures don’t. Just like old clothes become vessels of memory, cities can become sacred through time.
In Detroit, half the city is gone. But the other half has become a collective memory-keeper. Self-taught historians. Electronic musicians. Artists. They use memory and music to build a new, invisible city on top of the ruins.
Newtown Creek is the same. You are photographing an invisible city—a once-mighty industrial landscape that now exists mostly in memory.
Outro
This conversation spans not just cities, but centuries of urban transformation. From the demolished gas tanks of Maspeth to the spiritual rubble of Detroit, Anthony Hamboussi and Kyong Park reflect on how memory, capital, and imagination collide in the making—and unmaking—of cities. In a world increasingly mediated through images and algorithms, their dialogue is a call to see more deeply, to listen more carefully, and to remember what once made cities not just functional, but sacred.