Bowled Over

In April, a YouTube stream of the Nagakin Capsule Tower demolition, complete with a live chat, allowed far-flung viewers to bemoan its demise in real time. During ten seconds in August, ten thousand people watched more than eight thousand pounds of explosives raze a pair of three-hundred-foot-tall towers in Noida, India. A fifty-six-story commercial supertall will replace Hotel Pennsylvania, a Renaissance Revival landmark in Midtown; Michael Young of the blog New York YIMBY is carefully tracking its deconstruction. Marcel Breuer’s first binuclear house design, built for the Geller family on Long Island, was demolished in January; a photo record of the remains—the living room stonewall and fireplace—was published aside an elegy in the New York Times. Building demolition has become one of our favorite spectator sports; fittingly, we seem capable only of watching (and documenting) the brassy finales of these architectural notables.

A month prior to the Nagakin demolition, a few blocks from my apartment, Grand Prospect Hall, a 119-year-old, Victorianera banquet hall in …