A New England lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s

Many would date the beginning of an interest in the dilapidated ruins of the industrial North to the confluence of the historic preservation movement with business dreams of economic revitalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (14) In Lowell, Massachusetts, this precise combination of forces led to the rehabilitation of derelict mill buildings, which transformed the downtown into a museum devoted to the history of the rise and fall of the textile industry; in 1978 Congress even granted Lowell the status of National Historic Park. Other mill towns followed Lowell's example: for instance, in the 1980s the former Amoskeag mills in Manchester began to reopen with new shops and restaurants, and plans were first formulated to transform the former Sprague factory into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. Today many former industrial buildings have been converted into cultural centers, museums, and high-end shops. Huyssen argues that "urban preservation, remakes, and retrofashions ... seem to express a fear or denial of the ruination of time." (15) In the early twenty-first century the industrial ruin serves as a cipher of nostalgia or, in its reinvention as a tourist destination for shopping and entertainment, it functions to deny the progressive deindus-trialization of the Northern states.

The collapse of the industrial North dates to the early twentieth century and took place in New England before anywhere else. Sheeler and Strand were more or less unique among artists of their generation in turning their attention to the textile mills at a point when such factories no longer functioned as an economic foundation for the region and before their preservation and reinvention in the late twentieth century as historic sites, shops, restaurants, or museums. Both artists attempted to reconcile themselves to the loss of industrial modernity well before such collective coping became a prevalent and recognizable phenomenon. That they fixated on decaying industrial buildings put them at odds with the rest of the nation as it emerged from World War II and oriented itself toward a future based on the firm belief in continued industrial might and economic expansion. If anything, Sheeler and Strand recognized that such a future had unequivocally left New England in the dust. From our perspective we can only look back knowingly--perhaps nostalgically, perhaps sadly--at their art as having been born from a belief that the collapse of industrial modernity was but a local rather than a national affair.