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Multiple Materials, Multiple Meanings: The Fortunes of Thomas Mendenhall

HE WRECKING BALL swung back into the shattered second story of the last remaining downtown structure along the north side of Front Street in Wilmington, Delaware (fig. 1). As the ball crunched through the masonry, the brick wall buckled and collapsed, spilling debris over two cars stopped for the traffic signal at the intersection of Front and Walnut, adjacent to the site of the city's earliest commercial district on the waterfront. By sunset the house erected by Capt. Thomas Mendenhall in the 178os was ready to be heaped with the rubble of the other historic buildings that had made up the hub of the late eighteenth-century urban port. Years of urban renewal culminated on this evening in September 1981, with less above ground than when the district had first been platted more than two centuries before. As students of the past, we mourn such losses automatically and on principle. But do even we fully understand the objects whose passing we mourn? What exactly can we hope to realize from the study of the past? Architectural historians primarily respond to manifestos on style; in their