In John Wilson’s obsessive video chronicles on the streets of New York, as seen in his HBO series How To with John Wilson (2020–2023), the director embarks on ostensible missions, often migrating to other discursive thoughts and topics, only to tie it up in surprising and often amusing ways. Along the way, we typically encounter an unlikely cast of characters. His first feature film, The History of Concrete takes a similarly circuitous path with the titular building material. Concrete—consisting of cement, water, sand, and stone—at its heart, is both solid and ephemeral. The word derives from the Latin “concretus” meaning compact or condensed, the passive participle of “concrescere” = “con-“ (together) and “crescere” (to grow).
The material’s flexibility and durability is echoed in Wilson’s attraction to all things concrete and his use of it as a metaphor for issues of life and death. David Ehrlich in IndieWire noted the film “straddles the divide between false permanence and ephemerality. People make skyscrapers and highways out of it. They scratch their names into the mixture before it dries as a bid for immortality. They use it to build the burial vaults that sustain them into the sweet hereafter. It is nothing less than the backbone of modern infrastructure.”
Concrete is the glue that holds the city together. Throughout the film, Wilson points out the material’s presence in the built environment: from 5-foot-by-5-foot sidewalk slabs (and the rogue mounds that serve as makeshift ramps), some with signatures inscribed; to the fill-in tree plots that prevent drainage. He also comments on concrete’s indication of how much construction is taking place in New York City: “you’re completely surrounded by cement trucks.” At one point, Wilson meets the Gumbuster, (“call 866 U-GOT-GUM”), whose job is to clean gum stains off the sidewalks, “Gum is like the birdshit of people; wherever people congregate there is gum.” He also hits the pavement himself, roving through the city, visiting the sets of two feature films in one day (Marty Supreme and Caught Stealing), which Wilson, in an interview with AN, explained as “two different versions of New York at the same time”
Much of the city’s concrete is also collapsing. Wilson’s camera finds fissures on bridges and highways. He zooms in on 432 Park Avenue, the ten-year-old midtown skyscraper that is reportedly falling apart because designer Rafael Viñoly “wanted the concrete to be white, which makes it crack easier and causes big chunks to fall on the street below.” The film provides a tour of New York City’s disintegrating concrete architecture, taking us to WXY and Dattner Architects’ Spring Street Salt Shed on the West Side Highway, which is held together with packing tape on certain joints. while the century-old concrete marquee at the former St. George Hotel on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights collapsed last year.
Wilson subverts the commonly held illusion that concrete is permanent with a visit to the BQE’s triple cantilever at the Brooklyn Heights waterfront with “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz who says the “lifespan of any concrete deck is 40 years.” Schwartz explains that after that, concrete is prone to spalling, exposing reinforcing bars, the structural skeletons meant to support the roadway. “Rebars are fossils or imprints. Corrosion or rust [can grow to be] larger than the rebar itself, it pushes the concrete, creates a void, and begins to fall to the ground,” he explains. The internal pressure can have external effects, and Schwartz says this can cause pieces of concrete that way more than 600 pounds to fall to the busy roadway below.
Wilson’s storytelling traverses scales from the infrastructural to the personal. At his own house in Ridgewood, Queens, he documents trying to fix the cracked concrete foundation with a bag of Home Depot cement only to make matters worse. Then, the sidewalks outside his house were torn up to install a new gas line, but they mistakenly used white concrete which had to be replaced with gray.
We also get a bit of history, visiting the Pantheon in Rome, finished 128 AD, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. In addition to major buildings including the Colosseum, concrete allowed the Romans to build structurally complicated curved forms such as arches and domes, and to build bridges, reservoirs and aqueducts (Roman concrete was waterproof). We also see the oldest concrete street in American built in 1891, Court Avenue outside the Logan County Courthouse in Bellefontaine, Ohio. About 60 percent is still the original concrete that George W. Bartholomew devised to withstand horse and buggy traffic.
The film makes the argument that the human and material lifecycles are intertwined explicit in a visit to Save My Ink Forever, an outfit that preserves tattoos on skin of the deceased for the living to display. Wilson meets the proprietor, whose grandfather embalmed Chef Boyardee (Ettore Boiardi 1897–1985), the canned pasta king who settled Cleveland after having served as head chef at the Plaza Hotel, he tells Wilson “Nothing lasts forever, except maybe a tombstone.” The film’s final shot lingers on Boiardi’s tombstone, begging the question: Is that burial tablet made of concrete?
Susan Morris works across media—film, television, radio, exhibitions, public programs, print, digital media—specializing in the arts and culture with an emphasis on architecture and design.
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