The relationship between architectural site and ruin is a heavily contested one; while ruination can signify entropic process, it can also denote deliberate action. In the run-up to the Commonwealth Games of 2014, Glasgow’s civic authorities undertook a process of presenting the city as the product of dynamic development and evolution for both the internal gaze of its inhabitants and the external gaze of the visitor. Yet it could be argued that this romanticised sensibility of improvement in relation to the built environment came at the expense of a more nuanced reality. In this paper, we examine the case of Dalmarnock in Glasgow’s East End, one of the key sites of urban renewal in relation to the Games, by discussing the narrative of a family who fought a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful battle to avoid the destruction of their own tenement property in favour of the new wave of construction. In the event, the form of this forcibly removed architectural leitmotif had an afterlife in the context of an innovative design project, Scotland Can Make It!, curated by Panel Glasgow and motivated by the desire to revisit the idea of the souvenir in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games. One of the six object types produced, The Golden Tenement – a small die-cast model of the Dalmarnock tenement block – was the product of a collaboration between Neil McGuire and Marianne Anderson, and it refocused the idea of the ruin through an elegaically architectural lens. Through the filter of the dialectograms of Mitch Miller and the work of documentary photographer and filmmaker Chris Leslie, we relate the example of Dalmarnock to other instances of the actual or attempted obliteration of sites that compromised a narrative of Glasgow’s civic positivity such as Red Road. In conclusion, we offer that The Golden Tenement problematises the cultural memory of this troubling moment of abjection, taking us beyond the sublimated notion of the ruin to a still more resonant interpretation.