Detroit in Ruins

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has talked about consolidating the city - moving people out of some areas and focusing city services on where the people would be. Some parts of the city would be great expanses of nothing. A great idea, but lotsa luck paying for a bunch of eminent domain.

One place where that did work, though, was the Herman Gardens housing project on the west side, which is now an open field. At one time, it was the largest housing project in the nation. It still looks weird to see the open field when I drive along the Southfield Freeway.

The biggest example of urban decay is the Michigan Central rail station - about 10 stories tall and rotting. It used to be beautiful. The ironic thing is it's the first thing you see when you come off the Ambassador Bridge, which like the rail station, is owned by that SOB Matty Moroun, who is very good at paying off politicians to vote against the proposed second, publicly owned, bridge across the Detroit River. The second bridge needs to be built. The Ontario and Canadian governments want it. Moroun's Lansing lackeys keep shooting it down. I'd love to see the second bridge be built (it's needed!) and for people to abandon Matty's bridge. Eff him.

 

Matty is an asshole who screwed over most of his family to turn the family business into the empire that it is. So it doesn't surpise me that he screws the city by keeping all of his decaying buildings sitting around for no reason.

 

I've never been to Detroit but those pictures tug on me a bit.

One thing I couldn't help thinking was about the left behind stuff in the classroom, the police station and the library. You'd think they'd move that stuff or get rid of it before shutting down the building? It's almost like a lost civilization, one where life ceased without warning. You'd think Detroit had already been through the Rapture.

 

The American Pompeii, Capitalism erupted and left devestation in its aftermath.

 

Sarnia-Port Huron is a much better/easier border crossing.

 

Why didn't this happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh then? I know they had their down times in the 70s & 80s but neither city is in anywhere near the trouble Detroit is.

 

In my town, a long way from Detroit, they turned over the high school to the local little theater group after a new campus was built on the other side of town.

They used the auditorium and cafeteria for productions. And some other rooms for storage and such.

The rest of the building was abandoned but since the school was getting all new equipment, everything was left behind.

The really crappy Apples were still in the computer lab. The desks, the chairs, the chemistry lab. Everything was still out but just covered in dust.
It was very odd to see.

And that's in a town with a population of 4,000. I'd imagine that a major city would hundreds, if not thousands, of such buildings that were abandoned.

As for Detroit, it still seems like a renaissance is possible there. Homes and property are so cheap and parts of the city are still really nice from everything I hear from people who live and travel there.

 

Any idea why the school district didn't make the effort to sell off the equipment, fixtures, etc. to raise money? Or was that just too much of a bother for them?

 

They could turn this into a marketing theme:

Detroit: Come see what we used to be!

 

Johnny Knoxville did an excellent three-part documentary on the subject of Detroit's decay recently. I think you'll find it more uplifting than sad though.

 

I'll watch those later - don't have time right now - but when did Johnny Knoxville become a documentarian??

 

White flight and corrupt governance...happened in St. Louis, too. I remember seeing a documentary on abandonment when I was in junior high in the 1970s. Nothing new