This building was a favorite of visiting photojournalists for years to illustrate stories about Detroit. It's right across the street from the iconic train station (a mecca to visiting photographers), and I suspect they felt the words "auto parts" and obvious abandonment said something about the state of the city's economy or industry or something.

At some point during the recent spate of art happenings/installations and cleanups of Roosevelt Park (including the Imagination Station and the Hygienic Dress League's "no vacancy" sign on the Roosevelt Hotel) somebody made this subtle and awesome change to the abandoned storefront. It's been this way for months, but I finally got a shot of it that I like.

Does anyone know who did this? I'd love to give him/her credit.

 
Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

The Detroit Institute of Arts recently installed "framed reproductions of forty of its most famous works to the main streets and landmark outdoor spaces" of metro Detroit in celebration of the museum's 125th anniversary. Fittingly, they placed a reproduction of Frederic Edwin Church's massive Syria by the Sea in front of the ruins of the Michigan Central Station.

My daughter had a play date in the neighborhood yesterday evening so the boy and I took the dog for a walk over to the station. It was cool to watch people stopping to take pictures and reacting to the image in the lovely garden that was installed in front of the station last summer. (You will forgive me for cranking up the warmth in the photo I took of the installation, I hope).

This is exactly the sort of thing the city needs to be doing with respect to its tourist-attraction ruins, and I even talked about this very painting in relation to the station at the talk I gave last summer. I have to give credit to one of my favorite writers, Geoff Dyer, for first making the comparison in an excellent essay from his book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (2003):

The painting. . .showed ruined columns of antiquity bathed in the elegaic light of the declining sun. A caption explained that the painting depicted "a civilization in ruins, succumbing to the forces of nature. The crumbling buildings, overgrown with vegetation, symbolize nature's power over humanity and its structures."

This picture was much in my mind as I drove from the Institute of Arts to the Michigan Central Railroad Station. . .It occurred to me that Church's picture might have been acquired with some Dorian Grayish motive in mind---the ruination of the painted city guaranteeing the Motor City's eternal prosperity---but it ended up being an allegory or prophecy of Detroit's decline and fall, a decline and fall exemplified by the Michigan Central Railroad Station. . .

I parked in front of the station and walked over to a couple of people who were taking photographs.

"Oh, we're just here photographing," said the woman, "hoping someone would pull up and park a white car slap in the middle of the picture." I looked at my car. It was an unbelievably stupid place to have parked but, eager to enter into a dialogue, I said, "Actually, I parked there entirely for your benefit." 

"You did?"

"You will recall that in Caspar David Friedrich's paintings there is usually a lone figure, a monk, say, in front of the ruined abbey or -- in the most famous example -- in the middle of the beach. The small figure gives a sense of focus to the fathomless longings of German Romanticism. In the case of post-industrial ruination a human figure would be inappropriate but a car -- a white Ford, mind you -- might be just what you need, compositional and symbolically." 

I had captured the intellectual high ground but I had not succeeded in regaining the lost ground of common courtesy. "I'll tell you what," I added. "I'll move the car."

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

As I wrote yesterday, with a small group of interested parties I had permission to see the inside of the Broderick Tower. The penthouse apartment once belonged to Thomas Eaton (the guy who built the building, calling it the Eaton Tower) and it was later used by David Broderick as the swanky private Sky Top Club during the 1940s/50s. Vandals have seriously destroyed the interior that was pretty well preserved when Camilo Vergara took photos of it with the building's caretakers back in the early 1990s. He said the place was almost unrecognizable now. One interesting spot was the place where a hole in the plaster revealed a wall with what must have been the original wallpaper of Eaton's apartment:

The four corners of the parallelogram-shaped building have these beaux-arts details, including massive stone globes that the taggers have also defaced:

The views from the roof are as incredible as you'd expect the views from an abandoned 35-story skyscraper to be.

I was really interested in the trees growing in the tar so high up, and wondered how big they'd get:

I liked the way this little plant looked like it was holding up the architectural detail:

As if the legal access weren't enough of a treat, we also got to see a nude photo shoot taking place on a rooftop below us:

 
Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

My friend Camilo Vergara was in town for the week (with preservationist Tim Samuelson, Chicago's "original crazy white man") and the last few times he's visited I've tried to figure out a way to get him into some of the shuttered buildings where he took some of his early 1990s shots of Detroit (as seen in American Ruins and The New American Ghetto) without much success. I'm not an "urban explorer" and I don't have much interest in breaking or sneaking into abandoned buildings these days. This time I enlisted the help of Geoff George and Dan Austin from Buildings of Detroit to get rare permission to legally tour the Broderick Tower, which has been secured for potential rehabilitation (which the current real estate market has stalled indefinitely). Although I'm not all that interested in this stuff anymore, buildings like this are part of what makes Detroit so unique and interesting. With the David Stott building recently added to the list, what other city has more than three abandoned 35-plus-story 1920s skyscrapers?

The building has been heavily vandalized by idiot "urban explorers" over the years, but plenty of its original glory remains:

I love it when you find wallpaper or murals with an ancient ruins motif in modern ruins (The 1970s Gary Sheraton is my favorite example). The illustration above hangs in the lobby of the Broderick Tower. I also noticed this fallen wallpaper on one of the lower floors:

This chair has been sitting in this hallway just like this since like 2003. I totally checked flickr.

One of the most interesting parts of the Broderick Tower are the old dentist offices scattered across the various floors. Apparently at one time there were a lot of dentists working here:

Some of them looked like they hadn't updated their medieval equipment in a long time when their offices closed or the building was shuttered:

The building was full of ephemera from the 1940s through the 1970s. I really liked this old issue of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis:

This was creepy:

These were the studios of WJLB, currently Detroit's big urban contemporary radio station, which had its offices in the tower back in the 1940s (when it ran foreign-language radio shows for Detroit's immigrant populations):

A group of Canadian tourists were trying to get into the Broderick Tower around the time we gained access, and they went over to the unsecured Metropolitan Building (right) when we told them they couldn't come with us. We kept stopping to see if they made it up to the roof and noticed how the masonry was about to collapse from the top floors of the Wurlitzer Building (left).

Tomorrow: the view from the top.

 
Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

If you're ever in Detroit's neighborhoods in June, you have a chance to see that some of those plants growing up and taking over the porches of abandoned homes are actually the former owner's untamed rose bushes.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

The crazy thing about this is actually that there's not some guy actively working on it with a forty next to his tool set.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

I have written about this house before, and it's still something I see every day and find incredibly fascinating. It's right next to a liquor store, the only form of commerce for many, many blocks in any direction, so there's always a lot of activity around it. Back when I wrote that post, I was concerned that the occupied half would become, like the unoccupied half, a haven for drunks and drug addicts, but apparently new renters have moved in and the one half is still well-maintained, while the door to the other half remains wide open.  I wanted to get one last photo of the summer growth to highlight it's weird symmetry. The woman in the dress seemed to have some emotional problems and the gentleman with the hat stopped to talk to her, very gentle, and it was quite touching.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

The light was dimming when I took the first photo, so I went back the next day to get a shot that showed more clearly that there are actually plants growing inside this airplane.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

I was driving back from Chicago the other day at sunset and stopped in Gary, Indiana to take a couple tourist snapshots of the ruined City Methodist Church Gothic Revival sanctuary downtown in that light. What a beauty. I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of graffiti in and on most of the great ruins of that city, as well as the fact that many still had windows. What's wrong with the scrappers and drunk suburban teens around there?

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

When it comes to ivy, Detroit is in a league of its own.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

I went back to the abandoned zoo the other day to see how things were holding up. A lot of the trees are dying and when they fall they crush fences or boardwalks, but other than that things were quiet and wild as ever.

In the lion/tiger cages, this little plant seemed to be opening the door to come inside.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

When we went past these two tenements, my daughter said, "Man, one of those definitely has a ghost."

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

Went back to this spot and took a shot when the plant life in this weird area was green. Metroblossom was in town and I was showing him around to some of my favorite places, and he snapped a shot of me while I was up on the hill:



Credit for photo #2: metroblossom

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

There's hardly anything left of the old Uniroyal plant on Jefferson just across the bridge from Belle Isle. They are currently doing a massive environmental cleanup there (50-gallon drums of sludge dated 4/2009 all over the place) in order to extend the riverwalk all the way to the island.

The shocking pollution at the site does not deter people from fishing all along the shore there, where 25-year-old scrubby trees and dense brush can make you forget you're in the middle of a massive city.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

This was the 1924 swimming pool in the community center that was a part of the projects I recently wrote about (it had served the Paradise Valley community before those projects were built). It closed in 2006. The tile work was gorgeous.





You could almost hear the echoes of so many generations of kids having fun in here.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

One of the kids' favorite buildings in the city, for obvious reasons. Gram is at the age where every cow gets a "mooo" even giant torso-less heads planted on forlorn ice cream shops. I can't help but wonder about all the fine memories this place must hold for eastsiders. A lot of the city's wandering photographers have shot this, but I've never gotten out of the car to shoot it from the side, where I couldn't help but wonder why some graffiti artist hasn't given this cow some spots.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

As thousands of tourists and sports fans streamed into downtown for the NCAA final four games last Saturday night, I walked through the crowds over to a nearby abandoned recreation center. I loved how the scrappers ripped right through the name of former Final Four standout Chris Webber (whose donation was used to modernize the aging facility not that long ago) in order to get to the wiring that fed the scoreboard above.

The coolest part of this art deco recreation building was the 1929 swimming pool with its elaborate tile work. The facility had served Detroit's black community ever since it was first erected in 1926 and it closed in August, 2006. The bulk of the scrapping took place last summer after the nearby housing projects emptied.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

The library in this particular school was still intact thanks to it being used to store several classrooms' worth of desks and the exterior windows had not yet been liberated of their plywood coverings. Each of the classrooms looked occupied by a poltergeist.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.

Inside an abandoned school with nothing much salvaged since the day it was shuttered (including a fully-stocked library!), I came across this map with a representation of an ideal city at the bottom. I couldn't help but stare at it in awe for a few seconds, comparing it in my mind to the city existing outside the boarded-up windows leaking so little light into the room.

Previous Photo

This image is Copyrighted. No unauthorized reuse.