Two links I’ve been saving for everyone’s delectation.
The happy?
This extraordinary video mashup of something like 270 films released in 2010, coming in at six minutes running time.
__
Just great stuff.
And the sad?
This collection of genuinely beautiful photographs of the ruin that was Detroit. The artfulness of these images is just marvelous.
__
The subject…it breaks my heart.
Perhaps this should be considered an open thread?
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Image. J. W. M. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838
(The link between image and post is a little allusive, I’ll admit, but it’s there (in my own mind, if nowhere else), and I do truly love this painting. I’ve made pilgrimages to see it.)
Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))
All right, since this is an open thread…
How many regular writers are there on this blog? It’s hard to keep count. Is there some way we could get a list of everybody, who they are, what their backgrounds are, what their interests are? Maybe you could tack it onto the Balloon Juice Lexicon or something…
Violet
Oh, wow. Those photos. Heartbreaking. I had no idea…
It should be saved. It could be saved. It can’t be saved. I don’t know…
Wiesman
Dear Tom Levenson,
I’m happy you are blogging here.
That’s all.
/suckup
geg6
I saw that photo essay on Detroit on, I think. Salon the other day. They also printed some of the photos from it in the Sunday Pgh. Post-Gazette this week (as a sort of cautionary tale of there but for the grace of FSM…). Beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking. This is what it looks like when a once-great city deteriorates before your eyes and no one has the tools or the will to save it.
mr. whipple
Found out about this Turner dood a few months ago researching Debussy.
I like this one.
Yutsano
@Violet: Every single one of those buildings (except the house that got torn down) is both salvageable and restorable. But it will take both money and will, something both Detroit and Michigan are sorely lacking right now.
arguingwithsignposts
As much as I love me some urban ruins, I’d encourage everyone to watch this documentary short about some positive things going on in Detroit.
Janet in Virginia
Detroit photos make me want to weep. Coming soon to a city near you, too, thanks to Reaganomics and corporate pillaging. What’s wrong with America?
Sweet Fanny Adams
Amazing photographs and truly heartbreaking to see the decay that has happened and is happening. Guessing that there’ll probably not be an effort to preserve/restore any of them especially in these economic times. Trouble is, that if nothing is done now or soonish, then it will probably be too late. Really very sad and quite a loss.
Bella Q
@Wiesman: What he said. And since it’s a open thread, a comic snippet:
Zionist Vulture
When I first saw this report that the Saudis had taken an Israeli vulture into custody for spying I thought they were referring to a new drone aircraft. Actually, they arrested a bird.
(Josh Marshall)
R-Jud
I also saw that photo essay on Detroit. The waste is so awful.
Nellcote
Thank you for the photo link. The photos are shocking and heartbreaking. If the public places are just being left to rot I don’t understand why architural salvage companies haven’t gone through them. It’s very spooky the way humans seem to have just walked away from so many of the rooms. Especially the libraries/schools. Surely there are ways to distribute the books at least.
mr. whipple
It’s a shame that Merka doesn’t give a shit about old stuff.
Tom Levenson
@mr. whipple: That’s a great one. See it at the National Gallery in London. (In Trafalgar Square. Free! As great museums should be.)
The Fighting Temaraire is there too.
Also, if you are a Turner person and have a chance to stop off in New Haven, the Yale Center for British Art is just a fabulous place to spend a couple of hours. (Also free! As great museums…) Several top notch Turners, Constables, and a bunch of other stuff that shouldn’t be missed. It’s not that well known a collection, I think, but it should be.
Citizen Alan
The Detroit ruins are not just saddening. To me, they are also terrifying because they are the future that every Republican, whether Teabagger lunatic or Galtian Overlord, wants for this entire country. Those pictures represent the remains of part of our civilization after the vultures have picked it clean, and now, they cast their greedy, gluttonous eyes towards the rest.
General Stuck
Well at least Lake Erie is no longer on fire, as it was when I was a sprout. That’s somethin”
mr. whipple
Thanks, Tom. Don’t know nothin about art, but dig that style.
Cleveland has this, and I could sit in front of it for hours.
Violet
@Yutsano:
I would love to see some rich Wall Street types take on this kind of endeavor. Imagine if someone with money put it into restoring those gorgeous buildings and investing in Detroit.
Art
Here’s an pretty neat four part video serious on the rebirth of Detroit. Might take a little bit of the sad away, I mean at least the possibilities are there.
http://www.palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit
Tom Levenson
@mr. whipple: Ah yes. Nice one.
arguingwithsignposts
One thing about a lot of urban ruins is the amount of money it would take to remove all the toxic stuff in them. Imagine how much asbestos is in those buildings.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I received a chain email a few months ago from my wingnutty uncle. It compared present day photographs of Detroit and Hiroshima. The gist was that Detroit is in its current state due to free handouts and welfare. Or something like that….Ugh.
mr. whipple
@Tom Levenson:
I felt better just calling it up.
aliasofwestgate
Tom, there are some that are working to revive Detroit.(and they aren’t members of teh Big Three, its the youth and some of the old guard) It’s going to take some time. Just like it took decades for it to get that bad. Hopefully someone takes an interest in things like the old Central Station one day, and either restores it or finds some other purpose for it. Something that gorgeous needs to stay up and alive. It really does.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey)))): My first book of poems is coming out soon–like I should be getting copies from the publisher before the end of the month soon, at least according to the email I got this morning. Does that count as writing?
And in the open thread vein, ssome bastards cut down the shoe tree in Nevada, the one on US Route 50, the loneliest road in the country.
Yutsano
@Violet: Here’s a thought: instead of the Ford family investing another $50 million in a quarterback for the Lions, they get a little self-awareness and start doing some things to rebuild the city. One of the lessons that other cities learned from urban renewal projects is you have to invest the money first THEN the people & businesses start flowing back.
ETA: if the Ford family is already doing this then mea culpa. They may not be doing enough.
schrodinger's cat
I have a question. How did Detroit get this way. Does it all have to do with the decline of the US auto industry? Or are there other reasons.
New Yorker
Think of the demographic shifts in the US over the last 40 years: we’ve abandoned cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, all of which sit on the largest bodies of fresh water on earth, to go live in the desert (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Inland Empire California) where water crises are right around the corner.
We’ve ditched cities where things were once produced (steel, cars, machinery, etc.) to go live in a city where the only driver of the economy is people flushing their money down the toilet (Las Vegas).
I find this a very disturbing portrait of the state of this country and its ability to sustain itself.
James E Powell
One could do similar photo essays for any of the Rust Belt cities. Interesting that this one is in the Guardian. Perhaps in the States this is an old story.
I have mixed feelings about the lamentations and nostalgia for the glories of the big cities of the industrial past. I am from Cleveland, so I grew up with this. Those cities were grand in their day, for sure, but they were built by using workers like draft animals, destroying the environment, and corrupting the state and local governments.
geg6
@schrodinger’s cat:
Not that I know, but I would guess that there are few of our Galtian overlords who want to revitalize a city that is, by a large majority, populated by dusky people and white trash like Eminem.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I think you could also do a similar story about New Orleans. What kills me about that story, though, is that you could make the argument that what started the decline was Ronald Reagan’s oil policy which gutted domestic production, and yet Louisiana has become increasingly conservative over the same time period. I just don’t get it.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: Milwaukee has done a pretty good job of revitalizing its downtown and lakefront.
Tom Levenson
@New Yorker: Speaking of Galt’s Gulch, which we are sort of, as a transplanted (northern) Californian, I sometimes get my jollies thinking of the huge dislocation we could enjoy if we created a truly free market in water.
Much hilarity would ensue, and the Great Lakes Water Compact would start to interest a lot of folks.
aliasofwestgate
@schrodinger’s cat:
A lot of other factors. I grew up north of it, but i was always aware of it as a music town as a kid. Music still thrives there, even though Motown records moved to LA. It’s been in decline longer than i’ve been alive, sadly. It’s going to take decades of stubborn rebuilding, but i think it will revive again.
Detroit and its natives, much like New Orleans and her natives, and even those who just love the city period will do(and are doing) what they can to revive it. Now if we could get a few billion dollar families to see prospect in helping things along, like restoring some of those gorgeous old ruins, that’d help things along.
Violet
@Yutsano:
Yep. It would be really cool if they did something like that. Maybe they are.
@James E Powell:
Things falling apart is an old story. Maybe one day people will go gawk at Detroit like they do now at Chichen Itza or Rome.
Delia
I love Turner. About 30 years ago I happened to see a special exhibit of his work in London and I’ve loved him ever since.
Detroit. I have a hard time formulating right now since I have a bad cold and a serious case of the stupids. But it’s just stunning. It’s like no one upstairs is awake to the fact that this will happen everywhere.
geg6
@James E Powell:
Not true about any Rust Belt city. Depends on the leadership. In Pittsburgh, which could easily have ended up like Detroit or Cleveland, we were lucky to have good leaders like Richard Caliguiri and Sophie Masloff. They gave us the beautiful vital city we enjoy today, but we were lucky.
James E Powell
@schrodinger’s cat:
I have a question. How did Detroit get this way. Does it all have to do with the decline of the US auto industry? Or are there other reasons.
I believe if you ask the Michigan voters who vote Republican you would hear that it was the unions, the liberals, blacks, immigrants, and everybody else other than the corporate ruling class that made the decisions that made Detroit and the rest of the Rust Belt what they are today. And got rich doing so.
I would argue that in a culture that believes the only value a person, place, or thing has is determined by how much money can be made off of it, what we see is inevitable.
Tom Levenson
@geg6: Really good universities to serve as incubators for economic activity help some too.
Detroit is unlucky that U. Michigan is just that little bit too far out of town.
James E Powell
@geg6:
While what you say is true, at least as far as I could tell from visits there, I am from Cleveland. I can’t say anything complimentary about Pittsburgh. Wait, it isn’t just that I can’t. I don’t want to.
HRA
As someone who was born across the Detroit River and have a lot of great memories of going to Detroit, I am stunned and saddened by these photos. To make matters interesting, I was brought to live in Buffalo as a teen. The sad is enormous here, too.
schrodinger's cat
Didn’t Anthony Bourdain once do a show about Detroit, Baltimore and Buffalo?
schrodinger's cat
@New Yorker: Chicago is a counter example to your general theory, I wonder what makes Chicago different since it is still thriving and has not gone the way of Buffalo and Detroit. Could those conditions be replicated?
schrodinger's cat
@geg6: I read your post over on the other thread {{{geg6}}}. I can’t even imagine what you must have gone through.
cmorenc
@Yutsano:
A great example of another American city that was, 35-40 years ago, undergoing economic and physical decay and had begun to demolish once-beautiful dilapidated relic structures from its heritage heyday was Savannah, Georgia. True, there are major differences: in Savannah, the city woke up to the madness that was overtaking it in the name of modernization during better overall economic times, and had a larger, more influential contingent attuned to the city’s historical antebellum heritage, and also they had a much better overall stock of material to work with than Detroit.
Nevertheless, if you want to see a magnificent example of what a city can do if it wakes up in time, BEFORE the process of descent into decadence and ruins goes too far and too much is destroyed to make way for nondescript mediocre structures, you can find no more beautiful city than Savannah, the extensive “old” part of which looks even more the perfect image of the genteel antebellum southern port city than your imagination could possibly conjure up. Not only that, but the adjacent 1950-ish downtown has been restored (and functions) such that you can actually see what the heart of most mid-sized American cities were like back when they were thriving hubs of commerce, rather than ignored except for bank headquarters and government functions.
New Yorker
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m not saying every city on the Great Lakes is a basket case, but in general, the population of this country seems to be most stagnant in the areas where, uh, human habitability is easiest while moving to places where, uh, human beings shouldn’t live in great numbers. Even in Atlanta, hardly a desert, they’re having water issues.
asiangrrlMN
Wow. The photos of Detroit in ruin are just so horrible and beautiful at the same time. I will have to watch the documentary on what’s positive in Detroit for a counterbalance.
schrodinger's cat
@New Yorker: I agree with your overall point. I was just wondering what made Chicago different.
Jennifer
I’ve never been to Detroit but I’ve been fascinated by it for quite some time – it holds a sick fascination for us dystopians. I highly recommend detroitblog for its stories of the city and its holdouts, and detroitfunkfor its amazing photo archives.
While it’s shocking and saddening to see what happened to Detroit, it’s not exactly recent. The city started losing population way back around 1960. It started with white flight and was exacerbated by industrial decline. But the decline has been going on for 50 years now.
terry chay
@schrodinger’s cat: The contrast of Chicago (and even Pittsburgh) to Detroit and Buffalo played out in the Rise of the Creative Class, written by some CMU professor in 2001.
As for the California’s inland embpire and the Phoenix area, they will get theirs this decade. I have no doubt of that. The demographics aren’t exactly tea leaves here.
Fortunately, they won’t have built anything of worth to photograph when it becomes detrius.
John - A Motley Moose
Detroit’s biggest problem is, and always was, population loss. You can’t expect to take a million people out of a city and not have major decay. That leads to empty schools, homes, and commercial buildings. There’s simply not enough people to fill those buildings.
One thing to keep in mind is that the city declined while the suburbs prospered. Detroit is surrounded by affluent and prosperous suburbs. The white flight to those suburbs, and later black flight, are what almost destroyed the city. But those suburbs will someday be what saves the city. The demand is there for a viable urban center.
Detroit will rise from the ashes, but it won’t be the Detroit of the 50’s and 60’s. It will be something new.
Art already posted this link to Johnny Knoxville’s videos about the rebirth of Detroit, but I think it needs to be emphasized. http://www.palladiumboots.com/exploration/detroit
joe from Lowell
I had to stop clicking through those pictures of Detroit. I couldn’t get all the way through.
Too sad.
PIGL
@Tom Levenson: The poem is pretty moving, too.
But Fame has nailed your battle-flags–
Your ghost it sails before:
O, the navies old and oaken,
O, the Temeraire no more!
AliceBlue
Turner is one of my favorites. I especially love “Rain Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway.”
It’s always intriguing to see the artwork that illustrates your posts.
joe from Lowell
@geg6:
I am shocked that you are endorsing such a great man theory of history.
Detroit’s fortunes, like, well, everything, are a consequence of objective material conditions related to the control of capital and the means of production, not the presence of absence of leaders.
In this case, the economic dominance of the auto industry made it a single-industry town, less able to weather ups and downs and more subject to the pains of industrial migration on both a metropolitan and national/global level. The political dominance of that industry in the state and municipal government also burdened the city in unique ways, such as stalling rail transit and promoting suburan sprawl even more than in other places.
joe from Lowell
@John – A Motley Moose:
People are finally waking up, and realizing that a strong urban center benefits everyone. In places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, they’re going back to try to retrofit and add them.
Tom Levenson
@John – A Motley Moose: One thing worth remembering is that this is in fact pretty much what happened to Pittsburgh demographically. Its population reached about 670,000 (city limits, not metro area) by the 1930 census and stayed right around that number into the 1950s. The decline started slowly — the 1960 census reports 604,000 and change — and then the numbers just keep falling. 520,000 in 1970. 423,000 in 1980. (Tables here.)An estimated 312,000 in 2009.
Pittsburgh recreated itself as a much smaller, no-smokestack town over a wrenching three decades or so. Detroit will, I hope, get at least that far…but it will be a much smaller and perhaps more compact city when it does.
Tom Levenson
@AliceBlue: Yup, that one’s great — @mr. whipple: linked to it above.
@PIGL: Thanks for this. I’d never come across the poem before. Now I know what I’m doing when I’m beetling o’er the seas.
When Melville was good he was very, very, good. And when he wasn’t? Still a bucket of fun.
debbie
“Lost” lives on:
http://www.tvsquad.com/2011/01/05/lost-numbers-prove-lucky-for-mega-millions-lottery-players/
El Cid
This video of a Chinese student dancing impossible moves to techno is worth watching.
debbie
@Bella Q:
I heard that Iran arrested a squirrel loitering near a nuclear plant, believing it to be a Mossad plant.
Dennis G.
I grew up in the Detroit. The photo of the old Vanity Ballroom brings back many memories. It was in my neighborhood and where I saw many a band play in the early 1970s. It was there that I watched somebody punch Iggy Pop as Iggy suggestively danced in front of the fella’s date as Iggy moved through the crowd sitting on the Ballroom floor. The front man of The Stooges just brushed it off and kept singing and moving through the crowd.
Detroit is a city of memories and dreams. The photos capture the 40-year ghost dance of Motown.
Cheers
sal
Coincidentally, Detroit 187 on ABC last night had a plot line involving a French guy coming to town to take picture of the ruins.
Tom Levenson
@Dennis G.: I never did thank you for that art shout out of a couple of days ago.
Thanks!
Best,
T.
Elie
To shift our eyes to another precious and beautiful —
After several years of building the riparian area around one of our local creeks, and of tending egg boxes and watching out for returning salmon, we got six — six, beautiful, precious chum upstream to spawn right before Christmas…
We have been improving the creekside and putting in eggs for 7-8 years. Thousands — hundreds of thousand eggs have hatched and the young salmon smolt swum out to their salt water destinies. Last year — year seven, our hearts were broken when the chum salmon massed at the mouth of the creek but water levels were too low for the large fish to feel comfortable and they moved on. This year, thanks to flood level rain, we had enough not just for the chum, but for a number of coho salmon to go up and spawn.
Its a small but huge thing. I am so grateful of being able to see it happen at all these days… there were also two new baby Orca in Puget Sound (now the Salish Sea) this year. These are babies with our resident Orca pods that consume salmon exclusively — so I am thrilled and ever so slightly reassured that they have enough to eat — for now…
I am just thankful and celebrate
John - A Motley Moose
@sal: Not so coincidental. Marchand and Meffre are not well-liked in Detroit. Some of that dislike was shown in the episode last night. The writers also had the characters voice the most common complaint about the photographers. They focused on only the worst parts of the city. Not only that, but they went out of their way to make it look bad.
One of the buildings they photographed was the old abandoned Cass Tech school. What they failed to show or even mention was the brand new, state-of-the-art replacement for that school that was built right across the street from the old school.
djheru
I saw those Detroit pictures displayed in an exhibit during the Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids, MI. They choked me up and got my vote for the competition.
Platonicspoof
@ Tom L.:
The same day I saw the Detroit story / photographic art at the Guardian, I also ran across this Marty Robbins spoof of science news.
It’s from last September, so I’m guessing it’s already been e-mailed to you on the order of sp am.
For anyone needing some humor to go with beauty and sadness, the comments really get into spoofing the Comment Is Free commentariat, which of course could be applied much closer to home.
Linnaeus
Having grown up in metro Detroit, I can understand why. The photographs are very poignant and artistically well-composed, but looked at a certain way, they come off as “ruin porn”, whereby the viewer satisfies some kind of morbid fascination with the degradation of the city while forgetting that about 900,000 or so people still live there (and about 4.5 million in the greater metro area) and a good number of these people are deeply invested in seeing their home recover from the wrenching changes it’s undergone. They do mind dying.
Which is not to say, let me hasten to add, that one can’t appreciate these photographs or that they have no aesthetic/artistic value. Just trying to put things in some context. I don’t live in the Detroit area now, but I have thought about going back there from time to time. Don’t know if I will.
A few people have asked about Chicago and why it generally escaped the fate of Detroit. It’s complicated – and I don’t have a comprehensive answer – but one reason is that Chicago managed its transition from a city of heavy industry to one of services far better than Detroit did. Chicago’s location is highly advantageous for making such a transition; it’s long been a transportation hub for both rail and (later) air travel, which makes it a good site for locating business that want a presence in between the coasts and also some reach into Canada.
There’s a lot of talk about Detroit’s future, and one version of the future entails Detroit tying itself more strongly to Chicago, whose advantages makes it the anchor city of the Chi-Pitts megalopolis/conurbation. Detroit’s border location also makes it a good choice (again, according to the “regional city” view) as a gateway city to Canada (and Canadian trade), especially Toronto, as it sits almost exactly midway between Chicago and Toronto.
Dennis G.
@Tom Levenson:
Don’t mention it. I love the art.
And it is a great way to add something to a post as FYWP will never let me post a link to video. Why? I do not know, but such is the world of WP.
Cheers
celiadexter
I lived in Detroit from ’74-’89. The decline started in the late ’60’s — it was easy to blame it on the riots but not true — it was a combination of what was happening to all Rust Belt cities and the changes in the auto industry, which were concentrated in Detroit. What has happened since then probably can’t be reversed. There are proposals now to tear down almost everything and use the land for agriculture, and I’m not sure that’s a bad idea. The photos in the Guardian show the fate of formerly beautiful places; take a look at this video, which is now 4 years old, and see what happened in the streets. Both left me in tears. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6WKMNmFsxM&feature=related
Shell Goddamnit
I’m from Detroit area but haven’t lived in the city for ten years – part of the Detroit Diaspora. We’re everywhere.
The picture of the library hit a nerve. I guess I didn’t want to know it had gone that far.
Beyond that…yes, the decline has been ongoing for a long, long time. Jane Jacobs predicted that Detroit was in serious long-term trouble due to its lack of density, way back in 1960. I think that’s a very big part of it.
The one-industry – and that one very sensitive to economic fluctuations – nature of the regional economy is another big part. Another is the fact that Detroit was not able to annex its thriving suburbs, instead of seeing them take the tax base and the viable companies and lure them away.
And Coleman Young being elected Mayor in 1973…well, let’s just say that a lot of the white folks in the area felt the same way about that as these fucks feel about Obama being elected – willing to shit in their own nest, just to insure his failure.
There’s probably more, but those will do to start.
Scott P.
Ah, a Marxist historian!
Tom M
@joe from Lowell:
Srsly? Pittsburgh was known for a single industry, steel. In the mid 1970s, there were 13 mills with 55,000 workers in and around the ‘burgh producing millions of tons of steel.
Today, there is 1 mill (Edgar Thompson) with fewer than 5,000 workers producing that same millions of tons of steel.
Pittsburgh doesn’t rely on that industry anymore, they had to change and did. Whether it was Sophie or Dick is certainly debatable, they had a lot of help, but the city did change, mostly for the better.
Maybe it’s the football. Most people here think so. It sure isn’t the baseball.
Mr Furious
Those photos are indeed hauntingly beautiful, and those guys actually have a 200 page coffee table book of them.
But the real master of the Detroit ruin photography is James Griffioen (aka “Sweet Juniper!“) a local blogger in the Motor City. I wrote a post on him when I added his blog to my roll, and it has several links to his photos and stories within it. I’ll blogwhore just to bypass the moderation that adding all the links would trigger:
“Worse Than Detroit” March 02, 2009
He lives there and has spent far more time exploring and documenting the city, and manages to capture images that are fascinating in so many ways. You could easily waste hours in his Flickr galleries.
Mr Furious
Oh, and here is a small gallery of my Sweet Juniper-inspired Detroit photos. Six decrepit mansions and a shot of the Michigan Central Station. Taken when we relocated back to Michigan early in 2010.
I’ll be in Detroit once or twice next week for the Auto Show, and I’ll have to take some time out to add to the collection.
John - A Motley Moose
@Mr Furious: Many thanks for that link to Sweet Juniper. I’ve bookmarked that blog and plan to read everything on it eventually.
I’m really glad I read this post and comment thread. I was familiar with the photo series by Marchand and Meffre already, but I learned other things today. The Johnny Knoxville documentary was really great and so is the blog you linked to above.
This thread even inspired a diary I wrote for the Motley Moose http://www.motleymoose.com/diary/2799/your-lying-eyes
Bulworth
@New Yorker: Yeah. Some very good points you make here.
Bulworth
I assume the rest of the buildings are unoccupied or not being used, but I honestly wasn’t sure about the library. Is it still in use? Hate to see those books going to waste either way.
grumpy realist
Most of those buildings probably can’t be salvaged–partially due to the asbestos issue and mainly because there isn’t the population density available to support them. Best would be to salvage what is possible, then knock the buildings down and plant trees.
Mr Furious
@Bulworth:
There are lots of photos from various libraries and schools, but the worst of all were some of Sweet Juniper’s photos from the Detroit Public School Book Depository where there are photos of thousands of new, unused textbooks just destroyed.
These buildings are not being used, or are abandoned. And at a certain point in Detroit, as soon as a building is taken out of service for any reason it cannot be maintained or even secured with the shortage of funds or personnel in the city. Closed schools are quickly broken into and vandalized, and stripped of copper and anything else of value. Once the integrity of the structure is compromised to the weather, it becomes a lost cause in most cases. Water damage is immediate, and the harsh seasons and freeze/thaw finish things off.
Also, many of these structures of stone or brick look sound from the street but hide extensive damage within: from fire, water or squatters, and all were built at a time of lead paint and asbestos materials. Rehabbing even a good-conditioned old building is a dicey cost/benefit decision at times, and in these cases, bulldozing is the best option.
The City of Detroit has a backlog of TENS OF THOUSANDS of structures to be razed over the next couple years. they literally cannot knock them down fast enough.
dj spellchecka
also, google up “Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore”
here’s one image….check out this house
http://csuphoto.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/image003.jpg