A series of photos showing what appears to be a post-apocalypse Detroit but are in fact present-day shots. See them here and here.
That first link also has links to East German industrial sites and America’s forgotten thaters.
I’ve never been to Detroit, although the wife has. She attended a summer workshop one year at the U of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor. I find these shots really good, though.
Spooky. I half expected to see Dagny Taggart poking around in the abandoned motor factories.
More photographic evidence of Detroit’s decline. I saw a TV special on a town near Chernobyl as it is now. Detroit is almost, but not quite like that in certain parts of time. Of course, I have never been there and maybe these photos are misleading. I hope so.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Detroit (4-5 months total over the last 3-4 years) and I can tell you that Detroit looks worse than those pictures show you.
There are spectacular buildings, some of them 60-80 stories tall, that are vacant, boarded up, and some are half-burned. The old Postal Building is huge, and vacant. The old Armory building on the river is just so much shattered glass. The main drag that used be where all the clubs and theatres were is now trash-strewn and unused, except maybe as a restroom by the homeless and the addicted.
It’s an incredibly sad place to be, as you can see that it was once a bustling, prosperous lively place, now fallen into disrepair and disrepute.
There was an article about post-industrial Detroit, along with pictures, in the July 2007 edition of Harper’s. It’s well worth a read, and is available online here (PDF).
It’s a really interesting phenomenon, because you have urban blight that is so bad, and so long-term, that nature has actually begun to reclaim sections of the city. In most blighted cities (Baltimore’s a good example), the decay and desertion haven’t been sustained or complete enough to allow this sort of re-greening.
It’s not really surprising that it’s happened in Detroit, though. I can’t think of another American city that lost so many people. The city’s population peaked in the late 1950s and early 1960s at almost 2 million. It’s now down around 900,000. When you remove a million people from a 140 square mile area, it’s going to leave a lot of empty dwellings and unused commercial and industrial space. And the decline of the auto industry and other businesses means that there aren’t even as many people coming in to work from the suburbs and exurbs as there were twenty or thirty years ago.
Wow, I would love to salvage some of those interiors and then re-sell them here in Indiana…I would make a damn fortune. But I would need a whole armored company just to get at them.
Could you post a few links to Google Maps street view?
Pretty amazing stuff. A friend of The Boy’s is heavily involved in the urban exploration community, and he’s taken very similar photos of the decay in abandoned buildings in downtown Detroit… it’s pretty sad to see beautiful old buildings fall apart from neglect.
He manages to find buildings to explore just about everywhere he goes, though. Most major cities have plenty of abandoned and decaying buildings tucked away where people don’t want to live or work anymore (I know of several in Toronto). The only difference is that Detroit has more of them than average.
Detroit is the crappiest derelict city in the country, because of all abandoned falling apart buildings. Some of the neatest architecture is there, but is past decrepit. The city can’t afford to demolish the huge volume of houses that need to come down.
The urban explorer sites had lots of good material on their sites from that town. Urban explorers go to abandoned and lost places and photo log the experience posting to a group site. Seeing the interior wreck of the train station is disheartening. At least Detroit has made an effort on making some of the exteriors of prominent building not so ugly.
There is better stuff out there, but you’ll have to find your own links. I’ll be looking at some other ruins I haven’t seen yet, thanks to my searching for this. I know there are pictures from the tops of some of Detroit’s tall buildings, but I can’t say if those two links have them. I think they do.
I’ll have to figure out what “Google Maps street view” is and get back to you.
Google sends vans with cameras down various cities’ streets, taking pictures at street level view, and links them to their Maps feature. So you not only can get the flyover perspective, but also what it would look like if you drove down those streets.
This assumes that a.) Google has sent vans to map Detroit, and b.) Google actually sent vans through those parts of Detroit.
Go to 2201 Michigan Avenue, Detroit MI in Google Maps, then go to street view. Looking north from there, across a little park you see a building about 15 stories high. It’s a derelict railway station (Michigan Central Station) – obviously it was once a great landmark, but passenger rail has gone, and the building has been derelict for many years.
OK, I figured out what it is, but I’m having trouble finding stuff that I could drive right to if I was actually there. Also, the street view is making my head spin from looking 360° to try and find things.
OTOH, it’s simply amazing what google maps has done. I’ll keep trying to find the old Postal Bldg and the Armory thingy (which is right on the river, near-ish to Cobo but I can’t find it).
Also, the Statler Bldg is amazing, and I think it’s the old Ford Bldg that I’m looking for… it’s like 80+ stories tall, and is one of the coolest buildings I’ve ever seen in the States.
ETA: look at some of these bldgs, including the big one just north of due east.
my link is fubar… not sure how to link to street view but i’ll keep working on it.
Driving in Detroit proper, you see so many formerly gorgeous buildings that are completely rotted and falling apart. It’s absolutely disgusting and depressing. Most of the buidlings can’t even be saved at this point because of how much decay and destruction has gone on. It makes me so mad and depressed.
I mean-BILLION of $ in good housing and office space-lost because a corrupt city government chased the decent people away! Wht nation can afford to squander its housing stock this way? Detroit 9uncer efficient, honest government0 could be just like palo Alto, Ann Arbor, or San marino-instead, we have allowed the criminals to destroy the place.
pretty sobering , and a lesson in how bad government has effects FAR beyond the immediate.
Who do you want to blame here? The city government in the 1960s was trying to address racial concerns - though it did so in a spectacularly incompetent fashion. This led to a massive riot in 1967 that hastened an already brisk white flight and emptied the town eventually of most of its population.
This plus the shocks in the auto industry over the years have left Detroit where it is - and it would have taken politicians much better than we had available in the 1960s and 1970s in either party to stop that. Frankly, I don’t think anyone could have.
I went in to street view at the location you provided. Michigan Avenue looks pretty darned bleak. Lots of boarded up buildings along that road :(.
I am used to seeing equally bleak looking places in Philly. Is the Detroit situation far worse that the decaying parts of other major cities?