The decline of Detroit grandeur

Grandeur Lost: The Modern Ruins of Abandoned Detroit is another abandonment post from WebUrbanist

The now famous pic of William Livingstone house

Detroit is arguably one of the most fascinating modern cities in the world. This is thanks to the city’s unique balance between its former identity as a manufacturing mecca and its current state of sectional abandonment and renewal. It is neither deserted nor wholly occupied, but exists in tension between destruction, creation and everyday living. 
French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre saw the abandoned parts of this compelling urban landscape and documented it in their book The Ruins of Detroit.

United Artists Theatre - talk about decayed grandeur!

Despite the empty neighbourhoods, abandoned buildings and crumbling structures. The city balances its former glory, its current semi-abandoned status, with pockets of fresh new life and creative directions springing up from the ashes.

East Side Public Library

The city, so rich with history both industrial and individual, was once the fourth largest in the United States. It housed some of the country’s brightest engineers and most promising entrepreneurs. The city grew and its residents continued to expand their living areas into planned suburbs.

Atrium of the Farwell building

But the automobile industry which played such a large part of the city’s early days also proved part in its undoing. White middle-class residents used those cars to move out of the inner city and into their new suburbs. Segregation increased steadily until the violent race riot in 1967.

Following the riot, the city continued its rapid decline. The industry that built Detroit moved on to other locations. Inner-city residents fled their homes by the thousands. Every race and every economic class was affected by this exodus; the city simply bled away until it held less than half its former population.

Lee Plaza Hotel

Unlike almost any other place in the world, Detroit’s abandoned buildings and ruined structures are not isolated in one part of the city. Grand, well-kept buildings can exist just meters away from crumbling ruins. Inhabited and abandoned homes exist side by side in neighbourhoods.

The grandeur of the multi-storey Michigan Central Railway Station

What is so compelling about the images in The Ruins of Detroit is the seeming urgency of the city’s abandonment. In civic buildings, papers and boxes still occupy offices. In abandoned libraries, books continue to line the walls. Schools still hold desks and police stations are stuffed with forgotten and mouldering mug shots. Chairs are tipped over as though the former occupants of these buildings suddenly evacuated due to an emergency. No hope of salvaging the situation.

St Christopher House Public Library

Given the slow but steady decline of the city’s population, this urgency is baffling. Surely there was more than enough time to clean the buildings out, remove anything that could be reused or salvaged and clean the buildings up. But it seems that no one cared to take the time to do so.

This state of partial ruination is ephemeral – eventually it must give way to complete ruin or rebuilding. As witnessed in my Decaying Detroit post, the photographers’ goal was to capture Detroit’s current state of abandonment before fate tips one way or the other.

The East Methodist Church

Yet more photographs at the Weburbanist site.

Decaying Detroit

Most of the images you tend to see of Detroit are of the central business district - grand buildings decaying, but this series entitled 'GooBing Detroit' a tumblr blog, uses Google Street View Time Machine to follow the fast transformation of family houses from cute and cheerful suburban residences to overgrown vacant lots.

Exeter, northern Detroit, 2009, 2011 & 2013

Much has been said about the decline of a once great city, and the seemingly diminishing chances of a revival. The metropolis has lost 25% of its population in the last decade. The city’s 78,000+ 'feral houses' - abandoned, looted, burned-out - are the stuff of legend, seeming to revert back to a wild state the way domesticated animals tend to do when left to their own devices.
These Google Street View images of Detroit from 2009 through to 2013 paint a poignant portrait of decay in the city. 

Rampant growth - Healy St, north of Hamtramck, 2009 & 2013

The Street View images are often astonishing in the rapid transition in a span of just a few short years. A stretch of houses may have cars parked in the driveways, toys on the lawn and other signs of life all around in the first image, while by the third or fourth they’re barely discernible among the overgrowth.

While these images really drive home how much Detroit has lost over the last three decades, many residents aren’t ready to give up hope, despite the fact that the city’s population has declined from a peak of 1.8 million to just 700,000. There are areas of the city that still thrive, but the question of an overall plan (either to break the city into manageable pieces or reinvigorate it as a whole) remains an open one. In the meantime, it seems to almost be an industry with urban explorers and photographers recording what is left before nature claims it back.

Remove the residents and homes rapidly deteriorate, Arndt, East Side, Detroit, 2009, 2011 & 2013

Next post more of those grand decay photos you associate with Detroit.

Detroit - now and then

I've spoken before about posts combining aspects that interest me, and WebUrbanist has produced a 'now-and-then' with abandonment!

A second floor hallway

 Now & Then: hybrid images of a deserted school in Detroit   In this post DetroitUrbex takes documentation to new depths (and heights) in this series of collages that show historical use and present conditions in abandoned structures through the lens of students and teachers overlaid with the haunting shots of an urban explorer.

Cass Technical High School was founded in 1907, and a grand building built in 1919. A fire in 2007 led to its demolition in 2011. School continues in an additional facility erected in 2004.

Check out the serious warping of the basketball floor in the gym, due to moisture damage.

DetroitUrbex has a whole site on exploring and understanding the city of Detroit, with images, interactive 3D models, even tours.

The library's decline from the 90s

 

One of my favourite buildings

In terms of the grandiose abandoned buildings, Detroit's Michigan Central Station is up there. It's amazing that I did my first post on it Abandoned in America nearly 2 years ago - December 28 2007. Recently Opacity added this page on the MCS with a video of the station just before it was abandoned.

At World's End

At World’s End: 13 More Post-Apocalyptic Visions, another post from WebUrbanist.
Our small blue planet – and everything on it – is destined to be fried to a crisp by an expanding sun some 5 billion years hence. Will anyone be around to observe the final sunset, or will society and civilization be snuffed out long before? Here are 13 more visions of what a post-apocalyptic world might be like.
I've chosen just a few of the 13, which have some significance to me.

Mad To The Max

From Australia it came, and things would never be the same. Mad Max, released in 1979, was the inspiration of many post-apocalyptic films to come. I was at one of the Mad Max locations at the Mundi Mundi Plains just a few weeks ago.

Apocalypso music
An early sci-fi blockbuster is The War Of The Worlds in which invaders from Mars nearly triumph over humanity, only to be defeated by humble bacteria. One of the best treatments of Wells’ masterpiece is Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, issued as a double LP record in 1978 accompanied by bleak artwork by Peter Goodfellow, Geoff Taylor and Michael Trim. I've the LP version and just organised to have it digitised the day before yesterday - will still keep the LP and artwork though.

Silent Spring In Siberia
Some say the world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper… a slow slump into decay and decomposition. Witness the process in action by visiting the abandoned Russian city of Kadykchan. A Siberian tin-mining town that boasted a population of 5,794 as recently as 1989, Kadykchan has less than 300 inhabitants today.
This view of Kadykchan in its prime, taken from – seriously – the city’s official website.

 Panic in Detroit

It’s not only in Russia that parts of our modern world are slipping away into chaos and catastrophe – it’s happening in the city I've covered a number of times Detroit, Michigan building the American dream.

Still in Detroit

People have been calling Detroit "the motor city" or "Motown" for years, as along with Henry Ford most car companies were based there - Ford, Studebaker Packard Motors, Fisher Body Plant, Uniroyal Tire Plant, Chrysler's Dodge Main complex, & General Motors Cadillac Plant. Now after its heyday these buildings are abandoned, taken-over or demolished.

The remains of Henry Ford's Model T Automobile Plant. Built in 1909, it once produced 1000 "Tin Lizzies" a day. In its last days of vehicle manufacturing, it produced Ford tractors. It ceased production in the 1970's, and is now a shopping mall.

The immensity of the Packard Motors ruin site defies photography. This panoramic image shows only about twenty per cent of the site, from across one of the huge parking lots that was once filled by cars of its employees. Partially torn down in 2000, a law suit has held up its full demolition.

It wasn't just the manufacturing industry that suffered in Detroit.

The lavish Michigan Theater, capable of seating 4050 people. The demise of this once mighty movie theater arose, in large part, from its inability to compete with the newly emerging suburban movie theaters and their acres of free parking. So now its auditorium is itself a carpark.

Even the humble library building succumb...

The Magnus Butzel Branch Library (demolished May 1998) serviced a bygone neighbourhood in an area of Detroit known as Poletown after the Polish immigrants who populated it and supplied the labour for the Dodge company.

The collapsing six story section of the J. L. Hudson Department store during its 1998 implosion.

These photos and more at http://www.detroityes.com/news/071014/601pics/101.htm

Abandoned in America

From factories and prisons to offices complexes and hospitals, there are amazing abandonments all over the world; elegant, impressive derelict structures located in the heart of major cities that are decades or even centuries old.

Detroit’s Michigan Central Station

An example of U.S. urban decay is Detroit's abandoned train station, the Michigan Central Station. Most of the interior has fallen victim to 'urban miners' who break in to steal any stone accents, wire and even copper tubing and bricks to sell as scrap. Photos are from SeeDetroit.com

The station was opened in 1913 and closed in 1988. Its future now remains uncertain.

The building has to be at least 17-18 stories high. Its architectural grandeur is still evident (at least in the photo above) the masonry work on the eaves, columns and balustrades.

The interior is massively proportioned, especially here with its high vaulted ceilings, columns and arches. For an idea of size - there's a distant doorway in the centre of the shot. Apparently the upper floors were never used.