WOW, I absolutely LOVE the HDR treatment you've given these photos...they are spectacular!
Those are awesomely beautiful photographs, and a moving post.
(I, too, once broke into an old tunerculosis asylum.)
I wonder if the sadness we feel when we look at a decaying abandoned building has something to do with our inability to face our eventual societal destruction and demise. We can look at the coliseum in Rome and see it as history, but when we are faced with the immediacy of the decay in Detroit, it seems all too near. Great post and as always, I love your photos.
This is just far too weird...is it possible that I know two people who fell out of a jeep behind the Budweiser plant, or was I someplace where you told that story, maybe ten years ago? Some mutual friend's back porch? Either that or I am suffering from the worst case of de je vu ever.
The pictures of the book depository are beautiful. There's something almost organic about the chaos and wreckage, like some force of nature is responsible.
i'm surprised camilo jose vergara hasn't added detroit to his invincible cities project yet.
there's nothing worse than nostalgia or the fetishization of ruins, especially from the privileged point of view. yet it has fueled much of my discipline's work. photography can be such a seductive medium. the question is, what do we do with these images? do they galvanize people towards action? probably not. you're right, it's a human tragedy, and an easily ignored one, at that.
Those rooms look like they were inundated by a flood of books instead of water. Kind of like a mangrove swamp.
There's something about these kind of post-Apocalyptic images that is so compelling. I'm thinking of Logan's Run here...what the manmade world might look like if we stopped maintaining it.
I think people are saddened by all the waste, perhaps seeing a metaphor for all that we are throwing away with our current way of educating our children.
vergara has flown into detroit many times over the years for his little photography and urban exploration trips. while well-intentioned, his idealistic (and academic) suggestions have come across pretty ridiculous (wall off the central business district as an american acropolis! turn the michigan central station into a medieval-style monastery!). I am interested in the way he seems to encourage valuing ruins as ruins. I think there is something worthwhile there (I was a classics major, after all). I think if ruins can survive within vibrant cities elsewhere in the world, there is some hope for the same in detroit.
I think what almost everyone can agree on, whether they see buildings like these as sad or beautiful, or both, is that we should try to do whatever we can to keep them from being torn down.
God, that was poignant, Dutch. And the photos, perfect.
The sadness for me stems from being faced with so much unused space. Particularly in the case of the apartment buildings and hotels that you've photographed, it seems like such a sad, sad waste that there are residential buildings that already exist and there are still people living in the streets.
I know it's not that simple to solve the homeless' problems - just throw a roof over their heads - but it's just stunning that enormous buildings built for residential purposes just sit there empty, you know?
Are these photos of the book depository available as prints for purchase (please say yes!)
I think the sense of sadness I feel when I see photos like this is rooted in the feeling that we're just letting these beautiful structures rot while we keep building ugly crap to replace it. Yes, decay can be beautiful, as your photos often demonstrate. Can't something be beautiful and sad at the same time?
Your comments about Detroit make me wonder about the attitude of the people who live there. Do the people you encounter have much hope for the future of the city?
For me it's not so much sadness as frustration, waste, loss of potential. Same as the dead houses here, though - I can't stand to see them torn down, because every one is a story lost. Part of our cultural landscape that deserves to be honoured, remembered.
Gorgeous photographs.
If I get up and out of my own myopic and nostalgic viewpoint for long enough, I can see how things evolve, devolve, grow and change. I strongly appreciate things of the past for their beauty and craftsmanship, especially when what we see a lot of now is cheap tilt-wall crap being built. I don't know what drives that evolution from artistry and craftsmanship in the creation of a structure, but there isn't that much of it left anymore to view. I think that part is sad. However, the process by which things ebb and flow in nature... I can see that as just what it is, without some value judgment on it. The older I get, the harder it is to live just in the present and accept what I see at face value. I tend to spend more time locked in memory of the past, not wanting to let go of things from "my day", forgetting sometimes that as long as I am alive, this is my day, and I own it just as much as the young kids typically assigned ownership of it.
Nice shots.
This post reminds me of a book I just started, called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, about what might happen to the planet if people suddenly disappeared. It's as if the process has already begun in those buildings.
for awhile now i've been wondering about the whole detroit as urban-prairie- i just can't wrap my mind around this.
mostly because here in outer nyc every developer with a pulse and financing has been snatching up any type of property and throwing up whatever garbage- residential and commercial- they can and filling empty spaces with crap. our city council can hardly keep up with the zoning laws they have to modify to control it- it's gotten pretty bad, for those nostalgic saps like me that remember when houses had trees around them. crazy.
but when i look at your shots of abandoned houses and buildings it's so hard for me to imagine what that could be like here. someday i hope you can tell us a little more about how it all happened and what you think it means for the future of detroit. fantastic use of the lens, btw. your eye is getting better and better.
Through your pictures of Detroit's ruins, I have become interested in the city's history and discovering what the hell happened. White flight? The death of American manufacturing? What? Why? You have probably brought Detroit and its story to many people that would have never given it a second glance.
I saw similar ruins (though not of as great scale as the Detroit depository) when I was in Siberia. We went from town to town, north of Magadan, and came across abandoned mining towns. Usually, when the mine closed, no one had anything to themselves to the town except for their families, who were usually all miners. Towns of hundreds and thousands of people would all just pack up and leave.
I don't know if there is any kind of rule to discovering abandoned, falling apart buildings, in the sense that you shouldn't take any of it away. In Russia, though, I totally snagged some 80s and early 90s-era Commie propaganda and some nifty childrens' books. At least the Soviets believed in evolution and taught their grade schoolers as such...something we could learn from the godless heathens, I'm afraid.
I mostly feel curious how the 'first world' can still be so many different places. In The Netherlands grand buildings like the Detroit ones you've shown us are either immaculately renovated, or were demolished right after abandonment/fires etc.
That's why I find your pictures amazing: your life, your family is not that different from a 'regular' white family in Amsterdam, but your surroundings are alienating and therefore fascinating, to me.
Fantastic photos, fantastic post.
Jules
House of Jules
I've commented before on how much I like these photos. I echo the thought above about you bringing Detroit to so many of us who would have otherwise never known about the city, let alone its beauty. I work with a guy from Detroit (here in TX)and asked him about some of things you write about (ex: Heidelberg Project) and he had no clue what I was talking about.
The trees growing out of books moves me in such a strange way.
Loss and rebirth all in one.
Thanks for documenting this Jim, I for one have really enjoyed it.
Not sure if you've ever caught the HBO series "The Wire", but I think you would enjoy it if you aren't already familiar. It's set in Baltimore, which is also truly the main character in the show. It really exposes this decaying city, the layers of societal failure taking place within it and the devastating effects these societal failures have on individuals.
This is an incredible post.
It also awakened a memory of one of the local papers, back when they actually fulfilled their watchdog role instead of reprinting wire copy, writing about all the wasted supplies in that book depository. A district that has been broke for years wasting that kind of money is just obscene. I know Detroit Public Schools teachers and they are good people doing an impossible job. And the schools are just so bad and so incredibly mismanaged that we as residents of the city just bend over and take it --there is no hope, literally no hope, that the schools will ever improve and we are at the third or fourth generation of kids that are just wasted potential. I know some of these kids, and thanks to good parents and supportive environments they end up doing OK. But how much better could they do if they were given the education they deserve? Or even one that reaches the level of adequacy? I am out of ideas. It was bad when I was a kid, and it's worse now--while the opposite is true of the city as a whole the schools just keep getting worse. Unlike many Detroiters I was in favor of the state takeover, because despite the ugly overtones of racism the state could not possibly have done a worse job than the people Detroiters keep electing. And now that we have our board back, I have been proven right.
A lot of the people like us, young families who moved into the city for all the right reasons, finally give up when school time rolls around for our kids. If we leave, that will be why.
I so enjoy your words.
Like pnuts mama said about NYC, the Washington DC suburbs are growing like crazy. I cannot imagine the empty buildings you describe or present in pictures. In DC, 8 people will pay insane amounts of rent to live in a 4 bedroom townhouse, old buildings are filled with cubicles with people and computers packed in, and the suburbs are losing trees in favor or houses, townhouses and condos filling in every patch of grass. Baltimore 45 minutes away is very different, as Suki points out. And I'm fascinated as to how cities get to be where they are.
As for the ruins in Rome... I think they are simply so far removed from what we live in today. Both because the fall of the Rome Empire is so historical a thing (as Tamara said), and because the ruins don't look like places we live and use today. They are columns without roofs or stadiums without floors. Even if the ones that do have floors and roofs don't really look like the type of structures we have these days, which makes them simply history. Not like something that was just used and left abandoned only years ago. If that makes sense.
Thanks for another great post and beautiful pictures!
a lot of the ruins you see on vacation in europe are frauds---vertical-rising structures were often rebuilt by archaeologists from rubble found on the sites (such as olympia, mycenae, delphi). What I think is more interesting in places like rome is seeing the way classical building elements were incorporated into later structures.
another strange thing in europe are all the fake ruins that wealthy eighteenth and nineteenth century landowners built on the grounds of their estates. in places where there were no greek or roman settlements to begin with you find greek and roman "ruins" built as ruins a few hundred years ago.
detroit's ruins may only be a few decades old, but they are all too real.
I get that sadness from the pictures of abandoned buildings, and I think it is because it feels like an abandonded building is so often an abandoned hope. So many hands went into building these old, beautiful buildings, so many hours of careful carving to make the columns, days of someone's life concentrated on this one structure - and now it is rotting, the people who built it probably dead, the whole thing forgotten by most of the world. To me it's like a rejection of something, people's labors and histories, all the things that happened in that building being negated somehow by the rot and the rain and the damp.
Near my house there is an abandonded mental hospital, a huge sprawling campus of buildings that was closed in the mid-90s. It is architecturally just beautiful - so many careful, gorgeous details, the Gothic shapes of the roofs, the delicate inlay of the fireplace in the main building. Underground there is a bowling alley, a theater... it was a whole world within itself. Every time I go there I am struck not only by how wasteful it feels to let something so lovely go into the ground, but also by how amazing it is to watch the trees overtake it and turn it into a sort of modern forest of walls and undergrowth, and most of all by what must have happened there, by all the lives lived out in its walls... The building for the criminally insane is especially haunting to me, not because it is particularly lovely, but because I have an overactive imagination and I can feel malevolance in its very walls.
I think that is a huge part of why people feel sad about abandonded buildings - they represent so much to us, they are about so much more than bricks and mortar and paint.
I love these posts mainly because of the comments and commentors. I'm an Arch student at IIT and I hail from Livonia and my Dream has been to rejuvinate Detroit ever since I was 12 and taking classes as Second City (when it was still in the D.) I remember the drive, throught the dead downtown and barren neighborhoods, my Mom saw dead, and I guess I just saw opportunity. I have a whole wall in my apt filled with maps, pictures, drawings, projects and ideas on how to rejuvinate the city. I was there over Thanksgiving Break to see the city, as I do on every break, and it never fails to fill me with hope.
No sadness for me in the ruins of Detroit. Just a sense of wildness- freedom - hope. I get a real sense of connection to the past and future.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun".
Brilliant photos, just beautifully composed. But while most "urban decay" photosets, like yours of Detroit or the many NYC High Line excursions, give me a vague sense of the passage of time, these made me literally nauseated -- the waste! All those kids! Uggghhhhhh...
I grew up in the middle of the 'Sopranos' opening credits -- the rusty Superfund ghetto-burbs of north Jersey. I've seen many a shuttered industrial site, my grandfather and great uncles worked for years at Bethlehem Steel...so maybe that's inured me to this "sadness" people talk about. The economy tanks, the plant shuts down, the hulk rots...I don't kow, I see it as wasteful in only a generalized, "wages of capitalism" kind of way.
But a *school district* just "leaving town" this way?! Not a commercial enterprise, but an essential part of the public trust...I just can't believe it. And again, I have seen a lot of bureaucratic waste and nepotism and scandal (New Jersey, people!). I guess one could find an equivalent dollar value of wasted materials in any active system, but seeing it all just literally piled up there, forgotten...it's too much.
I'm a semi-employed lawyer, about to leave the profession for good and apply to the Mass. rapid-licensure teacher training program. I love the classroom and working with middle-schoolers (I know!), and I've finally come to terms (I think) with dumping my JD and doing what feels right. I am the product of public education and I am happy to trade the corporate cubicle for a "high need" urban classroom. And these pictures shake me...it's not just crime, poverty, language barriers, racism, standardized tests and text messaging I'm up against (I'm going to teach English, ha ha), it's this monumental indifference? God help me.
Sorry to go on and on...keep it coming, this is why I love this blog. 
I may well have first learned of these photos of graffiti at the Chernobyl site reading this blog, and no doubt you and many of your readers have already seen them, but here is a link: http://26-04-1986.com/
Your post reminded me of these images; the similarities and distinctions between these scenes of abandonment are interesting to me.
These pictures remind me of your picture of the old theater/parking garage in Detroit. I am a grad. student in urban planning and I ended up writing a paper on the history of movie theaters in the US based on your photo. This set of photos also inspires me and makes me so curious about the history of cities. What possibly could have happened to lead to the waste you show in the pictures? I am sure there is a story there and I would love to find out more about it.
Decayed old buildings seem defiant to me. Almost like crumbly old men who shake their sticks at the "kids today."
Great shots.
The thing that always concerns me about my own decay aesthetic is the question of ethics. After spending time in New Orleans this summer, I blogged about/around this issue at length:
"I love stuff that looks old and busted. I like shabbiness and semi-seediness; peeling paint makes me giddy. I love non-uniformity and jerry-rigged repairs and DIY signs. But all of this is beginning to strike me now as an aesthetic that's hopelessly bourgeois and rooted in privilege. The crumbling house facades that I find so quaint limn the limits of someone else's existence. To me, they provide a fleeting moment of aesthetic pleasure; to the people whose lives are enclosed in those walls, they're an inescapable fact of socioeconomic disadvantage."
To my mind, though, your approach to abandoned Detroit always seems to be appropriately reverent and solemn and grave, not cheap or superficial. If you're mindful of the thorny problem of representing decay, that precludes the possibility of careless exploitation, doesn't it? Anyway, for what it's worth, this was an interesting and thought-provoking post, and I'm a big fan of the photos you bring back from your expeditions.
My husband looked over my shoulder as I was reading this post, and he said "What the hell did he take pictues of? Armageddon?"
I love the photographs and I relate with your ideas but, with all due respect, I think this post should have been labeled as Sentimental.
I have trouble feeling sadness in the same way most people reference it when it comes to ruins. I think awe and respect are better labels for what I feel when I look at some of your photos of Detriot, with a heavy dose of morbid curiosity thrown in as well. I think the stories behind the photographs really color the perceptions of people who view them here. I never knew much about Detroit when I stumbled across your blog. I find that I'm more or less taken with the beautiful and slow decay you're capturing on film. The stories you tell, while sad and fascinating, are just interesting background on a history that is shaped by what we're seeing in your photographs.
While growing up in rural central Pennsylvania, I lived right down the road from a farmhouse dating from the 1880s that was completely abandoned in the 1930s, furniture and farm equipment left to rot where they stood. The owner, who was more or less a hermit, had died with no relatives to take over his estate. As a child I used to walk right into the place and sit at the head of the dining room table which still had four place settings on it (odd because the guy lived alone from what I could tell). I'd imagine the past life spent there and think about what time and the elements would eventually do to the place.
My dad used to come with me sometimes and marvel at the construction of the place, talking about how things weren't constructed like this anymore and why it was a damn shame that it was being left to rot instead of being renovated or the structures razed and stripped of their quality materials. I remember taking offense to the prospect of someone eventually discovering this place and tearing it down. My gut feeling about it was that nothing about it should be disturbed, not even the place settings on the table, because it represented a history in the purest way possible.
Right after I left home for college someone ended up buying the farm and restoring it. I've more or less made peace with my own version of sadness... losing my childhood ruin-in-the-making and wishing I could have at least photographed the place the way I'd like to remember it, decrepit and totally undisturbed.
Kudos to this thought-provoking, difficult post. Like many of your readers, I have simply been enjoying the strange beauty of your urban decay pictures without thinking about what they signify.
I'm still stymied about that, but I do have a theory about why the places and the images are beautiful. I think it's (at least partly) because the human eye doesn't want to look at clean rectilinear shapes all the time. I live and work in NYC and when I've been in town too long I can feel my eyes hungering for variegated colors and textures, random patterns and fractals.
Of course, nature pictures have those qualities, but the urban decay images have the added benefit of a certain "magic eye" factor--you're looking at this textured, almost random image (which is relaxing), but you're seeing signifiers of human existence (which is stimulating).
just read the Cormac McCarthy book "The Road." Can almost see the post apocolyptic survivors marauding through these images. Terrifying and beautiful.
There's something about those cavernous photos that remind Bossy of a Colonoscopy.
FYI, the amazing YMCA downtown, where my mother works out (and where I do too when I'm in town) has a beuatiful view out the windows of the level with all the treadmills and other cardio machines. From that vantage point, it looks like a lovely, vibrant city! And the People Mover even comes by frequently. (Who rides the People Mover? It is always a mystery to me. But there it is, going by multiple times during my cardio workout.)
Detroit really has some gorgeous old buildings. If only a completely new administration could be brought in to that city to bring it up to its potential....
Taken by themselves, abandoned, run-down buildings don't make me sad, it's the lost opportunities and waste they represent that really get me. All those books gone to waste, all that beautiful architecture ignored in the face of 'progress'--THAT is what makes me shake my head in disbelief.
Thanks for risking your neck to take these shots (personally, I'd be afraid to fall through the floor at the book depository).
amazing stuff, dutch.
i have some great photos of the ruins of Detroit from when i lived around Tigers Stadium back in the early 90s. burned-out and abandoned homes, piles of charred books from some long ago fire... there's something eerily poetic about Detroit's desolation i admit, though i'm normally hesitant to elevate decay and entropy resulting from neglect to art.
thanks for the great pictures.
I always feel that 'sadness' when I see nice architecture neglected and in ruins. I feel actual sadness for the building. I think it's because I tend to anthropomorphasize too much. But good architecture has character and a spirit and when it's neglect that character and spirit are neglected along with it. I actually had a hard time looking at the close-up pictures of the unused workbooks, knowing how they could have helped children to learn and grow.
But I have to say that I'm very compelled by what you've written and by your pictures. I want to come to Detroit and see for myself.
Having lived in Detroit for many years, I often wandered through the Central train station and have been to the book depository too. It still remains, to me, a disturbing state of what the city has become. Despite the attempt at revitilization, most of my friends & family tell me of the unnerving sense of desperation in the city. Between the downward spiral of Detroit's economy and the continual increase in violent crime, I find it rewarding that you are able to see some of the beauty among the decay.
You should check out the Mitten Movie Project / InZero. They are making some great movies by utilizing the ruins of Detroit to their full advantage.
Wow oh wow. I've never been to Detroit, but I've seen the ruins on a much smaller scale here in the Seattle area. I have to agree with one of the other posters that the sadness comes from the loss of hope. The loss of hope for our kids to learn, to thrive. It's such a strong example of the indifference towards the children, their education, and their overall futures. It's a sad society we live in.
I have to agree with you on the beauty. There are definitely those who can see the ruins and decay as simply beautiful and transcendent without the sadness. Just commenting to say that I am also one of those people.
It's the same to me as listening to music like Califone or Mogwai... the bits of static and bursts or build-ups of noise are just as beautiful as the melodies, and together, they're spectacular.
Drinking when pregnant?
Hey SB.. Dutch is a guy!!! ergo not pregnant!
"And what is it that draws us to ruination? Why do some of us find it so compelling?"
Hey man, it's all about death. So, I don't think we can remove the melancholy from it just like we can't take out that whole 'awe' thing from looking at the stars.
Well, we can try. But it's hard.
Why arent you writing novels? Seriously.
I know you're a busy SAHD with another bundle of joy on the way but i hope you've at least considered it because your writing? Amazing.
If your fictionalized Detroit adolescence was written up into a novel i would be in heaven.
I'd pay to read your extended writing even if it was a self published book. I'm sure i'm not the only one either.
This blog just makes me want to read more, more, more.
I think you underestimate the emotion many people attach to buildings. They have a life to many of us.
Remember the book The Little House? http://tinyurl.com/285859
It's one of my favorites and I felt the house's pain when the family left and it was alone and empty and crowded in the city. Then the little house is taken to the country and a family moves in and takes care of it and it's filled with love again and this makes the house happy.
I like to think of buildings in this way. When I see the signs declaring restoration projects in Brush Park, I can almost feel the houses trying to hold their heads a little higher.
Superblondegirl said and I agree.
"I get that sadness from the pictures of abandoned buildings, and I think it is because it feels like an abandonded building is so often an abandoned hope."
This is why your pictures of Detroit's ruins make me sad. It brings to mind the racism that started it's downward spiral. It brings to mind all the mismanagement of the city's possibility. It brings to mind what my great grandparents saw when they arrived here and how far it's fallen from what it was.
I know you love the city exactly as it is, but I do not. I love things about Detroit but I do not love that buildings like these are unloved enough to be left to rot. I do not love that homes where families were raised are burned out wrecks.
This makes me sad.
These ruins are stunning to look at. But it reminds me of a war zone and in a lot of ways it was. It still is.
the villages on the south east coast of Newfoundland, where my ancestors lived and fished and died since the 1700s were forcibly "resettled" in the 50s and 60s after the Canadian government took over. the subsistence lifestyle which my people had practiced successfully for generations was deemed "backwards," and people were moved out to more central locations.
my dad, a playwright and poet, was haunted by the abandoned buildings and gravestones of his forebearers, and devoted much of his work to giving them a voice.
he took me there once, when I was about twelve years old. it was an extraordinary thing to walk through the ruins of my great-grandfathers house, the graveyard hidden in the forest, the husk of the church in which my grandparents were married, and for which I was named.
There are dozens of resettled communities around the coastline of the island. They are singularly sad and holy places. I never thought about how that would translate to an urban setting. Until now.
We have nothing as powerful as this in Australia that i know of but i have taken many photos of an abandoned brick works factory. If you are interested email me and i can point you to them. I love your photos.
I am moved to comment on this... I looked at your beautiful photographs and felt a gust of sadness, or something like it. And am not sure why, either. I don't really have a strong opinion about the decay of buildings, even beautiful ones. I think we're orchestrating our own demise, and it is fascinating (among other things) to watch the stages of decline. I'm thinkiing the sadness is an automatic reaction to loss, even if it is loss of something not connected to us personally. The loss here is strange though because it is loss of something pretty abstract, like a system or a module in an institution. It tells about a place where people worked and filed and copied and had coffee, all part of a larger structure, and these photographs makes it clear that that structure and the people in it going about their business was all for naught. Then a short step to realizing that whatever we're doing now is just as transitory, no matter how important it is supposed to be or how solid it feels.
I love these photographs, and all the ones you post of decaying buildings, I don't care how cliche you say they are, they never cease to evoke some kind of emotion then thought.
I just wanted to comment on the great photos. You have a real talent with the camera. Great eye. May I ask what camera you use?
A few thoughts. I live in Columbus, and I can simultaneously identify with and feel grateful for the relative lack of abandoned buildings of which you speak. We bought a 100-year-old house in the ghetto (our first home!) and I have commented many times that only Americans love shabby-chic. Everything in our house is old and ugly and most of it is falling apart: all I want is some clean lines and some intact wood! Also, I have a secret love for broken-down old abandoned barns. They always seem so magical and sweet-smelling, with their dusty air of desertedness. So I can certainly see the beauty in ruins. Third, my honey spent some time in Detroit as a child, and at work we have a client who lives and works in Detroit. I have wanted to see it since I read Middlesex, but it sounds like there is no redemption for the city. I have to snort derisively at those Visit Detroit! commercials, but I wish that cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati could take care of their people and rehab their beautiful old buildings. It's always so senseless to see abandoned things and people.
I think the sadness for me comes from the amount of love and effort that went into constructing the building, and how that's all lost in time when it's allowed to decay. Both human energy and raw materials were consumed in vast quantities to build a concrete and steel structure like this, and it could house and serve people for centuries. Instead it served for a few decades and was discarded. My brothers and I now own an older building that we've rehabbed and it's architecture is so similar to the book depository that it's striking. But it's a thriving, vibrant building with over hundreds of people working in it daily and it's a source of pride and income for dozens. It was built in stages from the late 1800's on to 1927. There's no reason this book depository couldn't have had the same fate - well none other than the economic support and willpower required.
Side note, I'm from Columbus as well - and don't know the last commenter.
the sadness for me is to see the waste, the corruption (in every sense of the word), knowing that this is what is happening to children for whom those books were once allegedly bought.
Shrink-wrapped pallets of someone's promise never delivered in a building piled high with undelivered promises.
The fact the photos are also beautiful ... that adds something, I'm not sure what. A feeling I'm not keeping promises?
I see the dreams of a people left to rot and fall in upon themselves. These building are as close as we can come to a physical representation of despair.
When I see the photos of Central Station, I think of the potential for the building. While the days of trains as a primary source of transportation are long gone, there are still many uses for a beautiful and historic landmark such as that. I think about what could have happened to Union Terminal in my hometown of Cincinnati and I think of what could be for Central Station in Detroit. Instead of a building neglicted, it could become a museum celebrating Detroit the way Union Terminal has become a museum celebrating Cincinnati history. And yes, it it still a train station - much smaller than it once was, but still used for the purpose it was built for.
There are still many wonderful buildings in Cincinnati that are neglicted and it would be great to see them all restored to their former glory. It's too bad not all cities recognize the great architecture that they have.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.d...0604/1001/
RSS01
Suffer the children...
Detroit Public Schools Spent $1.5 Million on Trips, Catering
Funds Spent Despite Pledge to Save
January 20, 2008
By JENNIFER DIXON
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Despite promises to scale back travel and other nonessential expenses, Detroit Public Schools spent more than $1.5 million on hotels, travel and catered meals in the year that ended Sept. 1.
That’s comparable to what the district spent on food and travel during a similar time frame in 2005-2006. After the Free Press uncovered those expenses last February, school officials pledged they would rein in such spending. The expenses outraged parents and teachers in the cash-strapped district.
Asked about the latest bills, Board of Education member Jimmy Womack said it is “unfortunate the travel expenses increased when the board made it clear we needed to reduce our expenditures in that area, so much that we put restrictions on our own travel.”
Womack said the 11-member board could demand an investigation by majority vote.
While the new records show Detroit Public Schools paid hundreds of vendors, they don’t show why the money was spent, who spent it, or when. And with few exceptions, the district refused to provide the Free Press additional details on the expenditures.
The district would not explain, for example, why meetings were held at the Doubletree Hotel Dearborn at a cost of about $235,000.
The records also don’t indicate why the district spent $75,300 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, $13,628 at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark, and $9,036 at the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan.
Superintendent Connie Calloway declined to discuss the spending...
love these pictures. With yoou permissino, I would pick one of them in oprder to illustate the next issue of an Italian Literary Magazine.
You can find the project here: www.buran.it
It's a very interesting magazine, since we translate and publish novels (and pictures) from all over the world, only if they are on the web.
The aim of the project is to give dignity at the invisible writings that day afet day disappear in the web.
Let me know at flounder.whistl[at]libero.it
or on my flickr (flounder_whistl)
thank you
I applied for a job at a school in cleveland a few years back (i couldn't afford to work there unfortunately) and many of their textbooks were dated 70's to early 80s...they'd be glad to have those books even now...it hurts to see them rotting away
Wow! Incredible! Good HDR, and i love that prospectives with all this choas of book on the floor! Amazing place! Thank you for this stuff!
you asked how it felt to see the photos so...
i have never been to detroit.
your photos are other-worldly. shocking and frightening. interesting and peaceful. have you ever seen the fan tracery ceiling at kings college? somehow the ground floor of the book depository reminds me of that, perhaps the color of the cement and the lighting in that photograph.
My reaction seeing these (and similar sites like DetroitYES) goes beyond "sadness." As in, it's more than just the sentiment aroused by seeing a once-grand building falling into ruins. For me, I can't help but think that nothing this good gets built anymore--the building that now serves the function of whatever abandoned structure we're looking at is doubtless some cheap-ass piece of junk, all pressboard and bean counting. To me, when I see something like the train station abandoned, I feel like the civilization that built it is gone. It was a good civilization and I miss it.
Amazing pics of the old book depository there! Its cool how the photographer's managed to bring out the awesome colours in the walls and books etc. I wonder if this place will ever be renovated?
Commenting by HaloScan
