Vintage Travesty: Beware or this could be your City:

[Son_of_Atropos]

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850973,00.html

Those days will never come back...

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes...the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things."

 

[Foofoogal]

How very sad. I pray for Michigan a lot lately or the people anyway.
Those photos remind me of the song: "Kings and kingdoms shall all pass away. "

 

[anglophile]

This kind of thing is happening all over. Once its gone its gone.

 

[miss_elise]

Detroit is the city where an Australian Radio station was selling a house for $1 to listeners who wanted it...

seems there are quite a few other buildings they should be selling for similar tiny amounts

 

[Marc Chevalier]

I was born in Detroit. This breaks my heart.

.

 

[Atterbury Dodd]

Fills me with a deep sadness.... this kind of waste goes on all the time, all over. and yet they continue to build modern ugly buildings no-where near as good looking as the old ones--if they had only done the up-keep.

 

[J.J. Gittes]

You don't know what you have till its gone. I mean look at that station, its beautiful, if they have a station now, its probably modern and ugly. When its torn down, the city will complain that a historical building was lost and should've been saved. Happens all the time. Very sad how our past gets destroyed and forgotten.

 

[Foofoogal]

I am reading it is so bad that whole lots of homes are being bought up for as low as $1.00 each. Then the problem is the investors are just letting them sit and making further decay.
I don't know what the answer is but if any town with as much as one red light today they should make planning for future building. Not having dependence on one industry is also something to take into account.
I just moved to area where it is a free for all with little or no zoning. Trying to find where to live is interesting at best.

 

[Chas]

Has the Book-Cadillac Hotel been saved or destroyed yet?

 

[Lotta Little]

I'm also from the Detroit area, and I wish there had been a reason to stay there. You can see more tragic examples of its decline here: http://detroityes.com/home.htm

 

[carter]

This one of a Spanish Gothic theatre built in 1928 and unused since the 1970's is both poignant and disheartening.

 

[Son_of_Atropos]

Has the Book-Cadillac Hotel been saved or destroyed yet?

Book Cadilac was saved, they restored it and it is open for business.

 

[Sertsa]

I work in downtown Cleveland, and I'm seeing a similar decline.

The bizarre thing is that the scenes in that photo-essay seem post-apocalyptic, but there hasn't been an apocalypse. It makes me think of TS Eliot ... "Not with a bang, but a whimper."

 

[Marc Chevalier]

The Carlsbad caverns?


.

 

[Tophat Dan]

Detroit

I live about thirty minutes outside of Detroit and was downtown for a show not that long ago (Dropkick Murphys at the Filmore! Yeah!) and got miserably lost coming home. It is really, really creepy to drive down not a single street, but through a whole neighborhood and not see a single person or a light burning in any window.

Part of the problem is wealthy developers holding onto buildings and inexplicably doing *nothing* with them for decades, save put up more plywood and "no trespassing" signs". The longer the giant buildings are vacant, the further the urban blight spreads. I hate going to Detroit. It makes me so sad to see all those formerly great buildings just rotting away.

Top Hat Dan
Dan Peterson

 

[HarpPlayerGene]

I was born in Detroit. This breaks my heart.

.

So was I, and my father, his father and his father. I feel the same as you.

My dad had the pleasure of being in his twenties in the '30s. Man, what I'd give to be able to try that out. He told me a lot about how grand that city was. Detroit was referred to as "The Paris of the West". A real jewel - but with a fatal flaw.

If you try to name the single industry that drives New York, Chicago, Boston, etc., you can't do it. There may be varying opinions about the wealth and health of these examples but it's obvious they aren't burned out husks like Detroit. Unfortunately, Detroit was balanced entirely on the automotive industry. A boomtown in it's own way, since it was always only a matter of time before other places began to seriously compete with what was once for them essentially a monopoly. The city invested heavily in itself, its culture, entertainment, downtown retail district and so on. But as times changed this collapsed. The way it was set up, it had no other option.

 

[Son_of_Atropos]

How beautiful is this though.

even something beautiful can remain amongst the blight, quite the contrast, no?

 

["Skeet" McD]

Quomodo sedit sola civitas plena populo...

I'm also from the Detroit area, and I wish there had been a reason to stay there. You can see more tragic examples of its decline here: http://detroityes.com/home.htm

Well, I'm NOT from Detroit (although my wife is)...and have spent almost no time in the city, so there's really no direct emotional connection for me. But going through the images in the site referenced above was absolutely harrowing...and I mean that in the "hairs rising on the back of the neck/gooseflesh" sense, quite literally.

As a Catholic Christian about half-way through Lent, Jeremiah is much in mind these days, and it was impossible not to think "How doth the city sit solitary, that was so full of people!...[Detroit] remembered in the days of her affliction and of her miseries all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old...Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?"

On a different (but related) tack....as someone who DID live through the '60s, I find the long-standing love affair with that chaotic decade puzzling at best. Like any time, it brought good and bad, and as a time of change, in larger proportion; this is to be expected. But for everyone who loves the Motown songs (Hot times; summer in the city!)...I bet there's not one in a thousand who even knows that the same city burned itself down just a couple of years later. Two fruits from the same tree, sadly.

My wife, as a young child living with her grandparents on 7 Mile Road, grew up with her ear attached to a transistor radio listening to those songs....and also remembers her grandfather standing on his porch (where he had lived since the 1930s) with a shotgun. Ah! the '60s!

 

[Foofoogal]

Personal perspective is everything I have found in life Skeet.
Welcome to the FL.

 

[jac]

That's one hell of a slide show.
It's all about money, not pride anymore.
Incidentally, FFGal, too much and/or outdating zoning is no good either, I learned this the hard way.