The Fantastic Ruin of a Modern City

[mbarrick]

What happens when a modern city made wealthy in the first third of the 20th century falls into decay and ruin after nearly half its population moves away? Look at Detroit.

Here's a few of the more spectacular images from the site:


An abandoned, burnt-out mansion.


A railway platform designed for millions of passengers, serving none for decades.


A grand theatre at the base of a skyscraper, serving as a parking lot.

Comments

What a shame..what a waste

[kitsune-13.livejournal.com]

damn, it's too bad there's no abandoned mansions like that out here.
I'd live there in a second!! The house, I mean, not Detroit.
And the theatre base is amazing..just beautiful, but minus the cars. The exhaust must have ruined the designs on the ceiling..

what a shame/waste.

Re: What a shame..what a waste

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

> I'd live there in a second!! The house, I mean, not Detroit.

Exactly. You and half the people in Detroit.

Take a look through the site. There are whole neighbourhoods of abandoned mansions, apartment buildings that make the Banff pale in comparison sitting alone in fields where everything else has crumbled and been overgrown, 80-year old skyscrapers and hotels sitting empty... it's amazing. The city became rich off the automobile, and then everyone used them to move to the suburbs leaving the city to rot.

Re: What a shame..what a waste

[kitsune-13.livejournal.com]

I'll definetly peruse the site. Man, just think of all the homeless in the USA and these places sitting empty and neglected.
Cripes, they could use them for housing, for offices, hell..for anything.

I really don't understand the US...these buildings mark a great time in history. Don't these people give a damn about preservation of architecture?

Apparently not.

Still, what a waste.

I wonder if there was a way they could relocate the buildings? Or are they chain walled?

I'm curious.

Re: What a shame..what a waste

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

The buildings are mostly masonry and often enourmous. There is no practical way to move them. There is no money to preseve them. It's like Rome in the 5th century. In its heyday Detroit had about 2 million people, as did Rome in its ancient heyday. Now there is about a million people living in the city, as with Rome in the 5th century when a lot of people fled to safer places like Venice. Rome delcined further, bottoming out about about 100,000 people in the 9th century. How could the Forum - the very heart of the city - fall into disuse? How could the Coloseum be "mined" for stones to build houses? In Istanbul there is a large oval "roundabout" used by commuters in their cars - it's the track of the city's old hippodrome. There is a section of town inside the old wall made up of narrow streets and tiny shops and houses that share walls - the "streets" and "shops" are the old hallways and rooms of the palace of the Byzantine emperors with the old roof gone and new ones built over the individual rooms. How could the great cities of the Myans be left to rot in the jungle when there are still Myans? Each one is different in detail only - in every case it is the same thing that has come to plague Detroit: the foundation of the economy that brought people together in that place failed and the people left. But because falling into ruin is usually something that happened "them" a long time ago in some place far away and foreign to us it is bizarre and unsettling to see Modern, North American, and therefore familiar, things in ruin.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

what an amazing site...i knew detroit was messed, but not like that...it's amazing that such huge and beautiful old buildings can be empty...it's really hard for me to fathom...i think it's because downtown here is unique, like manhattan...it is the centre of town and the meeting place of the people...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've read plenty about urban decay, but I've never seen it presented like this. It's remarkable. It's also a testiment to the wisdom of our past (and even present) city councils that have made much maligned conscious efforts to make downtown undrivable and commuting a pain in the ass. It keeps the downtown alive. Manhattan was largely spared from this kind of urban decay both by geography, as you mention, and the fact that it grew up as a pedestrian city with good transit before the introduction of the car. It's more like European cities in that regard. Another aspect that saved New York City, and was mimiced by Toronto, was consolidation. Consolidating the outer bouroughs into the city allowed the suburban tax base to feed back to the city. Detroit didn't do this. Not thier fault, of course - no one saw urban sprawl coming and Detroit got it first.

Which is why Vancouver is wholly unique, though. In Vancouver the city planners were able to see what happened to cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and took conscious steps to prevent this from happening here, facilitated to a certain extent by the geography.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

on the other hand it would be cool and kind of creepy to explore some of those old buildings...the history would be amazing...although that parking garage makes me want to cry...one of my friends snooped around the very old brigham young university in provo, utah when they were down there...they did it at night and he said it was really creepy...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I'll have to find the sight again, I don't remember the city, but it is a bunch of college kid who started out exploring a derelict building at their university and then progressed to old factories, sewers, and all sorts of weird urban spaces. It's quite neat...

Found it.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

http://www.actionsquad.org/missions.html

And Vancouver copy-cats

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

http://www.wraiths.org/missions.htm

[pernod.livejournal.com]

you should put that last one in art_nouveau.
it's lovely.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

That's where I found this site.

[pernod.livejournal.com]

ha, ok. i'm an idiot.

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

what is it about urban decay that is so fascinating? it literally makes me drool... perhaps the juxtaposition of opulence and structure against destruction and poverty? "i like old, broken stuff" doesn't really define it. *ponders*

I don't know

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

But I have some guesses. I think one part of it is it makes the opulence more accessable. It's abandoned therefore no one will mind if you take a bit of it for yourself. I think that is a deeply rooted part of the human psyche - our most ancient ancestors weren't hunters, they were scavengers.

More consciously there is the awe at how anything so grand could just be given up and a part that rails against that - no matter how good and realistic the reasons are there is always a little bit that thinks, "I could fix that and people would use it again."

And then there is a conditioned part - the study of ancient ruins combined with the idea that somehow our civilization will be immune. It's shocking to see what "we" have built crumbled like bits of Rome or Byzantium. Plus there is the pop-culture influence of God-knows-how-many post-Apocalyptic movies and stories. We all watch and read those and identify with the heroes - to see the decay puts us in the story and calls up a touch of that heroism... "If I lived in a ruined world I could be like [Mad Max, Tank Girl, etc.]."

you may be on to something there...

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

perhaps the allure of urban decay stems from the combined awe of what human creativity can build, and the amazement that this same human drive could allow such creations to decay and die. we seem to spend a lot of time talking about how things were better "in that day" and these old buildings are testaments to that idea. and when the actual history of the building or site is not known or is hazy, we can write our own histories of the events and people that shaped these places, and our own stories of why they were abandoned, in some way making us part of the pseudo-imaginary "lives" of these old places...

Re: you may be on to something there...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that ability to feel a part of the ruin either by an imagined fiction or a factual history is a big part of their appeal. Look at all the stories people have spun around the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Roman Coloseum, and other places. When a ruin becomes a rallying point for a people the passion that can become attached to it is amazing, like with the Wailing Wall.

Ruins are full of mystery and possibility that spark all sort of imaginings. I can't get the idea of using these places in a movie out of my head.