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

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.