Detroit Tour '08

Now, at the outset, I didn't believe that I'd include another's writing here, and yet the following story (and related content) is both poignant for the uninitiated and too nostalgic for those who've been there to just pass up on principle alone. It is a story of the decrepit cement-and-rebar playground of my teens and twenties, that city that must be honorary undead by now, good ol' Detroit, Michigan. It is a story that needs to be told.

***By Chris Radcliffe, in response to the entry, "Escape to Detroit".***

Two groups of white urban underground explorers ran into each other in the largest abandoned building complex in America and a fistfight broke out. The origin of the fight was an internet tiff from three years before. It involved the ethics of trashing these kinds of ruins. I stood there with my friends wondering if this was going to spread into a Donny brook. I've lost touch with how this must sound to most of you. To me, while ironically absurd, it was just another strange weekend. Nothing came of the fight, someone cried uncle, lesson learned. This all happened last Saturday night in the Packard manufacturing complex in Detroit.

I'd come to town expecting things like this. We had broken into a sixteen story department store downtown earlier in the day. I usually start at the top and work my way down. I'm interested in the architectural artifacts that get left behind when they seal what's become a sarcophagus. Old neon signs and the crest that every architect worth his salt would have had sculpted to cover the water tower at the peak of a building seem to recall the history that I'm standing in. Old Gothic train stations and the dead hulk of obsolete steam powered electrical plants are my favorites. Every major city has something like this but Detroit is the mother ship.

Detroit is not going to experience the urban renewal that seems to follow a sudden influx of artists. Its scale is too vast, the level of devastation too widespread. David Best, a well known west coast artist, built a temple to the American dream in northwest Detroit last year. I went in search of it on my last night in town. Now, in any other city it would be sitting in a major public square, but in Detroit it was swallowed up in one of the tens of thousands of vacant lots off any of the major roads leading into downtown. It had no context other than a let-them-eat-cake kind of feel. Even something monumental is dwarfed in that landscape.

There are two city blocks that make up The Heidelberg Project that begin to attempt working at this scale. The artist that started Heidelberg used whole building as his canvas, one completely covered with numbers in various fonts and sizes. The next house was painted with multicolored dots and another had stuffed animal toys nailed to every inch of trim work. These houses were still all occupied in the middle of a mostly empty neighborhood. Whether that was due to the identifiable nature of this distinct place among the ruins or because its been a cause celeb for so long and attracts bohemian sycophants I couldn't say, but there it was. I was inspired by the spirit more than the aesthetic. There was a building in another part of town that I saw glittering in the middle of a square mile of leveled city blocks. It was covered in broken mirrors glued to scavenged plywood that caught my eye the same way. It all looked like dead flowers on an enormous grave.

Detroit, like Chernobyl, won't be coming back anytime soon. If there are other uses for this kind of environment, maybe it time to seize that place. As a scene, all it takes is common purpose and specific gravity. The next thing you know, what do you get? That's the real question, what do you get. I had a coney at Lafayette's before I left. I sat with a bunch of cops that looked like they'd been under siege for a long time. I didn't get the feeling that they were going to roll over for a bunch of artists with good intentions. But there is a place that could start fresh, inside the Zug Island salt mines the are hundreds of miles of caverns. Maybe in Detroit the new canvas is right below your feet."

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