Detroit City Is the Place to Be (39 page)

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For decades, a succession of city officials had struggled mightily to rebrand Detroit’s battered image. Their schemes had included casino gambling, an Eighties festival mall, new ballparks, hosting a Grand Prix, hosting a Super Bowl, even commissioning (this was Mayor Young, in 1984) Motown Records founder Berry Gordy (who had fled Detroit for Los Angeles in the early 1970s, taking the entire Motown operation with him) to write a theme song for the city modeled after Frank Sinatra’s “Theme from New York, New York,” which had been a hit a few years earlier. It being Detroit, a blacker member of the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr., was conscripted to handle the vocals, but sadly, Gordy’s song, “Hello, Detroit,” failed to burn up the charts. (Except in Belgium, where, inexplicably, it reached number one.)
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But now much of the attention being showered on Detroit from the trendiest quarters came in no small measure thanks to the city’s blight. Detroit’s brand had become authenticity, and a key component of this authenticity had to do with the way the city looked.

Would fixing the very real problems faced by Detroiters, I began to wonder, mean inevitably robbing Detroit of some part of its essential Detroitness?

This is not exactly a question of gentrification: when your city has seventy thousand abandoned buildings, it will not be gentrified anytime soon. Rather, it’s one of aesthetics. The Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert had been an active proponent of finding uses for the very buildings Vergara had suggested turning into a homegrown Acropolis, but most of the other big-money developers in Detroit (such as they were) had brought with them a suburban vision, made manifest in the dated mall architecture of the new Compuware Headquarters or the MotorCity Casino’s Reno
manqué
attempts at high roller gaudiness. The latter complex, seventeen stories tall, with green and purple and pink bands of neon slashing its girth, throbbed every night on the nonexistent skyline like an epic, failed art installation, maybe something by Donald Judd’s cousin from South Beach. The MotorCity Casino was owned by the Ilitch family, the local Little Caesars Pizza tycoons, who had also bought and beautifully restored downtown’s grand Fox Theatre—while, at the same time, leveling countless other historic buildings (like the old Motown Headquarters) to make more parking lots for their baseball and hockey arenas. (The Ilitches owned both the Tigers and the Red Wings.)

In Detroit, you can’t talk aesthetics without talking ruin porn, a term that had recently begun circulating in the city. Detroiters, understandably, could get quite touchy about the way descriptions and photographs of ruined buildings had become the favorite Midwestern souvenirs of visiting reporters.
Dateline: NBC
had devoted large portions of a particularly derided hour-long special on the city to sweeping aerial shots of ravaged neighborhoods. Even my own
Rolling Stone
story on the auto industry had opened with a two-page photo spread, the uppermost panel depicting an antique postcard image of Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1916 (identical rows of open-topped Model T Fords spread across the lot, the gold-tinted steering wheels looking like the raised shields of a brutally disciplined chariot army maintaining tight formation), while below, a row of junked, snow-covered cars foregrounded a present-day shot of the same plant from the same angle.

Ruin porn was generally assessed the same way as the other kind, with you-know-it-when-you-see-it subjectivity. Everyone seemed to agree that Camilo Vergara’s work was not ruin pornography, though he’d arguably been the Hefner of the genre. Likewise, the local artist Lowell Boileau, who, around the same time Vergara proposed his American Acropolis, began posting his own photographs on a website called the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, also received a pass, perhaps because he approached his subject from a native’s perspective, and with unabashed nostalgia. Photojournalists, on the other hand, were almost universally considered creeps pandering to a sticky-fingered Internet slide-show demographic. To some extent the critique had been just: as with stories about misbehaving teenage starlets, editorial love of Detroit came with obvious exploitative commercial reward: a link to a titillating shot of Detroit’s architectural dishabille could always be counted to rise to the top of your website’s “most emailed” lists, which was, of course, the bottom line.

At the same time, it wasn’t fair to automatically condemn all such photography. As often as portraits of the city’s ruins might be distorted and sensationalized, blanket condemnations felt equally disingenuous. Ignoring the blight altogether would have been reportorial malpractice akin to writing a travel piece about Malibu and failing to mention the Pacific Ocean.

Far more noxious, to my mind, than the commercial carpetbaggers were the hobbyists. One of the more fascinating Internet-age curiosities marking the rise of ruin-as-aesthetic-object were the number of websites dedicated to the so-called “urban explorer,” or “urbexer” for short. Urbexers snuck into abandoned urban structures (or shopping malls, or subway tunnels) and took photographs of what they found, the use of the term “explorer” being especially telling: like the gentlemen explorers of yore (Stanley and Fawcett and Livingstone, or their fictional counterparts Allan Quatermain and Indiana Jones), who braved the darker continents for untold riches, the urbexers tended to be white and (at least the ones I met) from relatively privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike their predecessors, though, the only treasures the urbexers hoped to bring back to civilization were high-res digital camera images to post on Flickr streams and anonymous message boards as proof of their spectacular stealth missions, often presented with startling incuriosity as to the human history of the places being explored, if not outright ghoulish glee.

One group of urbexers began calling themselves the Survival Crackas, after they discovered an old can of Civil Defense “Survival Crackers” in the ruins of the Packard plant; they posted videos of themselves smashing through abandoned housing complexes, theaters, even psychiatric hospitals and prisons, all set to aggressive heavy metal and hip-hop sound tracks. Another white urbexer in his twenties once regaled me with the story of the time he’d been startled by a homeless man passed out in a room of a long-vacant high-rise apartment. Only later, he noted coolly, did he think to wonder if the guy might have been dead.

For all of the local complaints about ruin porn, outsiders were not alone in their fascination. Among my circle of friends and acquaintances, Phil staged secret, multi-course gourmet meals, prepared by well-known chefs from local restaurants, in abandoned buildings like the old train station. John and his buddies played ice hockey on the frozen floors of decrepit factories, and occasionally watched Tigers games from the roofs of empty skyscrapers nearby. (Well, they listened to the games on the radio. From such a distance, the players, they said, looked like little moving dots.) Travis was hired to shoot suburban wedding photographs in the ruins of the Packard plant and a woman who had moved to Detroit from Brooklyn began to take nude photographs of herself in wrecked spaces (thrusting the concept of ruin porn to a less metaphorical level). The Cupcake Girls, a coed arts collective originally from Portland, or maybe it was San Francisco, arranged an installation of little cupcake statues in the window of a long-shuttered bakery in Upper Chene. A few days later, someone firebombed the place. People debated whether or not this was a coincidence.

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One afternoon, I tagged along on a tour of the Packard plant with Scott Hocking, an artist who had been exploring Detroit’s ruins for years, and who had been asked to show around a young visiting scholar from Denmark. The scholar had striking, pale-blue eyes and a bird’s face. Her thesis focused on creative ways the residents of cities like Detroit attempted to reclaim their postindustrial detritus. Scott, precisely the sort of person she had in mind, built wild installations in abandoned buildings, using only material found onsite.
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Scott had recently assembled a new piece in the Packard. We walked over there with Corine Vermeulen, the photographer who had taken me to the Zone, and Faina Lerman, a Latvian performance artist whose family had moved to Detroit in 1980. It was December, so we all wore puffy winter coats as we marched down the middle of the street, our boots crunching the surface of a deeply impacted layer of snow and ice. We eventually reached the train tracks that had once carried freight directly in and out of the sprawling complex. Scott made a joke about finding a dead body, a nod to the movie
Stand By Me
, but none of the foreign-born members of our party seemed to get the reference.

The factory, five stories, stretching across two sides of a major road, seemed to have no end. Scott said you could get lost inside, and that even he hadn’t explored every corner. Huge chunks of wall had collapsed to reveal the gray innards of the place, and gangly, stoop-backed trees hugged the walls like ivy. For years after it ceased operation, the Packard had been used as a storage facility. Scott’s new installation made use of a bunch of antique television sets he’d discovered in one of the storage sheds, and had involved his painstakingly hauling the bulky frames to a partially collapsed section of the roof.

Now he led us through an open bay door. As if in preparation for a public burning, someone had unloaded a dense thicket of tree branches just inside the space, otherwise cavernous and empty. A section of brick had been removed from the base of a far wall, forming a tiny crawlspace. Cartoonish, illegible blue graffiti tagged the circumference of the hole. Crouching so low he practically knelt, Scott led us through the passageway. I wondered if the person who’d cut it had been thinking of Lewis Carroll, or maybe
Stalker
.

On the other side of the hole, we entered a stairwell. The stairs had no railing and each step had a coarse, treacherous dusting of rubble. We climbed past broken windows overlooking a snowy graveyard, eventually coming to the top floor, where a huge portion of the roof had collapsed, flooding that end of the space with afternoon light. The covered portion of the floor remained dim and shadowy, though, only enhancing the spotlit quality of Scott’s installation. In the place where the roof had caved, he had arranged his empty television boxes on top of a number of the exposed columns, which looked like the remains of some Doric temple. It was a spectacular vision. Some of the columns had toppled over; others remained stoically upright, surrounded by boulder-sized chunks of concrete and gnarled fingers of rebar.

We climbed up to the roof for a better look, Scott deriving a perverse pleasure from pointing out the places he suspected would soon collapse, explaining how various support pillars would buckle and the angles at which they might come to ground.
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Corine set up her tripod and took our picture as we peered over the edge. The roof was covered with snow, and in the photo, it looks as if we’re standing on a wintry plain, at the edge of a cliff, but in fact the building had been abandoned for so long that scrub grass and little trees had begun to grow on the roof and now poked up through the layer of whiteness. The post-apocalyptic grandeur of the scene momentarily silenced us, as if we were in the presence of something demanding respectful meditation—but what, exactly? If you manage to slip inside certain Detroit ruins, you are sometimes struck by their sacred aura; like cathedrals, they can feel beautiful and tragic at the same time, monuments to flawed human aspiration that, in an unintentional way, begin to approach the holy.

It was freezing. Our fingers went numb taking notes and pictures. Faina said if the place were turned into a museum, you could fix up a little space in the corner and put in a café, make that part warm. We could hear scrappers in another part of the plant, the clattering of their equipment. Back inside, we came across another section of the building where an industrious type had dragged a couple of car seats to a scenic overlook. We saw very fresh footprints in the snow near a window.

On one wall, someone had spray-painted a blue Krishna figure, over which someone else had written FUCK YOU BUDA.

As we were leaving, a carload of teenage boys pulled up, looking for a way in.

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Meditation on ruin is part of a long and noble tradition. In Renaissance Italy, antiquarians such as Leon Battista Alberti and Poggio Bracciolini began to promote the study and preservation of Roman ruins, which, to that point, had been unsystematically pushed aside as the city expanded. In some instances, great marble statues and magnificent columns were quarried and tossed into kilns, where they were burned to make lime.

There was a contemplative aspect to the antiquarians’ work—Bracciolini’s best-known essay on the topic was called “On Vicissitudes of Fortune”—but, according to Alberti’s biographer, Anthony Grafton, they also “made fun of those who became too depressed” about the ruins, like poor, over-sensitive Cyriac of Ancona, who “seemed to mourn the fall of Rome with excessive emotion,” and who was compared by Renaissance humanist Antonio Loschi to “the man at Milan who began to cry when he heard a
cantastorie
, or public storyteller, sing ‘of the death of Roland, who perished seven hundred years ago in battle,’ went home still in tears, and was still weeping inconsolably at dinnertime because ‘Roland, the only defender of the Christians, is dead.’”

My grandfather Alberti, who traced our family origins back to Florence, insisted that we were related to Leon Battista Alberti, also a Florentine, and one of the great polymaths of his day, the prototypical Renaissance Man: playwright, poet, architect, painter, mathematician, “father of Western cryptography,”
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astronomer, lawyer, and prize-winning horseman, so physically fit that he was able, according to his own possibly unreliable autobiography,
Vita Anonyma
, to leap over the head of another man from a standing position. Thanks to the efforts of protopreservationists like cousin Alberti, many later generations of painters and poets continued to meditate on the transitory nature of man’s greatest achievements (and their inherent folly) in the shadow of once-majestic edifices like the Baths of Caracalla, built in the early third century by the Roman emperor of the same name (well, nickname—a “caracalla” is thought to be an early form of hooded cloak that the emperor brought into fashion, which makes him sound like a rather likable tastemaker, though in fact he’s widely regarded as one of the worst emperors—Edward Gibbon describes him as “the common enemy of mankind,” despicable enough to be murdered by a member of his own entourage while stopping by the side of the road to urinate) and pretty much entirely destroyed by the sacking Ostrogoths approximately three hundred years later.