I've done my fair share of "abandoned place" exploration. There is a special draw the decayed, which can be traced all the way back to the enjoyment of Roman ruins in the 15th century, and then to the medieval castles, and then to Eastern ruins, and so on and so forth. Besides reflecting nostalgia for the (mis?)remembered, they also live on in the landscapes of post-apocalyptical science fiction (eg. 12 Monkeys and Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles").
A whole host of websites have sprung up to follow Detroit's decline, and blog entries as well. It is easy to access many of Detroit's ruins, because there are too many of them for the police to evict you. Hell, it might even draw tourism these days. I was just thinking about what a cool photo trip it would be. Once you're in, the more the decayed, the better the photo. Abandoned photography has been around for years. But Abandoned Detroit has drawn quite a bit of media attention.
This writer thinks that "ruin porn" is just a cop out for "lazy" journalists. I've seen the same accusations leveled at journalists that explore chatroulette. Journalists devouring journalists? But there is a real draw to these places. I think it reflects an anxiety about the decline of America. The last 50 years has seen the first thinning outs of heavily settled places. As Rust Belters fled to the Sun Belt, the Midwest changed from the America's future to the ghost in the attic. Remember Horace Smith's Oxymandius:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[courtesy of Wikipedia]
Michigan is the Babylon of Midwestern manufacturing; Detroit and Flint are its neighborhoods. Perhaps the push to save Detroit's Michigan Central Station is more than civic pride, but the desire to rejuvenate America. An attempt to cover up a symbolic blight that speaks less about neighborhoods and cities and more about our civilization. To deny the relics that could one day speak of the beginnings of America's decline. But does destroying the past to prevent its future recovery really insure anything besides complete erasure?
