Hilzoy, you're making me sad.

I happen to agree. It's horrifying. Even if you can't to relate to these structures as objects, the human devastation and dislocation that they represent are profound.

I appreciate this post.

That is really a touching story, and I can see his point. It is so sad to see how the greed of a few has again contributed to the misery of many. Since I live in Oregon and yes, I prefer local organic food, don't shop at Wal-mart, try to recycle and even buy pre-owned when possible. All that, doesn't mean I don't feel awful for those who are losing their jobs. (I also don't consider myself a yuppie)
There are many houses in foreclosure in our area. Two of the five elementary schools in our city have closed in the last few years.
Many are out of work and there are a lot of homeless in our relatively affluent city. Friends are losing income daily in their investments.

I have wondered for years though, how our world would be today, if a majority had listened years ago. Does it have to take disaster and total collapse of our economy to wake people up? Are the rumors true about inventions that would compete with oil based products, being suppressed? Or are they urban legends?

this school reminded me of my old grammar school in chicago. solid looking with lovely big windows. i rather have not read your post. i feel incredibly sad. it'll take me a few hours to shake this feeling. sigh......

Detroit is a tragic city. Go on over to flickr and search for Lee Plaza in Detroit. Once a grand residential building, it sits abandoned and wasting away. And then there's the skyscraper downtown that once housed mostly dental offices, that was apparently abandoned all at once.

Very scary stuff.

For more of this than you probably want to see, check out "The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit"

http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm

There are a lot of cool buildings, but it is sad.

Those of my Class prefer the photos of Royal Oak and Grosse Pointe.

I grew up in Detroit and went to an elementary school that could well be this very building. It was called the Brady Elementary, and it was at the corner of Joy Road (ironic!) and Lawton. IF youi know the name of the building pictured here, I'd love to know it.

Soory, as usual I didn't read the piece closely and so I missed the link. However, many schools were built on the same plan and in the smae architectural style (in the late 20's) and this school could have been mine.

I left Detroit for the last time in 1972, and returned briefly for a high school re-union (Samuel R Mumford High, class of '57) about 10 years ago. I drove past every house I ever lived in and was appalled by the deterioration. I fear that in a few decades (or less) Detroit may simply cease to be. The administration (and attitude it represtents) that stood by as New Orleans drowned seems perfectly willing to let another major city (it was once the 5th largest in the US) disintegrate slowly.

I would't be too harsh on the scavengers. Like the piranha, they are only trying to make a living.

I came to this subject via James Howard Kunstler, who writes bitter Jeremiads about America's architectural depredations. And I agree wholeheartedly with Hilzroy's sentiments about the magic of buildings. Compare this Detroit ruin with the kind of storage locker facilities that are today's "learning centers". It's not just that these are aesthetic crimes. They're crimes against the soul and our collective need for beauty. What does it say about our civilization's arc that we once built things of stunning beauty as a matter of course?

Cities need to do what we here in Indianapolis are doing with a inner-city blighted area - We are tearing down and building new stuctures similar to those in the neighborhood. They actually are rehabilitating salvagable real estate and bringing it up to community standards.
It is called Fall Creek Place and it is what I will describe as a urban showcase.

Sarge
Indianapolis

I was thinking Detroit from the start. I read somewhere recently that the median house price in Detroit proper is $4K. Can that possibly be??

The Road: the ultimate microcosm

Things fall apart.
The center cannot hold.

What you are looking at is the ultimate fate of humanity. It's what happens when creative destruction meets the hard facts of a meteor, global climate change, or the first empty burp of the sun a million years from now.

The moon and mars are barren wastelands...

There is not going to be any Star Trek. Einstein's speed limit confines all species to their local solar system. That's a good thing. If you designed a universe wouldn't you put a cork on humanity? I can't imagine letting bin Laden or Falwell out of the bottle. "The Prime Directive?" Please. Humans are basically brutes with a veneer of civilization. The prime directive has always been: Can I eat this? Can I make a buck off of it? Can I enslave it to do my bidding? Can I stick my pud in it?

"Scavengers" is a noble end for our noble species.
This is it. This is your future.

Do not think I am a pessimist.
I've painted an actually glorious universe.
The universe is filled with life and light and color. It will go on. And fail. And go on. And fail. This is Our Road.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

I was one of those guys who made things. I was a machinist for twenty-three years. There was a great deal of satisfaction in taking a piece of metal and making into a part of something that people would buy and use. Even more satisfaction in learning to do it well and efficiently. Toward the end, the work dried up. Shops closed their doors and those that stayed open were only paying one-half to two-thirds of the old wage (Around $24.00 per hour for a top man). I started at the bottom in IT and worked my way up again. I never enjoyed it as much as I did making things.

Well done, Hilzoy. Beautifully sad, like a good cry. I was moved.

You are absolutely right as to the tragedy of abandoned buildings especially homes. My wife and I are in the midst of restoring a home that we hope to eventually occupy (if we were to ever sell the one we are in now that has been on the market for 34 months.) As we strip away the layers of wall paper, take up the nasty shag carpeting and pry up the linoleum tiles that were glued to the hardwood floors, we can actually feel the structure heave a sigh of relief. We can feel its gratitude for the rejuvenation. If I could afford it, I would spend the rest of my life restoring homes to their original state even if I could sell them for no more then I had invested. Not all of us are called to greatness but we can all strive to improve the conditions around us including the built environment.

For a house, a block, or a community to come into being or to reverse its inevitable deterioration and be renewed, there need to be three elements present simultaneously: a reason for people to be there, a vision of future better things, and resources to bridge the gap between now and that vision. For Detroit and many such settings, these elements don't coincide. People do not have reason to be there without work and community; a vision of what the community was and what could be cannot exist without the participation of people; and the absence of either of the other two elements makes it futile to dedicate resources, even from the most magnanimous of sources such as federal bailouts and non-profit funding. So things slide back into the world described by Alan Weisman in "The World Without Us." Those that remain on the fringe of these wastelands are hardly equipped to seed new development; they're the ones that lacked the resources to leave. And the scavenger mentality that left the school building stripped of metal has left the community stripped of moral leadership (hence Detroit's corrupt mayors) and even its nation stripped of enlightened self-interest in favor of predator lending and socialism for the investor class who is devoted to stripping the remaining resources for what short term profit can be gained.

The potential for cure is best in those portions of our communities where two of the three elements for renewal are present; we can then perhaps underwrite the third. For places like Detroit, it may be time for the rebirth of the prairie.

Nice building. I taught in one. The rooms are designed so that a child's voice could be heard, and a teacher's fill the room. You can only imagine what they're like now, with a room full of kids used to making as much noise as possible at home so as not to be lost in the crowd.

I worked in a suburban school built the same time, but better kept-up and with better behaved kids, so I got a glimpse of what it must have been like in 1950.

One of the problems is Michigan's manner of supporting schools by property taxes, an odd trace of the old property requirement to vote. Your right to a public education is limited by the wealth of your area. After the white flight of the 60's, the Detroit infrastructure went to hell. A state built by the industrial strip from Detroit to Saginaw promptly turned its back on those same cities. Without the wealth generated by those cities, Michigan would look like its Upper Peninsula--a pretty, rural backwoods.

It's The Rustbelt now--but that Rustbelt pulled the pellagra belt into the 20th century, won a World War and powered the postwar boom. Then the Casino Economy came.

Or the rebirth of the forest.

Having walked the streets of West and East Berlin in '58, I never thought those scenes would be replicated in our country.

However, just throwing money at rebuilding, without the needed infusion of living wage and above living wage jobs will never work.

Hilzoy, if you appreciate old architecture and historic preservation, you need to add OldHouseWeb to your bookmarks.

In some parts of the country old department stores, office buildings, warehouses are being converted into condos and apartments. Imagine what a marvelous set of smallish apartments for retirees could be constructed inside old schools.

Like one of the posters above, I left Detroit in 1972. I have never lived in a more exciting, dynamic place than Detroit in the late 60s, and I have never met more interesting people. Like New Orleans, it was a mostly black city, and a city with fabulous music. But I saw trouble ahead for the city, because I was pretty sure the car companies would not build new plants there; and without jobs, the city was going to be scary. So I left. I've been back a couple of times in recent years. Yes, indeed, there are blocks and blocks of pretty much nothing, empty lots and a few boarded up houses. It's the only place I've ever been with boarded up skyscrapers. My s.o. got out of the car to take a photo of the Highland Park Library where we met -- boarded up and covered with graphiti now. A young African American woman was pushing a stroller down Woodward Avenue. She was the only other person in sight. Patrick said she appeared frightened of him. What was this white man doing here in the waste land she called home?

The Ruins of Detroit website is terrific, if you want your heart broken.

There is a historic preservation movement in this country, being fought by really dedicated people with little support, ranging from average home owners like my husband and I, to organized groups trying to revitalize old neighborhoods. But it's difficult. Many of our nation's architectural treasures are at extremely high risk or are falling down through 'demolition by neglect' as we write.
I went to grade school in an old building similar to the one above. It was a wonderful environment in which to learn. It even had a Works Project mural painted on canvas in the central hallway outside the principal's office, but it was 'modernized' in the late 60's. I'm not sure if the mural is still there, buried under the walls. Modern school architecture is soul-less--large, cold, corporate-looking boxes where we warehouse kids off at the edges of community life, or buried in the middle of impersonal commercial districts. How would education change for the better if we gave kids schools like the one above again, and reduced the numbers of kids per school? My mother's 1937 graduating class numbered about *20* students, and she new them all well. Why do we cram hundreds to thousands of kids in schools like some corporate headquarters and then expect them to feel like anything but nameless corporate employees?

The rain falls down on last years man,
An hour has gone by
And he has not moved his hand.
But everything will happen if he only gives the word;
The lovers will rise up
And the mountains touch the ground.
But the skylight is like skin for a drum Ill never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works of last years man.

Leonard Cohen

My personal obsession is old movie theatres. Not the old palaces (though they are wonderful when restored) but the neighborhood theatres and the small town theatres of the 20's through the 60's. These once popular communal gathering places now converted or abandoned (when not demolished) are an iconic symbol of something special lost in our lives. Will anyone ever be nostalgic for a dead multiplex?

Maine today is 90% forest, in 1870 it was about 70%, 20% of Maine forest was once cleared for farms. The wood lot behind my house consists of 5 abandoned farms, each with its own cellar hole and each with its own stone walls. Most were abandoned around 1850-1870, the last one in 1950. All that land cleared by hand, now forest.

I too feel a pang when I see a grand old structure in disrepair, and I anxiously eye the roof - because once the roof goes, restoration is unlikely if not impossible.

Our currently-ascendant economics tell us that waste is good, GDP growth is greater when we don't maintain anything but simply leave it to rot - if not actively destroy it - and build elsewhere, on a new green field. Yup, the locust analogy is very apt.

Then said economics further simplifies everything to one function, and charges you to spend the minimum to replicate that function. Because the money "saved" makes everybody "richer".

So instead of a hand-built school of fine materials, a plain structure of mass-produced materials is built. This is taken even farther by commerce and industry, who once built buildings of pride but now steel-framed, corrugated metal one-story worker warehouses are constructed.

Compare Wal-Mart to the grand department stores, heck even the small-town Main Street stores, of yesterday.

But everything has more than one function, and a beautiful structure, one that can be shared by the workforce or even better, the greater community, has value well beyond what happens inside. It creates a space we can share that isn't defined by making or spending money, a space shared by our parents and maybe their parents once.

I think the constant barrage of structural (buildings, shopping centers, and freeways) ugliness that us Americans are subjected to has coarsened us, driven us back into ourselves and out of community life. I think this is what drives Kunstler into unholy madness, even though he hardly comes across as a guy who would be fun to watch a free concert in the park with.

The penultimate expression of this was Fox News broadcasting "Shock And Awe". The people who that broadcast was targeted at were no longer capable of feeling the disgust that this ill-targeted destruction was being rained down upon a city which was part of an ancient civilization, that just happened to be temporarily ruled by a dickhead and some basic hoods.

Yes we did it before, to Dresden for instance, but that was after many years of a horror of a war that most of us cannot even imagine.

And they rebuilt Dresden at least in the spirit of how it was.... whilst the Tom Friedmanints among us in the present time were orgasmically visioning McDonalds and Home Depots rising from Bagdad's ashes.

Ugh.

Go to detroitblog.org for a more personal look at the ruins of Detroit and the people who live there. Besides photos of decaying buildings, you'll find profiles (often heartbreaking, sometimes uplifting) of the people still in Detroit, the businesses they run, and the way many of them are coping with life in the blighted communities in which they reside.

It's important to remember that the major looting was done by the white power structure over a period of decades. For example, with all the trillions of wealth generated and extracted from Detroit, no sustainable funding model for schools was ever developed or endowed.

For decades the white power structure used Detroit as a machine to influence the legislature, keep the workers in line, and suck money out of peoples pockets, money that flowed out of the city never to return. In the final act Detroit and many other cities were 'blockbusted' by the real estate and financial industries, who scared white people into selling their city homes for a fraction of their value and fleeing to the suburbs.

So when the black majority finally got the vote and won the power, they discovered they had won nothing. The residential tax base of the city, eroded by redlining, might have been a tenth of what it once was. The big retailers, if they didn't just go broke, had left for suburban malls. The big movie theaters were replaced by televisions in the home. The physical plant, or what we call infrastructure, of the city had been neglected and shortchanged, and the police and fire departments were larded with white employees hired at a time when black people weren't.

This didn't just happen in Detroit. If you lived in a city over 500,000 in the early 70s you probably remember it happening around you. Then for several decades all the money was spent in the suburbs. Cities where black majorities achieved power were absolutely last in line and redlining of mortgage loans kept them there.

This is history that won't repeat itself, regardless of whether we learn from it or not. But it's important to see events in perspective in order to form a proper measure of our fellow people.

another shout-out to the Ruins of Detroit website. I've been following Detroit history since I spent a couple weeks there in 1996 on a job. The city is heartbreaking; stories like this are too numerous. In the 90's when driving through urban areas from my hotel to worksite, I already noted how some residential blocks were reverting to the natural vegetation of the prairie due to abandonment - it must be so much more pronounced now.

Heartbreaking that we have allowed a great American city to become this.

Odd, but his followup photos remind me of Oklahoma in the aftermath of the dust storms of the Great Depression era. Very sad.

I share your feeling for old buildings, especially houses, built with care and grace. Some wise and beautiful comments above.

While travelling I was delighted to discover an Oregon company, McMinamins, which (with great good cheer) rehabs some of these fine old buildings as brewpubs and lodgings. Google them, look for Kennedy School and the Grand Lodge. You'll feel happier. Also, the nonprofit Landmark Trust (separate from the National Trust) saves buildings, mostly modest but interesting, as vacation rentals. All of that is drop in the bucket, but could waken people to the waste of tearing down beauty to build boxes. Perhaps these ideas will spread.

Saving such buildings is a sideline to the major effort needed to bring jobs, dignity, hope to long-neglected communities; still a good thing to do. We can do more than one thing at a time.

Ha, I love abandoned houses to but for the opposite reason. I get off on destruction and tearing them down and doing more damage is consequenceless so I love it.

I'd start bashing in walls, breaking the few windows that remains, trashing the place even more!

It's so much fun and you never get a chance to destroy stuff in our modern world so you have to take advantage of these chances while you can.

[...] this ill-targeted destruction was being rained down upon a city which was part of an ancient civilization,[...] -- doesn't matter, @10:37

'struth. I grew up reading 1001 Nights so, in March of '03, after I ran out of all the sensible and rational objections to going into the I-wreck, the last one (but the strongest) was the gut one: "all the magic carpets... destroyed..."

Wonderful post, Hilzoy. Thanks to you and to all the insightful and touching commenters. Thanks even to Al lest we forget the elitist view and MNPundit for the mention of the irrational joy humans take in destruction for its own sake.

Perhaps you know it. If not, you should try the song Stately Mansions, on this Brian Bowers album:

http://mp3.rhapsody.com/bryan-bowers/home-home-on-the-road

Now my boards are bare and who's to care?
My yard is overgrown, my roof is fallen.
To children I am haunted;
To myself, I am tired.
I'm just that old wood house down the road.

What a waste. Reminds me of Baghdad after the looting.

That school looks like it could be in Pripyat, next to Chernobyl. "Richest country on Earth", my ass.