Some thoughts on Detroit's abandonment

One thing to keep in mind when thinking about Detroit is that not every dilapidated structure was abandoned as a direct result of the 1967 riot or "white flight." The Michigan Theater, for example, went out of favor when tastes changed and people no longer preferred to see movies in grand palaces with orchestra accompaniment. It went into disrepair only after changing hands several times and being trashed during its time as a rock venue. The difference with other cities, I think, is that these sorts of buildings would have always been valuable real estate and would have quickly been repurposed. In Detroit, we instead have this slowly decaying portrayal of the early twentieth century sitting in front of us.

A city will always change - even the landmarks we are trying to preserve were built at the expense of previous structures. Michigan Central Station was built on top of a former residential section of Corktown, and I would bet that every resident of that neighborhood opposed the destruction of their home, no matter how much money was offered to them. "Matthew Scanlon, the real estate dealer who acquired the land for the railroad, had to call on one old woman forty times to get her to sell," Dan Austin wrote on Buildings Of Detroit. Today's Detroit, however, is frozen in time. On the bright side, this leaves the city with a lot of unique architecture that cannot be seen in other places. In another city, the Michigan Theater may have been radically altered or torn down by some investor to take advantage of its prime location near the center of Downtown. On the other hand, the fact that Detroit is stuck in time makes us feel strange and confused because at some inevitable point in the future, every city, town, and street in the world will look like this.