Fabulous Ruins Of Detroit

What happened to Detroit ? In thirty years, the city has lost one million of its inhabitants. Shops, apartments, theaters and grand hotels are now just standing witnesses of a bygone glory.

In the fifties, Detroit had been nicknamed “Motor City” because of its leading position as the worldwide capital city of the car industry with prestigious brands such as Ford, Cadillac or General Motors.

In 1967, violent racial riots tore the town apart. Factories were closed, the population left. The French journalists, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, both fascinated by this contemporary history, went to Detroit several times to try and figure out for themselves what the soul of the city had been.

October 2005. For four years, some ruined buildings in France, Belgium, England, Spain have been regularly visited. The aim of such visits is to record buildings that are subject to change, or even to simple demolition. The Renault factories, located on the Ile de Seguin, are being knocked down, the Great Mills of Paris (13th borough of the city) are being reconverted, the big factories of the Belgian mining basins are being blocked up. We felt that it was too late to save them, we simply had to be content with the remains of what had previously existed.

The once splended Orsay station and the Great Gallery of the Jardin des Plantes, now in a complete state of rot, were patiently waiting for someone to rescue them.

But there is Detroit. In France, this town is synonymous with the car industry and the birth place of techno music. That’s about all.

For those who think they know, the Americans in particular, Motor City has been described with many names and adjectives: the poorest town, the darkest town, the town with the worst road network, the highest crime rate, it’s the black sheep of the USA. An unfortunate reputation that Detroit usually shares with Washington D.C. and Gary. It’s at last the national symbol of an industrial and urban decline.

One arrives there with such preconceptions, conveyed by years of American fiction and reports, which would turn the most down-to-earth mind wholly insane. It’s sad to see with our own eyes that fiction and reality can sometimes be so alike. Those deserted buildings are meant to shelter squatters or drug addicts. Nonetheless, in four years bad encounters have been quite rare.

First evening in Detroit. We are tired, having very recently left the plane and night has just fallen on downtown. The desolate scene of the town’s main ruins is standing before us: office buildings, hotels, apartments, theaters and cinemas. All the buildings stereotyping a middle-sized U.S. town are abandoned. The car park in which we parked on looks like a waste ground. The only joyful noise in that heavy atmosphere is a police siren call. The town is dead. Compared to it, the French middle-sized town Roubaix would look like Paris, Paris in turn would look like Tokyo.

It must be around 6 p.m. The salaried men have left the place (for there’s still some life in downtown). We’re going around a few blocks where the only people we meet in these badly lit streets are tramps asking us if we have “one buck” to give away. The scene is set. It’s a rather cold welcome, as we expected, maybe worse…

Fortunately, the next day we are meeting a couple of Germans, Silke and Daniel. They’ve lived in Detroit for four years and nothing bad ever happened to them. Good news.

The deserted buildings, sometimes wide open to the streets, don’t actually match our “expectations”: no graffiti, no stickers, no gratuitous vandalism, even though they’ve been empty for twenty years. The streets are indeed in a poor condition, some of the houses are about to collapse, totally different to the urban plan. In places half of the housing has totally vanished.

The few cars we saw here were driven on their rims; fast foods restaurants were equipped with bullet-proof windows.