I received an email from a reader of this blog who was especially impressed by the Detroit Free Press project that I wrote about yesterday - here and here - and that still currently occupies the front page of thenextmayor.com).
Evan, who was a student at Penn shared his response to my query about whether any parts of Philadelphia are succumbing to nature in the same way that several parts of Detroit are. Apparently, as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, "...life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously."
Evan, who sent me some of his photographs of this very process, has this to say (links go to full sized versions of the pictures, the smaller ones are below in the order described):
I'm a regular reader of The Next Mayor, I really enjoyed your last post. Pretty amazing story from the Detroit Free Press.
You asked if any parts of Philly are in as bad shape as sections of Detroit. The answer is definitely yes. And while I haven't been to that many of them, I thought I'd share with you an assignment from an Urban Photography class I took while I was at Penn.
We spent a lot of time looking at deterioration around the city, and I came away with some interesting pictures. In the first two, nature has really overtaken some abandoned buildings. In the second one, you can see trees and greenery growing inside what used to be a factory (I should note that when I was there, a sign was hanging off the building claiming they
were soon turning the Brewerytown place into lofts.) In the third (my favorite), someone left a couch in Logan Triangle, where the city bulldozed almost every house on what used to be 17 blocks of packed houses. Grass has now overtaken the former neighborhood.
First picture:
Second picture:
Third picture:
Thanks to Evan Goldin for the feedback and the great pictures! I'm beginning to think there may be something to replicating this Detroit Free Press project here in Philadelphia.