As I mentioned earlier today, the Detroit Free Press recently put together a fantastic multimedia presentation about the 2700 mile journey of one of their columnists who never even left the city. He drove every mile of every street in the city of Detroit and did he sure see some crazy stuff.
Having just seen the Will Smith pic, I Am Legend, in which Smith plays the last man on earth living a Manhattan that has gone three years without any upkeep at all, I was especially struck by this installment of the Detroit series. In it, columnist Bill McGraw describes parts of the city where nature has basically begun to reclaim the land. Now, I know we have a few cases of this in some of the more distressed neighborhoods in Philadelphia. There are the abandoned houses with the trees growing in them, the vacant lots with the waist-high weeds and some pretty poorly maintained park land.
But in Detroit, even their illegally dumped garbage is being reclaimed by nature:
Sometimes, when nature and trash combine, the result is strange, subtle and seemingly permanent changes in the city's topography.
Here is what happens: Trucks illegally dump piles of heavy-duty materials such as cement, drywall, used soil or rusty metal bars. As the piles sit, nature gradually takes over. Grass, weeds, trees and soil swarm over the piles, transforming them into green mounds. Before long, the mounds look as if they've been sitting there forever.
There are hundreds of mounds across the city. Some are knee high; others are big as a garage.
...
One of the mounds, off of Huber Avenue east of Mt. Elliott, is more than two stories high.
Sort of gives new meaning to the John Maynard Keynes quote, "In the long run, we're all dead."
These sections of Detroit where the grass covered garbage mounds are most prominent have an eerie quiet about them:
Inside the zone [an "orphaned" neighborhood near in the city's northeast section], which extends for several blocks, there are no homes, no factories, no parks, no people and no street signs. Some of the streets themselves have been obliterated by decay and vegetation.
In Legend the filmmakers worked very hard and used some wild special effects to give us a picture of what Manhattan, the busiest part of the busiest city in the world, would like if it were abandoned for just a few years. Apparently, they could have saved some money by filming in the Motor City.
Is anyone aware of any parts of this city that are as bad shape as these parts of Detroit? Let me know in the comments so I can go check them out for myself.
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