Abandoned Places

My husband and I met in graduate school in Bowling Green, Ohio, about twenty minutes south of Toledo, maybe an hour south of Detroit, Michigan. It’s funny, because I went to college outside Baltimore, and when I moved to Ohio in the summer of 2000 I had no idea I was exchanging proximity to urban blight for more of the same.

The first day I met my future husband, he was in a group of other grad students talking about Detroit, about the beauty of its abandoned streets and buildings, about how fascinating it was to witness urban decay, about the defiant vitality and beauty of house music, Detroit techno, Juan Atkins and Derrick May. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but I was attracted to his passion, his excitement for such an unusual subject. Who falls in love with decay and blight, with such heartbreaking loss and destruction? Before I left Ohio for good, I went into Detroit twice, once for a baseball game and dinner in Greektown and again to see a Brazilian film at the Detroit Institute of Art’s Film Theater. Each time, I was stunned by the contrast between the incredible edifices surrounded by seas of broken-down structures and desolate stretches of concrete.

Today when I should have been grading midterms, I spent a long stretch of time entirely absorbed in the posts in the “abandoned places” section of Sweet Juniper!, a blog I had seen around for awhile but never really gave a fair shot. Jim and his wife live in Detroit, and as a stay-at-home dad, he spends a lot of time walking around the city, with his dogs, his kids and his camera, documenting what has happened to the city of Detroit and what is still happening. His photographs are striking in their starkness and in their honest depiction of a major American city left to rot, a story of scrappers and prostitutes, of the homeless and the drug addicts, but also of the corrupt politicians, the slumlords, the gangs and the schoolchildren of Detroit.

Living in Baltimore is often depressing, and in these hard economic times there are so many stories to give us pause and tug at our heartstrings. But in considering Detroit, we also consider that maybe the breakdown of our society has been happening for much longer for parts of our country, but we have turned a blind eye, thinking it would never come close enough to touch us. For me, after looking at those images and reading those words, it’s getting harder and harder not to be touched.