We Are Still Here, and We Still Can Do Something
Robert Mentzer

Twenty-five city blocks west of downtown Detroit, Michigan Central Station looms over the old Corktown neighborhood like a monolith. You don't think it will be so big or so terrifying, but it is monstrous and impressive as befits a very old, very powerful ghost. Eighteen stories high and massive, as broad as a city block. Ornate neoclassical columns in the front. Every window on every floor broken out in shards. Walls covered in tags and messages. Michigan Central Station is magnificently empty and has been for more than two decades.
There are other ruins in Detroit but none so great and awful. To walk across the snowy field toward the building on a bright and frigid afternoon is to be seized with awe and terror. I felt the wind against my cheeks and squinted into the sunlight. Who am I to approach this structure? And what if it should turn against me?
When I was there so was Travis Gooch, a 19-year-old Detroit native who had stopped to take pictures of the station with a powerful camera. When I talked to Travis Gooch he said he was interested in photographing "the scenery."
"These things," he said, "they are phenomenal. There's not many places you can find such large facilities that... They're just here."

***

Detroit is now identified in the popular imagination mainly as a city of ruins. This is not fair. I know because when I was there I saw not only the abandoned skyscrapers and foreclosed houses but also new urban farming initiatives, a contemporary art museum in a stunning old warehouse space and a brand-new, multimillion-dollar Rosa Parks Transit Center, a glass-and-fiberglass structure that rises like a spaceship from the middle of downtown.
Yes. The ruin porn you find online is not a true portrait of the city. The photos are true, and they are portraits, but they are not the city.
But am I mistaken or is there also a sense of self-righteous scolding and bourgeois prudishness about the anti-ruin-porn backlash? As if what Detroit really needs is for everyone to just get on the same page and agree that everything is fine and there's nothing to see here. As if we are wrong to be fascinated and drawn to the images of decay even as we're repelled.
When ABC announced that it would carry a television program called "Detroit 187," Detroit City Council member Kwame Kenyatta offered a resolution calling on the show's producers to change the title, on the grounds that it would associate Detroit with murder. (Michigan's penal code doesn't actually use "187" for murder, but never mind, there was no mistaking the producers' intentions.) The alderman offered no alternate titles, but perhaps he would have accepted "Detroit Gentle Happy People" or "Detroit No-Crime-Whatsoever City."

***

Too many houses, too many buildings. Detroit is an attractive, interesting small city trapped inside in the body of the booming, sprawling mid-century city that it will never be again. From 1.8 million people in 1950 to 715,000 last year.
To lure them back into the city, Detroit now offers cops foreclosed homes for $1,000. One thousand dollars!
Beautiful brick houses with four steps leading down to the sidewalk. Old trees on the boulevard. Padlocks on the outside of doors; plywood across the windows. Detroit has shrunk in the way American cities never shrink. Only the empty buildings are left.
New developments downtown next to rotting abandoned skyscrapers. Wooden panels peeled away from the bases of the empty ones, allowing those who need it to crawl in for a place to sleep or get high or whatever.
I speak to a guy named Michael Lundy on his way out of the YMCA downtown. He is 27, a bartender at the Detroit Opera House, lived here his whole life, and thinks, now, about moving.
"I wish the best," he says. "But until we see some upward mobility, employment-wise, you have to look at other options. A lot of people want to stay here, and it's reasons to stay here. But if it's somewhere I can go that gives me a better opportunity, I can't just sit here and ride on faith, as much as I want to. ... I can't just stay here and wallow in the sorrows."
Is it wrong, I ask Michael Lundy, for those of us who are not from Detroit to want to see the ruins of Detroit? Am I a ghoul for gawking at Michigan Central Station? He tells me a story.
"A friend of a friend, he was visiting from Germany," he says. "And I asked him, what have you been doing? He said, we went to go visit the ruins. And I'm like, what the hell are the ruins? He told me he went over in the Cass Corridor area, and to Michigan Central Station. I'm like, wow. It really is ruins. It's not ancient, but it's modern ruins."
Above us, the Detroit People Mover passes by on its elevated rails, empty.
"But what can you say?" Michael Lundy says. "Until they do something about it, I can't be mad at people from other places discussing it or having an opinion about it. It's understandable."

***

At the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn there is a prototype of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House -- the round, aluminum house that the eccentric Omaha futurist once imagined would become an American norm. It was my favorite part of the museum, which I visited on the last day I was in Detroit.
Like all of Fuller's ideas, the Dymaxion House was an embarrassing failure. But in the new postwar world, Fuller could have been a genius. He was solving a problem that seems impossibly remote from Detroit, 2011: the anticipated shortage of housing for returning soldiers and their families.
"These dwellings are helping to fill the housing gap," intones the announcer in a film that the museum runs in a loop outside the display house. "A complete house for $6,500 -- the price of a Cadillac."

***

I think we are fascinated by Detroit because we wonder whether America is Detroit. Or put another way, whether Detroit's decline foreshadows America's decline. The idea that our best days might be behind us, that we've entered a long, slow evening. That the homes in our neighborhood will empty of people. That all of our great buildings will be vacated and left vacant until the windows are all broken out and the floors are warped and the walls are stained.
Across the city there are billboards that read "I'm a Believer," part of an urban self-esteem-boosting campaign led by the city's new mayor, former professional basketball player Dave Bing. In the shadow of Michigan Central Station, I asked Travis Gooch if he believed.
"I'm a believer," he said without hesitating. "Our whole thing is bringing back Detroit to the way it was. ... It's showing that we are still here, and we still can do something."
Yes. I want to believe this, too. But what.