Lester, you're ready more into what I wrote than I actually said. To confront these massive industrial and commercial buildings that within our lifetimes were the engines of American capitalism is to confront one visible aspect of what happened to *Detroit* as a community/culture/economy. But note that I said "one" aspect.
Unlike most observers and superficial views of this process, here we have someone who not only looks at the outside but literally goes inside and tells at least a bit of the story, whether it's where the first Model T was built or it's the Packard plant or whatever. Yes, these "ruins" are no more than 30 years old, while those in Athens or Angkor Wat go back thousands of years. And so? In Detroit's case, it is a testimony to the hyper-speeded-up nature of our civilization now, where the entire life cycle of a massive building that normally would last 200 years or longer as a useful structure has been compressed into 50 or less. The irony, as Boileau notes, is that the enterprise contained in those structures led to their early demise. I don't think the American public has any sense of what happened in these buildings over the last four decades. We turned away. And we turned away from the everyday neighborhoods of Detroit where the people who worked there lived, and only woke up when the headlines started screeching about "murder capital" and "Devil's Night". I'd like to see a photo-essay online about all the other parts that make up the confounding city and region of Detroit. Every place is unique, but what about Detroit is it that makes it so much one of a kind? It's not the "fabulous ruins," really -- it's something else. I'm always amazed at the fierce loyalty people have to such a messed-up, beat-down place. It's what has kept techno going all these years despite relative indifference even locally. It's that sense of you never, ever give up. I didn't mean to make this a big discussion issue here, just wanted to point the site out and say that it had a big effect on me. Downtown Detroit shows how radically we as a nation turned our backs on city life from the 1940s to 1970s, and shows us that we left behind something truly important for human civilization when we did -- the urban life that makes us cohere as a society. It's just more radical and obvious in Detroit than elsewhere. So I've had my say on this and I'm out... phred
