43 replies on “Some Photos of My Hometown”

  2. So you finally admit that your emotions are why you think auto companies are worth saving.

  3. Thanks for sharing Jonathan. I used to visit Detroit regularly in the 90s and the decay was/is everywhere. Walking around was like a trip to the best museum. A good reminder of why businesses need to innovate/stay sharp and not just pander to their shareholders – most of whom live as long way away anyway and don’t give a shit about their “home towns”. The mistakes that doomed GM were made in the 70s and 80s: they need to go away now and so serve as a reminder to Apple, Google or who ever is next..

  4. @2: I don’t think I ever hid my biases in this regard. Nor do I think my obvious and clearly declared pro-Industry-in-the-US bias makes my arguments in favor of the auto bailout invalid.

    Compared to the (ongoing) bailouts of the financial sector, I’d say the taxpayer was well bought with the money lent to GM….

    Fnarf: I’ve always thought of Detroit and Seattle as quite similar cities–just separated by decades in time. Both were/are primarily comprised of tidy little single-family homes on small lots. Both hosted the dominant companies in the dominant industries of their time. Both spurned the development of suburban economic cores.

    With that said, I think Seattle’s course will be different than Detroit’s.

  7. yucca: You can click on the photo to see its flickr location and a bit more info.

    The Time pictures and the one here are gorgeous… not that it looks like a nice fate for a city.

  13. I think the story of the guy frozen in the elevator shaft in the school book depository pretty much summed it up
    Detroit. But a picture is worth a thousand words.

    I don’t really know much about the region, but what is the plan for Detroit and the rest of Michigan? Are they trying to attract new industries, or just holding their breath that the auto companies come back?

  15. The auto industry died as part of an inevitable cycle: 1) Diminishing competetion creates excessive profets 2) Labor manages to secure a share of said profits by organizing 3) Competition increases over time 4) Older firms have to survive through marketing high margin products 5) Incomes drop and marketing driven value disappears quickly – business evaporates.
    It’s not all that’s happening but it’s why the auto industry is so much worse off than other industries.

  17. What it looks to me is a Mayan temple about fifty years after everybody left in 900 AD, but a thousand years before it was rediscovered, after all the books and stuff decayed into nothing and all the walls and ceilings had decayed into their bare stones.

  19. #14, The 60s and 70s. In 1967 I rather would have been in Detroit then San Fran. Brain dead hippies listening to Airplane and the Dead or speed freaks in Motown with Cream magazine, MC5 and Alice Cooper. Went to Detroit once, great history, beautiful downtown but the rest of the city, lookout. If we focus on public transit and light rail Detroit could be a solid city once again. But don’t look to us for answers, it’s a city full of union workers and black people, two things Seattle hates.

  20. @18: Well, yes. I grew up in a couple different suburbs of Detroit. My dad, however, grew up entirely in the city–including graduating from Mumford High School.

    After I graduated from highschool, I went off to live in Baltimore (City, not County).

    Your point?

  21. @16 beat me to it. The guy whose blog that is relocated to Detroit (in the city) from San Francisco a couple of years ago with his family. He has taken some amazing, moving, and saddening photographs of the city. He took the reporter from Time around the city (the reporter was supposed to be meeting with the mayor who stood him up. Somehow, Time got in touch with the blogger who met the reporter), but Time decided to send professional photographers to recreate the pictures the blogger took instead of buying his.

    You can read all of these stories under his Detroit tag:

    http://www.sweet-juniper.com/search/labe…

  23. This is so sad to see. We are seeing America’s heartland turning into a third world country because everyone got greedy. Thanks so much for sharing this, Jonathan.

  24. These images are post-apocalyptic. My sister is heading to Detroit in the fall for school – her choice. I’ll be interested to hear her impressions of the city once she’s been there a while.

  25. #19

    Umm, I wouldn’t have wanted to be living in Detroit in the late 60’s. The race tension and riots were not subtle things to live with in that era, according to my father. I’m from Southwest Detroit originally, and I can attest to the severity of my old city’s decline. It really is that bad.

    Jim from Sweet Juniper paints a very accurate description of the city. Check out his photo stream on flickr, too. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetjunipe…) I like his originals a lot more than the polished shots in the Time feature, and I think you will too.

  27. I grew up white in Detroit, Cass Corridor, Wayne State etc. etc. It is the main reason that I will never believe that liberal social programs are for the benefit of the poor but rather to entrench political power over them.

  29. These photos would be more illuminating if set alongside photos of the very prosperous suburbs just outside of Detroit’s city limits.

    The problem we’re facing isn’t total economic decline or abandonment. It’s the way in which power stays in the hands of and serves the interests of a wealthy few, while everyone else’s lives become more miserable. It is surreal to see state legislators in Olympia more scared of raising taxes than averting economic collapse. It is because they’re not feeling the pain.

  32. dan hawkins, a photographer from this here city of seattle, had a show at form/space last year of his recent trip to detroit. he’ll be showing at the sam gallery sometime in may, i believe, and he’s on his way to photograph pittsburg steel at the end of this month. he’s also done a bunch of shots within this genre of seattle. http://www.flickr.com/dghawkins90 pretty awesome stuff and he ain’t french.

  34. 31, what kind of solution to that “problem” do you propose? kill them all? send them back to africa? put them ALL in prison? what? i am truly curious what logical productive things you propose as remedies.

  35. Thanks for the beautiful pics. I lived in Detroit for two years and every third house was abandoned and boarded up… I was dirt broke at the time!!! really bad… I remember on walks seeing large abandoned buildings and wondering what the hell happened here. These pics are awesome. Weird thing was – i was most struck by the abandoned single gloves which were on every street corner, never anywhere else have i seen that oddity…

  39. Oh boy, Detroit really is the new Cuba for photographers. I love all these links though… makes me homesick. I lived in downtown Detroit all of my college years. On Willis Street, one block from Woodward. Detroit has just as many amazing broke-down people as it does urban ruins.

    One such was Tyrone, aka The Nub-Man, the one-armed bum that I’d play frisbee with behind the Majestic Cafe. He taught me the magic of posing as a parking lot attendant, once, when I was really broke.

  42. And my mom grew up in a house without running water in the Alleghenies… Just because I spent a ton of chunk in Roanoke doesn’t mean I claim her home village as my hometown. She met my dad at the now defunct GMI (General Motors Institute). They were line workers in Detroit for several years. I grew up in a podunk town on the other side of the state and now go to U of M. Detroit: not my hometown, and I’d never be so brash as to say it was.

    What’s my point with all this? A lot of the issues surrounding Detroit have to do with suburbanite nostalgia for something that hasn’t been for a long time. A lot of my classmates are from the ‘burbs, finding poetry in Detroit’s buildings and streets, as well as wallowing in the liberal guilt that’s rampant in the area.

    Me, I’m just tired of the “woe is me” bullshit. These people didn’t grow up there – their parents probably barely remember the riots/white flight, if at all – and their pitying ownership is misplaced. And it’s not helpful.

  43. Agree with “r” on all points except the liberal guilt part…i grew up IN Detroit never really experienced “liberal guilt” experienced much racism though particularly when I HAD to venture out into the ‘burbs’ to buy such basic necessities as groceries, clothes, etc. Which is why I also get tired of people who are not from the CITY, claiming and then going out to represent and speak for the CITY…to know ABOUT Detroit from your parents/grandparents is different than living IN Detroit and facing the day to day realities that come with doing so….and even if your parents grew up in Detroit it means to me only that they have knowledge of what Detroit WAS not what it IS (now)…only those who have stayed in the city know this and can truly connect with what Detroit was, what Detroit is, and what Detroit could be…..

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