Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have published a photo exposé of the ruins of a once great city. Is it Baghdad? Is it Kabul? Find out here. What do you think caused this destruction?
Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have published a photo exposé of the ruins of a once great city. Is it Baghdad? Is it Kabul? Find out here. What do you think caused this destruction?
I’ve seen these photo’s before, and I’ve been to Detroit and seen it first hand.
Socialism destroyed Detroit
Watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhJ_49leBw
Ahh yes, more ruin porn. We don’t need your pity here in Detroit and we don’t want you appropriating our problems for your shallow analysis bent on pinning them to “liberalism”.
It’s not pity, Nick, it’s contempt.
The saddest picture has to be the abandoned library with the books left to decay.
Doesn’t anyone value books and knowledge?
We aren’t pitying you Nick. We’re laughing at you.
Go to Google or Bing maps and take a look at Detroit from above. There are areas of block after block after block of nothing but over grown grass. It looks like Saskatchewan section roads in miniature.
A buddy of mine was being posted to the US and for a lark we decided to look at a bunch of cities for housing other than where he was going. There were 8 bedroom 6 bath mansions in Detroit up for less than 100k.
Requiem for Detroit – Full documentary
Well, I’ve heard the story about how socialism destroyed Detroit too. Its partly true. My wife was born down in the city. She and all of her relatives left in the 70s, as soon as they could get out after the race riots of 1967. The place imploded on itself because nobody wanted to live there under the threat of violence. If you meet someone middle class who is from Detroit, they probably live in Livonia, Royal Oak, Rochester Hills, West Bloomfield or Westland. Everyone who was white left to the suburbs. Now even black people who are in any way middle class flee for the suburbs too, leaving only the criminal class downtown. Its still fairly safe to go to a ballgame or a Hockey game at the Joe, but there are a lot of places you just don’t go down there. Its quite sad when you look at all those photos. As for Nick who posted above, are you proud of your city dude?
I knew before even looking it would be detroit. Saw this series a while ago, what a shame…
Just making it homey for Dearborns Muslims.
I’ve told the story many times of getting off the highway on my motorcycle in Detroit for gas, just pulled up the off ramp to the gas station on the corner. Guy behind the counter took one look at my white face and told me to get back on the highway and go past a bunch more off ramps before I stopped for gas. Nice guy, very concerned that I get the hell gone ASAP before something happened to my dumb Canadian honkey self. This was in the ’80s too, not the ’60s.
Nick Adams, its not pity. Its mockery. The place is a cr@phole supported only by union graft and federal bailout money.
Nick, I was raised in the Detroit area, lived there from 1955 through 1973. I for one do not pitty Detroit because it got exactly what it deserved — thanks to the unions and the political system (100% democrat): it turned out to be a valuable lesson learned. The funny thing is most (productive) people I know who still live in the city have the same thoughts as I do.
May I add, ‘God Bless Mayor Bing’ for what he is attempting to do to turn the city around.
Thanks tp Robert W. for Requiem for Detroit – from what I could attest to, 80-90% true and accurate.
Sad.
A few years ago I made the wrong turn after coming thru the Windsor-Detroit tunnel. I found myself in a neighbourhood that I clearly did not wish to be in. To put it bluntly, I was probably the only person there with a white face and without a criminal record.
I told the kids to prepare themselves, that if we were rear-ended by another vehicle, which at the time was a common technique for robbery or car-jacking, I was going to take off to the nearest police station.
Heh. My daughter, who was about 13 at the time, thought that I was sayig I would abandom THEM…
It took me a little bit of time to correct her…
But Detroit is clearly destroying itself…a damn shame…
This is what the left wants to do to Canada; specifically Saskatchewan. We are paying our poorest, dumbest people to reproduce, and it’s going to cost us our civilization. Future demographics of Saskatchewan are doomed. It’s demographic destiny. Our only hope is to import thousands of educated Canadians and foreigners to dilute the sloth, uneducation, and entitled laziness. Someone’s got to pay for it. I’m not a eugenecist — I’m just a normal guy who loves seeing babies *without* FAS, abusive diabetic parents, or addictions. For much of Saskatchewan’s fastest-growing demographic, babies are not angelic gifts to be treasured; they’re paychecks. They’re a path to independence and a welfare cheque, meagre as it may be.
Down with liberalism. It will destroy us all.
Its a Democratic party manage of what happens when you let the left run for a long time. This comes as no surprise to People who have lived under socialism.
The authors of this travesty have long fled with the goods. While the getting was good.
Socialism has lain wasted every Nation its touched.
Its an en elemental political form of lawlessness that leads to decay, murder, with corruption of the soul & body of any community. Leaving a corpse in place of life. The list is long. Yet the left forgets the next day its destruction, like the locust it moves to the green areas to make it a desert as well.
JMO
But…but…in RoboCop, the Boddicker Gang was 5/7 white, with one black dude and one Asian…surely it be white gangstas that did in Motown!
I, for one, would be interested in knowing to what Nick Adams attributes the destruction of Detroit, if not “liberalism”.
Rogue Male – violent street gangs in the ’80s seem to have been very racially integrated. Movies taught me that.
Parts of Toronto will look like that in the next 20 years.
And Vancouver’s east end!
Detroit will rise again.
I understand persons are coming forward with hands on remedies. This is a challenge and America can rise to it.
I have been to Detroit and the Henry Ford Museum. Also the Art Gallery. The Rennaisance Center and the Zoo.
We cannot write off Detroit, for we write off certain of our own cities.
Sermon over!
It’s sad to see such beautiful buildings go to waste. When one sees buildings in such ruin, one thinks of war. This was caused by slow moral and political decay.
Oak Park, Southfield, 8 Mile Road, a hot dog at Tiger Stadium served at your seat out of a portable steam bath, the world’s largest tire by the highway, sunken highways for that matter, the Ren Cen, cheap stuff at pre-Walmart F&M stores, Little Caesar’s pizza, Vernor’s gingerale, everyone with a Cadillac . . . so many memories of Detroit.
Peter (Lock City): “Detroit will rise again.”
No, it won’t. There are lots of cities where the downtown core is experiencing the death rattle. Money extorted from taxpayers that don’t live there doesn’t seem to help. What will? More parking meters?
If only they closed down car traffic and converted the core to bicycle only lanes.
Der Spiegel article on Detroit with the above pictures plus several more, from Ace’s headlines
Detroit looks like Africa with occasional snow. I’d say Africa played a role in this.
Atlas Shrugged.
Too many unions and socialist governments.
This is what happens when a city’s people consistently elect Democrats for over 50 years.
Any muscle car fans here may also want a cruze down WOODWARD AVENUE to end the night at an A+W drive in.
http://www.woodwardavenue.org/index.html
enjoy
socialism at fault?
uh, no, it’s the rapacious greed of the wealthy class emulated by the unionboys that did it.
Ken Kulak understands it.
Re-read the part of Atlas Shrugged where they describe the 20th Century Motor Company. The pictures look like they were lifted on Rand’s pages.
But, of course, she was a right wing kook. Just ask Stephen Coal-bert.
Atlantic Jim @8:41
I took your advice and did the google map of Detroit. You did not exaggerate. Starting from the downtown core and moving out for miles there are more empty lots than houses. Absolutely stunning. I have never seen anything like it.
President Johnson and his Liberal Buddies.
@ Rogue Male
The saddest thing is that detroit of today is worse than the detroit of Robocop :3
It’s funny how socialism’s apologists can hurl accusations of “greed” at everything but the very greediest entity of them all: State Almighty.
So we’re to believe that it was capitalism that did this to Detroit? How ironic. Capitalism is what made it into an industrial powerhouse in the early and mid 20th century in the first place. Capitalism is what gives these pictures that Omega Man look of a formerly thriving city. Socialism/progressivism/liberalism in varying degrees is what put emphasis to the whole “formerly” thing.
Socialism’s apologists resort to iterations of “blame the victim”. Because industry fled to greener pastures, or succumbed to the increasing burdens hung around its neck, it’s somehow itself at fault for the deterioration. I’m sure it’s also the fault of “white flight”, I mean how dare all those people move out of the cities? They shouldn’t be able to do that!
Enter the fetish progressives have for central economic planning. Their economic vision always requires constant coercion, and is for that reason always destined to fail. They look upon these examples of industrial and commercial abandonment, and “white flight”, not as compelling symptoms of failure, but rather as proof that they — as our presumptive technocrat whiz kids — should be empowered through the apparatus of the State to remove such decision-making capacity from businesses and the individual.
beagle @12:30 – so… you agree it was the unions what did it, but somehow, to you, that’s got nothing to do with “socialism” because they learned their “greed” from the “wealthy class”. Do I have that right?
(Since you have no logical or coherent response to what I just asked you, I think your best bet is either to ignore me or to call me a racist.)
This is last year’s meme but yeah, reminders don’t hurt.
And to the commenter above: er, “unions” ARE “socialism”
Eh, I was wrong. I thought it would be Chicago.
Just as the tumuli of Jericho and Troy yielded evidence of several cities erected on the ruins of earlier cities….a new city eventually will arise on the ashes…for the same reason the first was built.
In many cases these reincarnations were separated by a century…indeed likely the new erectors had forgottten the earlier city(ies) existed.
The old realators saw…location, location, location explains this.
Nature and commerce abhors a vacuum and the prospect of open land, road, rail and water transport will attact something…eventually…it will likely take perhaps a century….when the blight which caused the decline/decay disappears/fads away.
Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki didn’t get rebuilt out of spite…..but simply because it was a damn good place to build a city….
There is only one thing that can stop and then reverse the rot in detroit (and Columbus and Pittsburgh and Windsor and Montreal ….):
Right to work legislation.
Until the politics of these states changes they will bleed industrial infrastructure – and the skills and services that support them – to the southern RTW states and Mexico and the far east.
That change may he closer than many expect – much of these northern states are becoming solidly republican.
Looks like a job for Bill Gates, or Paul Allen, or one of their ilk.
That first photo of the United Artists Theater is Haunting. I never have to re-read Atlas Shrugged, it is burned in my memory in the book, the entire rust belt slowly dying form neglect, the buildings rotting away, the people living in poverty and ignorance, expecting the government to feed them and change their nappies but forgotten by an uncaring greedy government… Detroit?
“socialism at fault?
uh, no, it’s the rapacious greed of the wealthy class emulated by the unionboys that did it.”
Snort. Who & what exactly BUILT those many fine buildings, and all the now disappeared neighbourhood.
I love how lefties point at the greed of capitalists ( usually misindentified , with cronies that worked the government, too) as an foil for their own far more catastrophic mismanagement.
Kind of like they’ll point at a right wing dictator and accuse them endlessly of their awful crimes ( mostly against specific leftist “revolutionaries” and _criminals_) “that number inthe 1000’s”
AND….. remain deeply silent about the 10’s of MILLIONS of normal people slaughtered by their compatriots in the left wing peoples “paradises in the building”.
They disgust me.
It’s clear what happened.
All the people capable of building such beautiful structures or maintaining them left the city. All those that were left, created what you see now.
I guessed Detroit before clicking the link.
Sad, sad, sad.
Maybe we could start a contest as to what city will be next to self-destruct.
(And Montreal doesn’t count)
I nominate Houston Texas as a candidate.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7389052.html
Oh man, you cannot make stuff like this up.
I think the timing of these photo’s is ironic. Mayor Bing has finally taken the bull by the horns and it really trying to turn this city around. I am usually the first one to disparage this city and it’s crooked leaders and lazy populace but I see a glimmer of hope on the horizon and I pray that the current leadership stays the course. It is a tough job but it is finally being done. Go Mr. Bing!
TJ said: “Parts of Toronto will look like that in the next 20 years.”
Dude, parts of Toronto look like that -now-. Go visit the old Kodak plant, its a modern ruin. Hell, the Eaton Center is starting to look like that. Its just a big Dollar Store.
Downtown Hamilton has looked fragged and abandoned for 15 years, no end in sight. Same reasons too.
Very sad pictures. No one even had the energy to rob/loot/salvage those buildings, and even the vandalism appears to have been dispirited and without enthusiasm.