Photos
If you only had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted, would you capture it, or just record a turgid love letter to an urban wasteland?
Hippity-hoo-blah!
I’m not going to get into the complicated cultural ramifications of Detroit’s long and steady decline into what basically amounts to pre-Apocalypse, post-Apocalyptic disaster. It’s like a bomb went off that killed all the people but left all the buildings intact. Well, kind of intact. There is a lot to love about Detroit, in that condescending way that people love something because they don’t have to be a part of it. But the reality is that it’s a ghost town, and even most of the ghosts are just driving in from the suburbs to hang out at a bar for a couple of hours before driving back out again. Its collapse is beautiful in a way. And completely unacceptable. This is what happens when Katrina happens over decades.
But my point is that as much as a rousing call of support for the city might be more symbolic than actually relevant, because the damage is now 40 years deep, if you ARE going to ask people to open their eyes to the reality of the ruins as a place where people actually live, and draw attention to the potential that still thrives in its industrial roots, at the very least MAKE IT ROUSING. This is the most depressing love letter of all time, Eminem. You might as well be writing to Stan. (Who is also dead.)
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in other news, it’s 2009.
Dear Eminem,
If Detroit were a person, I bet it would hate you.
Is he running for mayor?
DETRO…wamp wamp.
M&M: Whisper into Detroit’s ear it’s ok to leave now, it’s ok, you won’t be in pain anymore Detroit, you can leave.
Trust me, it will hurt less.
“Also, my mom is a drug addict and i love my daughter”
There. Now it’s ready for the charts.
But is it racist, Gabe?
No, but in all seriousness: Not to be all Professor I Live In Pittsburgh, but I currently live in Pittsburgh, and have been hearing a lot about how devastated it was after the steel industry collapsed. Pittsburgh used to BE Detroit, and now it’s one of the few cities actually still thriving in the recession. This probably isn’t Detroit’s last gasp, decomposing theaters aside. It might take like 50 years, but renaissance is absolutely possible. Pittsburgh is a very beautiful place and I’m sure Detroit can be too after a while…even if Eminem is from there (recession schmecession, how do you come back from THAT?).
Hey Carrie, I wish that were the case, but I don’t think it will be. I lived in both cities — Detroit for 15 years — and I don’t think Detroit can do what Pittsburgh did. Pittsburgh has a lot going for it geographically that Detroit doesn’t, and it turned itself around before we had a cultural shift where young people are now willing to travel across the country to find work (like 101 of the 102 kids in my grad school class, including me). Detroit is hemmorhaging people and businesses at the fastest rate in the entire country and has been for the last few years.
The last time I visited home, I took the monorail around downtown Detroit (note that there’s an obvious problem with your city’s infrastructure when your public transit is a monorail) and I’d say that 75% of the buildings you can see from the monorail are vacant. Not brownstones or storefronts, but 30-story office towers.
So that’s the real cause of Detroit’s collapse. The city was bankrupted by their monorail system, just like Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook before them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3xGtjhZ_Yg
That’s fair enough…I guess the geographies are wildly different, and Pittsburgh does have a huge amount of colleges and universities for a single city, unlike Detroit. Thanks for the educated response!
I’ve actually been to Detroit. Once. I think they must’ve used the Barbara Walters-soft focus lenses because it wasn’t as soulcrushing as I remember.
Also, the city’s cultural relevance has been reduced to
this.