I was in the Detroit metro area on business last week. I’ll be relocating to the area in a couple months so I wanted to get acquainted with the area. Since I was scheduling my own trip, I penciled in an extra weekend to explore. I set aside the last day to just drive around the roughest neighborhoods of Detroit.  Most of these pictures are from the Hamtramck neighborhood.

Note: Click on the slideshow to go to the Picasa album and view it in Fullscreen mode.

At first it’s interesting to witness something you wouldn’t expect to exist in a first world nation. I’m sure other cities experienced a decline with the downfall of manufacturing and the US automotive industry. But, the scale of the decline, I would guess, is unique to Detroit. I began my day by eagerly taking pictures of the dilapidated properties. Somewhere along the way, the realization that I could spend a whole day taking pictures and not run out of houses hit me, and my intrigue turned to despair. I saw the forest instead of the trees. These kinds of neighborhoods go on for miles. The extent of the decay is so widespread, so entrenched, it seems there isn’t a chance of revival without a massive coordinated community effort. In lacking a community, that chance is pretty close to zero. The only way for these areas to come back is for them to be completely torn down and rebuilt.

I started feeling hungry, so I headed out of the severely decayed areas. I had to drive a little ways out to reach operating businesses. I pulled into a dirty pizza shop. The owner was sleeping behind the counter. It was the first pizza place I’ve seen with bullet proof glass. I made enough noise by scuffing my shoes on the dusty floor to wake him up.  Startled, he jumped up to the counter, “Oh! Hey man, how you doin’ today?” He was some kind of middle eastern. Bald except for the horseshoe of dark hair around the sides of his head. He was very obviously far-sighted as his glasses magnified his eyes.

“Good, good.” I looked at my watch. “Got anything ready to go? Anything warm?”

“Yeah man. I’ve got some slices.”

“Of what?” I replied.

“Pepperoni” he said as he grabbed a pizza box from a counter and angled the open box at me so I could see. Only half the pizza was left.

“I’ll take two,” I said.

“I’ll warm ‘em up a bit for ya,” he said. He snapped off a few pieces of aluminum foil from a roll he had laying on the counter, wrapped the slices in them, and then put them in a big toaster oven. “Ya know, I was wonderin’ if I should even come to work today.”

“Well, I made it all worth it with those two slices, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’m not from around here,” I admitted,  ”all the houses are burned down or borded up. What happened?”

“Mayor screwed it all up. Believe it or not, it used to be worse. New mayor ain’t so bad. He’s tryin’.”

I nodded my head in a state of uninformed agreement as another customer walked in. In order to avoid discussing anything controversial, I paid for the slices, and noticing there was no place to actually eat in the shop, I proceeded to eat my greasy tinfoil-wrapped pizza in my rental car.

I’m not sure how to feel about what I experienced in Detroit. It’s heartbreaking to see neighborhoods (or the remains of) in the condition they’re in. It’s an expanse of house graveyards and mini-landfills. It felt like watching a wild animal with a broken leg. You know it’s going to die one way or another, and you wish someone would just put it out of it’s suffering.

“I’m waiting.” reads the graffiti tagged on one of the houses.