Jacinda Barrett

There were times in Detroit, I felt like I was in a city post war.  Driving along, I would see a neighborhood of grand historic homes – empty and overgrown with ivy.  In the next street every house was a burnt out shell.  People looked haunted.  One cabbie said to me, “It’s with tears in my eyes that I look at my city.”  It used to be called the city of churches, now it is a city abandoned.  GM leaving, white flight after the riots, and the foreclosure crisis carve the empty spaces ever wider.  I was with there with my daughter and husband while he was shooting a movie and as Detroit now has one of the best tax breaks for film production it probably won’t be the last time.  The struggling city both broke my heart and won me over.    When Gabriel was working at the abandoned Brewster Projects for over a week, we spent days wandering in the empty apartments.  This is what had become of the first federally funded public housing development for African Americans – once a source of pride to the community.  Families left behind graduation photos, strollers, claiborne shirts, sneakers, and lonely stuffed polar bears.  I wondered where all these people went that they had to leave so many of their possessions behind.  No time to even pull down their children’s wall of posters?  Their small apartments still half full.   Were so many of them homeless now with no need or place to put their things?  So many children had lived here.

Now the city talks of razing all the abandoned buildings which could eventually mean over 30% of Detroit because that’s how much of it is empty.  What about buildings like the central train station (above), the hundred’s of public school’s or epic cathedrals that are empty, cracked and molding?  People have robbed these buildings of anything sellable: metal, moldings, fixtures, piping.  They really are just shells now.  There is so little to keep of these grand dames of Detroit.  It makes me sad to think of the architectural history that will be pulled down in the years to come – not to mention people’s entire lives.  The fabric of their childhood and family ties in neighborhood’s, gone.  No street corners to remember a first kiss.  The house your grandma fed you after school, the library you still owe overdue books or the backyard you built your forts in summer – gone.