Nowadays, the discerning tourist, traveler, visitor does not or should not ignore the biggest attraction of Detroit, Michigan: its ruins. You can browse the official web of Visit Detroit and see pretty photos of kids and parks and a marina or go to to www.detroityes.com and take a tour through the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, the real thing. Entire neighborhoods, good parts of downtown itself, of course all the industrial buildings once occupied by the thriving Detroit automobile industry. All dilapited, some demolished. The gorgeous poetry these urban and industrial ruins exhale have longly enticed photographers, writers and artists. Chilean-born photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara is fairly the most famous and important teller of the lugubrious fate of the American metropolis. He has documented and captured the demise of urban downtowns in America in the last 30 years. "American Ruins", "The New American Ghetto", "Subway Memories", "Unexpected Chicagoland"; all speak very literally in images and words of the destruction of urban centers in the nation. Places like Newark, New Jersey; Gary, Indiana; Chicago; Cleveland; Minneapolis; Detroit; St Louis; Los Angeles; New York, in her old infamous days and still now in some areas, are sad but fascinating examples of the present reality of a certain America: the deserted, vandalized and crime-ridden (non-white) urban downtowns of major cities agonize in decay while the suburbs thrive with affluent (white) population fleeing the urban destruction.
For most Americans, the city is a pest to avoid, a place where working and getting the hell out of there to go back to the green, peaceful neighbor-community outskirts and their houses built like identical mushrooms (Richard Nixon's wish to God to destroy New York City in the 70's is an over-the-top example of this attitude). The "American dream" might be in reality just a "escape from the American nightmare", or "from nightmare to nightmare". Leave the cities, take the country, this nation has a lot of land. Above all, if the choice is Detroit or Newark, wouldn't you go to "Residential Upper Golden Silly Hills"? The American urban destruction may be attractive for visiting, but surely not for living in.
This was not always like it is now, of course. At the turn of the century and up until the post- Second World War, many of the now-dying American cities soared in population, business, economy, architecture as a result of, between many other factors, a strong industry and a strong demand, due -in large part- to the many wars the United States was involved in. Look at Gary and South Chicago-Northern Indiana: all the steel companies, many government-owned, and the port and its heavy trade commerce; or Detroit and its automobile industry; also Cleveland and its industries everywhere, steel mills, oil refineries, auto and electronic parts. All this heavy industry declined and in many cases disappeared completely, whether a victim of the lack of demand provoked by the absence of major wars, or the oil crisis, or the huge importations the USA relies on; leaving, almost always and because of an urban planning that relied almost exclusively in the economic splendor (that never lasts long), deserted gritty downtowns and grimy, rusty industrial belts in polluted, broke and broken cities with no clear future. Or not even a dark one.
As an unavoidable circle and cycle, many of these cities have, as I said (and in a phenomenon slowly affecting Europe too), their long-time white population fleeing to the suburbs escaping the unemployment and urban-economic crisis of the downtowns (a process explicitly called "white flight"). The core of the towns are subsequently occupied by a non-White (mainly Black, also Hispanic) population typically newly arrived in the last 40-50 years, post-war times, from the empoverished and white-terror stricken South and attracted by that prosperity in the North that was to last no more than three decades. Destruction, crime, drugs, gangs, homicide, arson and general downfall almost inevitably followed. Those cities like Gary or Detroit than once where admired centers of urban life and culture are now undesirable shallow stretches of waste and wrecked remnants of the not-so-long-ago splendor where the National Guard has to patrol the streets. A post-landscape of doomsday whose statistics are to be found in the list of the most crime-infested cities of America, always on top and breaking numbers.
This phenomenon, still uncomprehensible for me as a whole in its vastness and multiple causes and origins, has been sadly utilized by the American white suprematists, racists, ignorants, conservatives, Nostradamus-types and other freaks to spread their apocalyptic word of "the end is coming to America, the Western civilization dies, blame the black and the minorities for the destruction of our cities". Unfortunately, they have the facts for showing: Detroit, Gary, Newark. Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis. Crack, guns, devastation, fire, death. No future.
While the average middle Californian moves to the sprawl, drives two hours a day to commute, beats his wife and has her daughter being a cocaine-user and sex-addict at 16, living his all-American suburban dream-nightmare, the average Detroiter sells crack in a corner of some ruined building of downtown surrrounded by houses on fire while two friends lay on the floor shot in the head, dead, and the police does not intervene for lack of funds.
America the beautiful, watch the show, the two sides of it. America trying to escape from itself, in vain.
The beaches and parks are now not the only touristic spot of the nation- the ruins of Detroit and other once-industrial-now-irreparably-damaged cities of America are places to be in, study, learn, think; and enjoy the beauty of the delerict buildings and surrounding urban demise. "Belgrade and Manhattan rolled into one". As Camilo José Vergara says, no joke in it, the ruins of Detroit should be preserved as a great American Acropolis, Athens and Rome style. A "skyscraper ruin park" that will contrast with Disneyland or Malibu.
Visit Detroit. Witness the grand downfall of a great American city.
