America’s Abandoned Cities: Detroit Pranksters Make Playthings of Empty Buildings

[Liberal_in_LA]

America’s Abandoned Cities: Detroit Pranksters Make Playthings of Empty Buildings

By Mary Kane 11/6/09 9:23 AM

Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant. Click on the video in the story linked above and see it for yourself.

Detroit has 80,000 abandoned lots and buildings, according to the city’s planning department. Old housing projects, homes, strip malls and even high-rise buildings sit empty across much of the city. Motown has more vacant office, retail and industrial space than nearly every other big city in the country.

Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.

“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”

There’s more to this. The pranksters’ playground of empty and abandoned properties represents a deep and lasting betrayal of the needs of urban America. Some cities in the Rustbelt, hit first by the abandonment of their inner cores and then utterly devastated by foreclosures, bear scars from which they are unlikely to recover and that few seem to see. Years after the financial crisis ends, I wonder if we’ll look back at this as a time when we stood by and let some of the country’s once-great communities simply fall into disrepair and die.
http://washingtonindependent.com/66876/americas-abandoned-cities-detroit-pranksters-make-playthings-of-empty-buildings


Video of dump truck push: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125745924791631907.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird
OB-EV262_dump1_D_20091105170719.jpg

[ellie]

1. It's not totally a ghost town

Wayne State University is in downtown Detroit. My husband goes there and there are people about. I have a friend that lives downtown as well. These descriptions make it sound like it is like a post war apocalypse.

[NYC_SKP]

2. I found a dead body in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side of NYC...

...back in the 80's.

College friend and I explored lots of these.

The dead body building was right across the street from my place on East Houston.

It was unrecognizable, in a sleeping bag that we tore open.

It had a crushed skull and hair, all the clothes turned to the same murky color, only bones, hair, greasy clothes.

And a smell you never forget.

:P

[KittyWampus]

3. cities and civilizations have risen then fallen back into dust throughout human history

IMO, it isn't necessarily "bad".

Painful? Absolutely.