Decay

Sweet Juniper!, which has been enthusiastically added to the daily reading roll, has an excellent Flickr photoset and accompanying blog post detailing the decay of the Detroit Public Schools Book Repository.

I noticed, as Dutch did, that a lot of folks commenting on Flickr felt some sadness at these views of collapse and ruin which, if you want to make a crusade for social justice out of it, makes the photos an extreme success. As Dutch says in the blog post, there’s a sense of hope lost here, and the bleak emotions that come with such a sense are limitless.

But like him, ruins tend to evoke much more in me. I don’t really know why, but I’ve always been the sort to look at a pattern of scuff marks on the floor of a hospital, for instance, and wonder about their origins, try to work out how they got there, what they mean in the larger scheme, and so on. So in that sense, ruins have always been a sort of orgy of unspoken history for me.

On the social justice level, we can look at this pictures and tsk, then seek out the larger forces that propelled the decisions that resulted in this warehouse of decay. We can find the grand reasons, and attack them, and ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. But in these pictures I find myself drawn to the smaller stories–how did the fire on the third floor start, who saw it, and what did it mean to them? When did the pallets start to collapse? Who worked there, and how did the abandonment affect them?

I guess that’s a storyteller’s impulse, but it’s something that has always fascinated me well beyond the desire to give voice to a pattern of scuff marks.

Where it’s personal for me is being from Detroit. My two closest cousins were in Detroit Public Schools in the mid-1980s when the Repository seems to have been abandoned. My first college roommate had come out of DPS around the same time. All of them made it out, slipped the cycle of violence and poverty (well, I hope my roommate did anyway–he seemed well on his way when last I heard from him), and achieved in a system that seemed eager to abandon them.

One of my cousins even went back to live in Detroit, buying a condo in a high-rise downtown, and I think he commutes out to the suburbs to work. The company my brother part-owns is located downtown as well.

The city has been revitalizing, in its own way, bit by corrupt bit. It benefits from having a lot of people who care very deeply about it, people I would never have suspected, like my cousin and my brother and my friend Dan. As much as I think my new home of Grand Rapids has become a major draw for Michigan and a beacon in otherwise troubled seas, the health of the state seems tied directly to its biggest, most infamous city. So, even 200 miles removed from it, I cheer the successes and mourn the setbacks, and watch in wonder to see what will grow up out of the decay.

Crossposted with klech.net