Road Trips : Road Trip 98 : Detroit 3
Sunday 25 October 1998 (Detroit MI)
It's a strangely emotional thing for me to drive through Detroit, a place which dramatically illustrates the end result of of racism and corpoarate greed. I realized that the Hudson's building was in some ways a metaphor for the entire city: abandoned, neglected, and a little too big and cumbersome for real adaptive re-use. The massive and majestic train station pictured above is perhaps an even more striking metaphor. It's a beautiful building which sits on the outskirts of downtown, completely abandoned and gutted, almost begging to be put out of its misery because it will never be restored.
I don't mean to suggest that Detroit is begging to be destroyed. There's still life here, despite popular opinion. Scott summed up the city very well with one single statement he kept repeating: there's absolutely no place else like Detroit. And I'm still drawn to the place. Every minute I spend in Detroit makes me crave ten more.
From Windsor ON, downtown looks completely different. The view from the hideous new casino reveals no trace of the dark side of the faded jewel across the river. What it does reveal is just how bad the Detroit waterfront could look in a few years when the casinos open there. Casinos are a really misguided plan for revitalizing a city, methinks. Look what they did for Atlantic City, after all. Thy're insulated environments which feed of the city and give nothing back.
Sort of like the Renaissance Center. And sort of like General Motors, its new tenant.
Time to move on. Scott had to start a new job on Monday and I had to be on my way after another morning drive through a downtown which ones had chain and people and now had one less abandoned department store across the street from the boarded-up Lerner Shop.
