Danelle Morton

I found this website — http://www.forgottendetroit.com — which contains four photographers’ images of the ruined factory buildings in that hard luck city. I wonder why the pictures make me so emotional.

I think it is because they speak to the grandeur of our aspirations of that time, the kind of thing you see in a country that is coming up in the world and wants to make a mark by having public places that inspire.

When you see something like the above, the ravaged ticket concourse from the train station, it makes you feel as though we live in a country in decline and that we ourselves have lost our center. How could we let these beautiful marble columns be defiled by vandals?

Yet there is poetry too, beauty in decay.

When I was growing up in San Francisco, the part of Third Street near where I now live was the city’s industrial zone with steel foundries, ship dry docks and shipyards and the massive complex that contained American Can. That is all in the past now, with just the hulks of the buildings remaining.

Illinois and 20th Streets

I walked around this forlorn area a few days back and was struck by the blunt integrity of these old buildings.

The only active place was a metal recycling facility on the old shipping pier. Every few minutes, another small pick up truck filled over the top with busted appliances and discarded bed springs would come roaring past me headed for the dump some place in this wreck of a building.