I've shared plenty here about feral dogs; I have heard people here use the word "feral" because so many of Detroit's strays learn to survive long-term on their own. Feral, used in this sense, means they have reverted to a wild state, as from domestication. Our word feral comes from the Latin root fera, or "wild beast," but it also has a connection to another Latin word, feralis, literally: belonging to the dead.

I've seen "feral" used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn't also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.

Like some of the dogs I've seen using these houses as shelter (I followed a whole pack into #9 last week), these houses are reverting to a wild state, as from domestication, a word derived itself from domesticus (the Latin for belonging to the domus, or house). Now these houses are feralis. They belong only to the dead.

This is just a handful of the photos I have of such places. I have dozens more (the lighting conditions were fairly similar in this selection taken over the course of three summers). Among the abandoned houses of Detroit, the lucky ones aren't burned completely or bulldozed, but allowed to be consumed by the foliage once meant to beautify them. This is something that has obviously been fascinating me lately. We might see ghosts of lives lived well within these walls, sentimentalize the structures and feel sad that they have been allowed to go wild. . .

But to borrow from Whitman: ". . .as to you [House] I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me,/I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips,/ I reach to the polish'd breasts of melons."

* * * * *


These images come from the period of 2006-2009, and most of these structures are now gone. Visit this post to see more images of feral houses that were taken in late 2009-2010.


Buy affordable limited prints of Feral House #7 and Feral House #13 at 20x200.

Last winter I wrote a photo essay on the abandoned Belle Isle Zoo. Apparently the idea of an abandoned zoo captured a lot of readers' imaginations, and over the months I have seen a lot of traffic from people searching for photos of it.

Many of the photos in that essay were taken over a year ago; last week I went back inside to see the zoo at the height of a new summer, seven years after it officially closed its gates. Please click on any of the images below to get a higher-resolution, more detailed view of each scene:

I kept gagging on the husks of dead insects: enormous spider webs stretched everywhere and the zoo is visited so little these days the spiders have no reason not to build their webs across doorways or the extensive boardwalk. Disgust commingled with guilt. Who was I to destroy so much hard work?

After glancing at the giant photo hanging in the old arachnid display, I envisioned a horror movie where a group of exotic spiders escaped when the zoo was closed, breeding into some terrible mutated species native only to these overgrown acres; around the corner I would discover the dessicated corpses of a dozen suburban teenagers, scrappers, and douchebags like me with DSLRs still hanging from their necks, all suspended on webs near the monkey cages. By then it would be too late: I would find my own arms stuck, and the last thing I would see are the staggered eyes and quivering tusks of the tapir-sized tarantula scuttling over to suck the juices right out of me.

Of course, there would also be forgotten lions lingering on the overgrown savanna for that last shock in the horror dénouement, beasts in dire need of meat:

I wrote of the "plants growing inside each enclosure, non-native species probably chosen carefully long ago to resemble the flora of wherever the animal was from but not to tempt them into nibbling. Even a simulacrum of wildness, abandoned, will become truly wild given enough time."

There is the bitter irony of this place. Zookeepers consulted with botanists; certain species of plants were ordered specifically and planted to their instructions. These enclosures designed to pen captive wildlife and captivate humanity were carefully planned to resemble wilderness down to every excruciating detail.

And every year that passes, abandonment allows that design to become more fully realized than any of its designers could have imagined. Seven years of a silent Darwinian struggle have taken place here among the flora. Sunlight. Water. Autumn. Spring.

There is a certain comfort here. The earth is fine. Nature is patient. The plants are just waiting. It is the monuments we build, the paths we tread that are endangered.

Last week I read in the morning paper about a street here where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. The reporter called it a "ghost street." Yesterday I found myself in the area. Other than an errant sofa, the street was completely empty, almost peaceful. I took a photo of every house on the north side of one block and then stitched them together. If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006.

Click on the image below to load a large file in your browser and then zoom and scroll right. This is the entire north side of the block: every home, every lot. You'll notice the fourth and seventh homes appear occupied. Pay attention to the state of all the other houses rather than the terrible stitching job:

This is just another virtually-abandoned block in Detroit. Eventually the burned houses will collapse; the boarded-up houses will burn. Someday it will all be green.

But this is what it looks like today.

*UPDATE*

I went back and took pictures of the houses on the south side of the road, just to show the extent of vacancy on this single block. Again, click on the image and try to ignore the stitching job:

During our most recent trip to Cincinnati, I had a few hours to myself and walked from our downtown hotel up towards the hills and ended up stumbling across one of the strangest places I have ever seen. It was an entire abandoned neighborhood, Baltimore-style row houses built on tricky terrain: Hamsterdom from The Wire surrounded by hills.

Detroit, it seems, is far from the only city to boast gut-wrenching displays of urban decay.
One of the buildings was different from the others, built of limestone instead of brick with the word "Glencoe" carved above the door. Back at the hotel I googled that to find what this place was. The Glencoe building was once a hotel/boarding house. Over the years, this neighborhood tucked into a hidden valley was known as Little Bethlehem, the Standish Apartments, and the Glencoe Place Redevelopment Project. When I asked a nearby mailman about it he'd called it “The Hole” and said it was "a real bad place awhile back." I found confirmation of that nickname online. The half dozen blocks were built in the late nineteenth century by a developer who was angry that the wealthy citizens of nearby Mt. Auburn wouldn't let him build a hotel there, so out of spite he built low-income housing on their doorstep. Preservationists hoping for potential redevelopment struggled to gain historic designation (and its tax benefits) because they couldn't identify a single famous former resident or even identify an architect. After it was built the neighborhood soon became a slum, and was redeveloped under an urban renewal project in the 1960s (providing the strange plazas and incongruous midcentury streetlights). The rowhouses once again fell into major disrepair in the 1990s and have been vacant ever since, despite recent plans to turn them into condominiums (stalled indefinitely due to the economy).

This was spraypainted on nearly every door. I figured there was a 20 percent chance some guy with a sniper rifle was up on a roof watching me the whole time just waiting to be able to say, "Well, he can't say I didn't warn him." Highly effective.

It was eerie, how quiet it was. I didn't see another soul for the hour or so I spent strolling around in here until a young mother holding her child's hand silently cut through the neighborhood heading uphill.

So over the weekend I went back into that elementary school currently being scrapped, headed straight for the library and recovered another pile of books. Shining my flashlight on the shelves I realized that though I'd said the library was intact, in fact someone had gone through and removed most of the newer books. What remained on the shelves were books from the first 6o of the school's 80+ year history. Now I regularly scour thrift stores and used book stores for rare treasures like these; in my zeal I failed to notice the lack of newer books. So either the budget did not allow new books over the past 20 years, or someone moved the newer books to a different school four years ago when the school closed, or someone like me had already gone through and removed the newer books. I dislike the vast majority of kids' books published these days, so to me it felt like they left all the best ones. Others would certainly disagree. You can click on this image to get a big version to see just some of the books I salvaged:

There are enough terrifying Nixon-era children's books in there to sustain that blog feature for another year. I only took picture books that my four-year old would enjoy; there are still hundreds---maybe thousands---of books on the shelves of the library. I also took a set a wooden blocks from a classroom with an exterior window being used as an entrance/exit by the scrappers. I am concerned that the elements will quickly ruin everything in that classroom. But I made the mistake of letting the kid see them:

Also on this trip I took stock of what else remained. Since the last post I have located a non-profit community organization that would love and appreciate some of the items inside, particularly the high-quality Community Playthings wooden kitchen sets (stoves, sinks, refrigerators, washer/dryers), art supplies, books, furniture and computers. I hope to organize an effort to recover some of these items before they get ruined or scrapped. I've already received several e-mails and comments from some folks who went out and done a bit of this themselves over the weekend. If anyone in the area still wants to help, e-mail me (sweetjuniper@gmail.com). I may also put some of the better books on eBay or etsy and donate ALL proceeds to the Georgia Street Community Garden. Mark just e-mailed me to say that due in part to the unsolicited generosity of Sweet Juniper readers, the garden was able to pay the fee to file the paperwork to become a 501(c)(3) non-profit, which will allow greater access to grants and allow donations to be tax-deductible.

I really appreciated all the nice things said in the comments to the last post, but I want to emphasize that I'm just an old vulture in this whole mess. Every day better people than me are working with the kids in this school district: teachers, social workers, volunteers, and even responsible administrators. But they too are victims of the overall system. I am of the same cynical belief of The Wire creator David Simon, who compares institutions like the public school system in Baltimore to Olympian gods in a Greek drama: unstoppable, unquestionable purveyors of tragedy. In Detroit, our institutions are more like a pantheon of even-crueler Scandinavian deities bent wholly towards the destruction of the human spirit, the limitless potential in each child. But even within these institutions, there is always some room for small human triumphs, and I want to commend those working within the system to do good. In the future, I hope to write more about the small triumphs amid all this tragedy.

Look at me. You people are going to turn me into some kind of community activist. Please stop me before I buy a pair of Birkenstocks.

The first theft is the easiest. I go back in after months of thinking about it and walk out with several boxes of things that do not belong to me. A man fixing his roof stops hammering to watch me. As I try to make my getaway, the car gets stuck in the snow. I am a lousy criminal.

After I finally dig the car out, I drive away from the middle school in which I have just been trespassing. Built in the 1960s in the international style, none of the floor-to-ceiling windows are intact. Earlier I'd walked through one of those windows right into the principal's office, where four decades' worth of report cards lay scattered on the floor. There was a stack of yearbooks on the secretary's desk: 2007, the last year of classes before everyone just walked away. I flipped through the faces of the kids whose presence once made this building a school. I found a banker's box and began gathering what it was I was there to collect.

A few months later and I find myself stealing again. I am in what must have been a records room for a K-6 elementary school built in the 1920s. The floor is covered in paperwork that dates back to the 1940s. My flashlight on the attendance records highlights a name "Kermit Nowicki" [last name changed] born in 1946. A baby boomer. I flip through the rest of the names and wonder where these people are today, old now and off in some suburban life so far from the 1950s city they once knew with backyards and alleys full of neighborly noise and activity and white kids in all the streets, milk bottles on the porches. Kermit missed a few weeks in January for the mumps. Would he find it strange to know I was sitting in the dark with the history of his body pressed against one of these chairs, the history of his warmth missing from these rooms?

I find a box filled with copies of checks written out to suppliers in some ancient calligraphic splendor; $7 checks written to the power company in 1958 and $12 checks written by the principal to pay for a month's worth of milk. I stuff a few checks in my pocket. Later, on the floor: a colored pencil sketch of Martin Luther King Jr. I take that too.

The bathrooms still have their marble stalls. The copper has been ripped from the walls behind each fixture, sledgehammered fissures in the brickwork. The scrappers have left notes to each other on the walls, gloating over what's already been taken. "$5,000 strong copper bitch." Just a few weeks before this trespass, a principal at an operating school in this same district sent home a letter with her students pleading for their parents to send toilet paper and light bulbs to school with their children. The school I'm in was closed so recently that only now are the smoke detectors running low on batteries. The devices are chirping birds in the hallways and classrooms, with songs like cooling embers.

The library is completely intact, with books dating back to the 1930s:

The picture book section is filled with the kinds of books I love to read to my daughter. I have seen what happens to books in these school libraries.

I grab and take as many picture books with me as can fit in my arms. I am a thief. But that all started months ago.

* * * * *

After my first visit to the shattered middle school, I am haunted by what I found in one office: hundreds of file folders containing student psychological examinations complete with social security numbers, addresses, and parent information. I sat and thumbed through them. Many contained detailed histories of physical and sexual abuse, stories of home lives so horrifying I still can't get them out of my head: sibling rape, torture, neglect that defies belief. The detailed reports explained emotional impairments, learning disabilities. There was another box full of IEPs. The dates revealed that many of these students are still in the school system somewhere. I found several of their faces in the 2007 yearbook.

I spend the next few months trying to track down someone who cares. I send e-mails to the school's former principal, offering to go back and collect these records for her or destroy them. She never responds. I call my mom, a retired special education teacher and erstwhile administrator to determine the extent of malfeasance. Then I call the school district's legal department and leave voice mails warning them of the liability of this gross violation of student privacy. I never receive a response. I track down the school psychologist to some address in Troy. Nothing. It turns out a daily newspaper reported abandoned records like these within many of the 33 schools closed in 2007 and the district did nothing. No one is responsible. Someone else was supposed to destroy them. The company that had been paid to secure the school never did its job.

So I did it. I went back in to destroy them so they would no longer be just sitting there on the floor for anyone to find.

* * * * *

I have read a stolen book to my daughter every night for the past few weeks. Last night, I pulled out the charging card from the first page of a book called The Boy and the Forest, and scanned through the names of the children who'd checked it out all the way back to 1964. Steven. Suzy. Kelvin. Natinia. Here was the history of a school, of a neighborhood, of a city. I write posts like this and the e-mails start coming: I went to that school. Let me tell you about the neighborhood back in the 1950s; and, Why don't you do something about it other than take pictures?

This time I did do something else: I stole stories. Some I hope will never get told. Others I hope to tell time and time again.

_________
I have been documenting the waste at recently-vacated, unsecured Detroit Public Schools for Vice Magazine for the past year or so. This month a seven-page spread appears in the U.K. print edition and some of the photos are online. The photos may get picked up by some of the international editions but for now the print version is only available in the U.K. I have been holding on to a lot of these photos all year and I will probably share a few more in the next few weeks.

I spent a day last week with a writer from Time Magazine showing him around Detroit. He was here to do a story about ways this city might reinvent itself, so a few days before he arrived I put together a tour of the city with that in mind. I was kind of nervous---this was Time Magazine, after all: the storied weekly of Henry Luce and James Agee and the "person of the year." I know no one really reads it anymore unless they're waiting for a root canal or a colonoscopy, but still: Time Magazine. It's a big deal. So I met the writer outside my wife's office and welcomed him into my filthy car. He was surprisingly young and all I could think when I shook his hand was, "Dude, you were born in the EIGHTIES weren't you?" He was only in town for a few hours and the mayor had just stood him up, so I had the enormous responsibility of trying to explain this insanely complicated city before he jetted back to Park Slope. This is how the mainstream media works, I guess: to write a story on the 11th-largest city in the nation they parachute in a guy who's never been there before for a few hours WITHOUT A CAR and let some carpetbagging hipster douchebag show him around town. What pertains to laws and sausages, it seems, applies also to Time Magazine articles when it comes to seeing how they're made.

To be fair, the writer was incredibly aware of how unfair this situation was. He was bright and fully engaged and fascinated by everything I showed him. I can only hope the time I spent with him will make the story something more than if he had been stuck walking around downtown trying to make sense of a 138.8-square-mile city from a few square blocks of vacant storefronts, abandoned skyscrapers, and a Hard Rock Cafe. As I drove him around town telling him all my favorite anecdotes ("That's where my kid and I got attacked by wild dogs!", "I was surrounded by wild dogs there once, too!", "Some wild dogs killed a homeless guy in that alley!") and spelling out my thoughts about why things here are the way they are, he was all, "You know, I appreciate all this information, but I have maybe 1,000 words if I'm lucky. . ." I told him I didn't expect him to write about everything I was showing him; you can't fit a dissertation on the side of a coffee mug. It can be such a challenge to capture the truth of a place; I have been hacking away at it on this blog for years because if there's anything I've learned from reading the great writers, it's that if you can capture the truth of any place you can reach the truth of every place. And if I was successful in showing this guy that Detroit does have some hope of reinventing itself, then maybe there is hope for every other place in these dark times.

But asking me to show you around Detroit is sort of like asking a devout Mormon to show you around Las Vegas: you're not going to see what the convention bureau or the city boosters would prefer. I wanted him to see up close all the different ways Detroiters have reacted to the issues of deteriorating housing stock, lost neighborhoods, drugs, loss of community, crime, abandonment, and abundant green space. I took him to the Heidelberg Project, of course, and then showed him smaller neighborhood projects like the Powerhouse I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

These are people, I told the reporter, who could live anywhere in the world, but they've chosen to settle here and become a part of this community and garden and farm and live a kind of life that would be almost impossible in any other major city. I drove him down the main commercial drag of the old Polish neighborhood that now looks like it never recovered from a nuclear blast. I showed him the operating automobile plant that years ago required a vibrant part of the old Polish neighborhood to be torn down, but also explained that the Chevy Volt---the plug-in electric car that represents much of Detroit's future---would be built there. And then, about a mile away, I showed him the neighborhood that surrounds Jane Cooper School:

This spot marks the far western edge of Georgia Street, one of the most devastated and forlorn parts of the city. I wanted to show him how the city might tear out the infrastructure and let huge tracts of the city return to nature, as other shrinking cities (such as Youngstown, Ohio) have done. I took him into the school and I could tell he had never seen anything like that before. "This is about as bad as it gets," I said, driving a mile or so to the far eastern end of Georgia Street, past shabby houses alone in their blocks and forlorn-looking storefront churches, heading to another community garden.

I heard about this garden from a friend who'd read about it on a local internet message board. She sent me the garden's blog and I arranged to meet the guy behind it that afternoon. When we arrived we found a block that looked like nothing else we'd seen all day: three vacant lots had been transformed into a well-kept garden, and at the center was a huge white movie screen with a motley collection of chairs facing it. Across the street was another vacant lot and the beginning of a small fruit orchard. Waiting for us was Mark Covington, the neighborhood hero who started all this:

He was one of the coolest people I've ever met. Last year, after the 37-year-old Detroiter lost his job cleaning massive oil tanks down in Toledo he noticed the trash-strewn vacant lot a few doors down from the house where he lives with his mother and grandmother and decided to clean it up and turn it into a garden. After negotiating the necessary permits, he recruited some neighborhood kids and even started receiving all kinds of help from people throughout metro Detroit who learned about his project through an online message board. Within a matter of months the garden was flourishing, as were his plans to do more. He started movie nights for kids and movie nights for adults. He gave away school supplies. It was the sort of outreach that patchouli-soaked non-profits requiring boards and grants and employees hope to accomplish, but this was just a guy, his best friend, a few people from the neighborhood, and a bunch of people he met on the internet. For one dollar they bought an abandoned corner store with an attached house that they plan to turn into a community center for the kids and a general store for the neighborhood that sells healthy food to supplement the free produce they get from the garden (they still need to pay a few thousand dollars in back taxes to get the property). "We were sitting here in the garden on the first of the month," he said, "And that path heads right through here towards the only grocery store over a mile away. Who were all these people walking over there at all hours of the day and night? That's when we came up with the idea to open a store here in the neighborhood." As we stood around listening to Mr. Covington, people from the neighborhood walking past greeted him warmly. "I remember when I was a kid this was a real community," he said. "We're bringing that back."

If you put Mr. Covington in a designer suit, from a block away you might mistake his silhouette for that of our former mayor, but make no mistake: in his blue jeans and work gloves he has proven himself to be everything that man was not. His selflessness is evident above all else. Where the former mayor exploited racial and regional divisions, Mr. Covington has exploited our common humanity and inspired black and white people from other neighborhoods and even the suburbs to come help reestablish some hope in this tiny sliver of Detroit.

The Time Reporter didn't get to meet our current mayor but I'm so glad I was able to introduce him to this unemployed man who---in a perfect world---would be the kind of person who leads us. The reporter asked, "Obviously Detroit is going through a lot of hard times right now, how do you see the city reinventing itself?"

Mr. Covington thought for a moment, shrugged, and pointed to the vacant lots he'd turned into gardens that feed the bodies and souls of his neighborhood. "This," he said. "On every vacant lot."

* * * * *

When we got back into the car, the reporter and I were speechless, having traveled from one end of Georgia Street to find Mark Covington at the other, to go from the worst kind of despair to the most inspiring kind of hope in just a short few blocks. "To be honest," he says, "Most of the people I interview are assholes. I don't get many interviews like that."

I had to pick up the kids at my wife's office and said to my daughter, "Say hi to Alex, he writes for TIME MAGAZINE" as though this was something that should have impressed her. She might have done something other than glare at him suspiciously if I had lied and said that he was in charge of feeding Muno on the set of Yo Gabba Gabba ("What's Foofa like in real life?"). Together we visited a school for pregnant teens that houses a working farm and my daughter pitched a fit because she couldn't see the pony. Driving away, I pointed at a nearby daycare center surrounded by barbed wire and covered with misshapen folk art depictions of Dora the Explorer and Mickey Mouse and said, "See that? THAT's where I'm going to send you all day if you keep this up." This is how we roll in Detroit, Time Magazine.

Thinking goats were as good as ponies, I drove straight to my friend's neighbors' goat farm just a few blocks from the casino with LED-light display that resembles Biff's from Back to the Future 2. In the shadow of that building the goats that weren't bashing their brains out totally came up to say hi.

"The casinos are part of how the mayor's office will tell you we are reinventing this city, but these goats are a lot more important," I said while getting my own kids out of the car. A homeless man pushing a baby stroller full of sheet metal ductwork walked down the middle of the road. "It's an interesting place," I said to the reporter here to write a story about it. "That's why we live here."

After we dropped the grateful reporter off at a cab stand and watched him get whisked back to the airport before we could even merge back into traffic, I said to my daughter in the back seat, "I saw a beautiful garden today, Juney. When the weather gets a little nicer, we're going to spend some time over there planting stuff, okay?"

"Okay pops," she said, and we drove home.