(As long as I've got the scanner set up). Look at those ears! I tried to catch this pup to bring him to the humane society, but he already had too much wisdom of these tough streets, and shied away.

I am officially out of polaroid film now.

 

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. To see the full gallery of 100+ feral houses I've documented, visit my portfolio site here.


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

So I always thought the wild dogs of Detroit were kind of crazy; roving in packs, many of them part Pit Bull or Rottweiler or German Shepherd. Sure, I've encountered a few truly scary former fighting dogs that seem to have been dumped due to their injuries and a few mutts that seemed rabid, but after a week in Puerto Rico I no longer think having stray dogs all over the place is that big of a deal. I've been to countries before where a few well-fed hounds lounged around in the sun, but I couldn't believe the sheer number of strays we saw in Puerto Rico. I didn't have my Polaroid with me but I still couldn't help taking a picture of this tiny thing we encountered heading up into the mountains near Utuado:

Someone had dumped her some time ago at an isolated scenic overlook that wasn't very scenic. We gave it all the food we had and my wife almost couldn't handle leaving it there. I just didn't have the Spanish to explain to some indifferent veterinarian or dogcatcher-equivalent in the next town that my wife gets very sentimental about tiny, frail creatures that are clearly dying. "Besides," I said to her as the pup mournfully watched us drive away. "You lived in Cambodia. Remember that French restaurant in Phnom Penh where you felt those tiny hands reaching through the wall behind your back begging for scraps? In parts of the world, creatures like that dog are human beings."

There comes a point where you have to accept that there's a tolerable level of cruelty to the universe, or else you just wouldn't be able live with yourself, I thought, considering my gut as I drove up into the mountains and our $135 a night hotel.

The next day we drove all over Puerto Rican coffee country between Utuado and Jayuya, the area where ancient Taino culture was best preserved due to the relative isolation from the coast. It was beautiful country. These were towns where a horse or two was tied up in front of every roadside bar or, in this case, Texaco station:

The roads up there were built about one-and-a-half cars wide, so around every harrowing curve you either meet your doom or another car still just far enough away to cause only a mild jolt of panic. To make matters worse, Puerto Ricans achieve maximum speed up and down the mountains by driving directly in the center of the road. They make Italian drivers look like lost Grandpas navigating 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88s around a church parking lot.

In Jayuya we ate a traditional meal of roast pork, greasy flank steak, pigeon peas, and some fried things, some of which were plantains. Twice-fried plantains (tostones) seem to always come served with this disgusting sauce called "mayoketchup" in which my daughter dipped everything she consumed. About halfway up the mountain she started complaining from the backseat that her stomach hurt. "Keep coloring," we said, busy trying to figure out where we were headed among the endless twists and turns. In the rearview mirror I noticed a car tailgating me with one of those massive roof-mounted dual-bullhorns that seem to be popular among Puerto Rican lunatics who feel compelled to share their apocalyptic visions and salsa music with everyone within a quarter-mile of their vehicle. At a wide spot in the road I pulled over to let him pass, and then went on our way only to find him parked in the middle of the road a mile up, out of his car and waving at us frantically. For all I know he was just making sure I was going to VOTE FOR GOMEZ but I didn't stop, narrowly missing him with half the tires skimming along a slate ridge.

"My stomach really hurts," I heard from the backseat, but I paid no attention because suddenly I was James Fucking Bond in a rented Nissan Sentra, actually living out that fantasy with both hands on the wheel handling those mountain curves at nearly twice the recommended speed. Suck it, Steve McQueen, I thought once I put enough distance between our car and crazy car-roof-mounted dual-bullhorn guy.

That's when the pack of dogs started chasing us.

I've been chased by wild dogs before, but we were going almost 25 mph around those curves and those dogs were still right on our tail. I couldn't shake them. Juniper quit complaining about her stomach long enough to get a laugh or two at the stupid mutts, and I begged my wife to take a picture while I drove. This is what she captured during the confusion:

After a while they got tired, and I looked at my wife: "Are we dragging a dead goat carcass?" We continued down the mountain, but the constant switchbacks and swerves finally took their toll: from the backseat we heard the unmistakable sound of vomit and smelled the pungent stew of sugary orange drink, mayoketchup, and stomach acid. Then we heard the sound again.

A few seconds later we pulled into the roadside parking spot at some old woman's hovel and my daughter was crying on a rock in her underwear, the two of us bathing her with handiwipes when crazy car-roof-mounted dual-bullhorn guy finally pulled up and started shouting at us through his dual bullhorns. I fantasized about the electric sizzle those bullhorns would make if I threw a fistful of vomit into one of them, but the kindly old woman (onto whose parking spot we were squeegeeing what looked like thousand island dressing from our daughter's body) yelled at him to go away and he did, just as two of her neighbors came over to stand around speculating. It was probably the most exciting thing to happen in that parking spot all week.

Eventually we cleaned everything up and drove away, and even though the car had a new smell there was a softness in the air, the softness that comes whenever your child is truly sick and all the whining and complaining is lost and forgotten, and all you can think is how brave she is and how much you love her. I thought back to my own childhood, remembering my father standing at an edge of road on Pike's Peak with a hose in his hand, washing out a car he'd rented that I'd filled with the sludge of pancakes consumed that morning, a story I heard time and time again whenever we spoke of our first big vacation.

I looked at her face in the rearview mirror, redcheeked, recovering. "You'll remember this, kid. I promise."

Vol. One here.

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.

It was raining on the interstate a week ago, and even the five-foot snowpiles lining the median were melting into greasy, gunpowder-colored sludge. Every few miles the snowmelt revealed a secret: a dead deer emerging from the melt like a tundra-bound mastodon, released to rot in the 60 degree weather. I never give much thought to dead deer on the side of the road; maybe a brief lament for the animal's awkward death or perhaps a thought to the human lives inconvenienced by it. But these deer were different, sitting as they were in the worsening gloop of winter, their once-brown hides now mottled gray yet still perfectly preserved as if they all had been killed that very day.

More than once I've walked into an abandoned building only to find the rotting carcass of a dead dog not far from the door. The feral animals, seeking some dignity at the end of lives that afforded little of it, seem to prefer to die indoors. I have also found dead dogs in vacant lots, and even the most dessicated of these corpses reveals some hint of a breed (such as a tuft of Rottweiler hair). The breeds of dogs whose bodies you find in fields or alleys usually tell you they were dumped there after losing an organized fight. Life in this town isn't easy for its people. You can imagine how hard it is on dogs.

Last night I was out walking our own former Detroit street dog (saved one day before his date with the needle), when we happened on a stray. Pinch-faced and skinny, the wild dog was only-slightly skittish. I ordered Wendell to sit by a tree while I approached: calming and petting it while looking for any sign of ownership. I brought it back to our porch where I fed it and then told it to get lost. I glanced out the window twenty minutes later and the stray was still sitting there, looking at me. The temperature dove into the low twenties last night. I begged my wife to close the blinds. "If it's still out there in the morning, I'll bring it to the shelter." But this morning it was gone.

On one of my first house scouting trips to Detroit, a friend gave me a tour of Belle Isle, the massive island park in the river between the city and Canada. He drove me past a barbed-wire fence enclosing overgrown foliage with a dozen albino deer huddled together. "European fallow deer," he said. "They've lived here for generations. They used to run wild on the island but now they're penned off in the abandoned zoo."

"Abandoned zoo?" I was intrigued.

Detroit does still have an operating zoo. A good one, in fact, built on an island of city-owned land two miles north of the city border, within wealthy Oakland County. But for over a century the city operated a separate facility first known as the Belle Isle Zoo (which opened in 1895---the same year the European deer were introduced to the island) and then the Children's Zoo (starting in 1947). In 2002, disgraced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick closed the Belle Isle Children's Zoo despite opposition from the City Council, claiming the pressure of the city's $75 million budget deficit. City council overrode his veto and freed up $700,000 to reopen the zoo. In that year's November election 88 percent of Detroit voters approved a nonbinding ballot initiative to reopen it. Kilpatrick ignored both and shuttered the zoo, shipping off the animals and calling the move temporary. "We need to really figure out what we want there," Kilpatrick said. Of course the "temporary" closure became permanent. Kilpatrick used money appropriated for the reopening of the zoo to fund a "Nature Center" on the most remote and unvisited part of the 982-acre island, including $1 million for a brand new enclosure for the island's dwindling herd of 20 fallow deer.

Seven companies submitted bids to build it, and the city building authority (run by the mayor's cousin), selected a company that had never before built an animal enclosure against the bids of several experienced zoo contractors. The first act of the winning bidder was to subcontract the construction to a company owned by the former mayor's longtime best friend (and fellow convicted felon) Bobby Ferguson [source], a man who has benefited from an untold number of similar schemes over the years (to the tune of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars). That is how business is done in the city of Detroit. And these are some of the results:

Miles and miles of perfectly adequate chain link animal enclosures abandoned so the former mayor's friend could pocket $1 million to build one on the opposite side of the island for 20 inbred European deer.

The Belle Isle Zoo has been closed now for over six years. Many people from this area have fond memories of visiting it as children. There were elephants here. Bears. Monkeys. Tigers. Some of the zoo's big cats were rumored to have been rescued from lives guarding Detroit crackhouses. In 1980, the zoo was completely rebuilt to adhere to more modern ideas of natural habitats with a lengthy elevated boardwalk and African-style architectural elements throughout. 22 years later it would all be left to rot:

Kilpatrick lied about this zoo as effortlessly as he lied about nearly everything during his tenure. He once put forth some cockamamie idea about turning the zoo into an X-Games style park with skateboarding and "zip lines." But that will never happen. It will sit like this until the scrappers find their way in, followed by the graffiti artists and the drunks and vandals, though the place is a block from the island's main police station and not easy to enter (it's a maze of 10-foot barbed-wire fencing) .

I did not go there with any intention to trespass. I often take the dog for hikes in the woods on Belle Isle. Inside of him a wild hunter sits dormant, and it is necessary to occasionally make him feel useful. Earlier this year a pack of wild dogs were harassing us, keeping their distance. They were smaller dogs than the ones that attacked us at the playground years ago, and once we started chasing them they led us right into the abandoned zoo. Inside the zoo, we followed their tracks through a maze of fences and walls. I could see that everything remained much as it had been left. The felid cages still had trees nailed to the walls for the scratching of giant claws. The monkey house sat silent, still smelling slightly of its occupation.

The dog loved the smells of the old zoo, rooting around every corner of the cages or the big cat enclosure. He was the Teddy Roosevelt of German Shorthaired Pointers, the Hemingway of birddogs: a big game hunter, sniffing at ghosts.


It was strange to stand inside the enclosures and look up to where countless people would have watched whatever animal dwelt there.

Even stranger were 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.

Every building and every enclosure chokes with overgrown plants in the summer. Dead trees have fallen to crush the boardwalk in places. The buildings are mostly intact, filled with snake and spider exhibits, educational displays. Scrapping damage seems light, though I do think the copper is gone. Signs inside the once-heated felid cages still warn KEEPER IN THE YARD.

A brush in a big cat cage sits next to an empty 40oz.


An animal transport trailer slowly rots into the ground.

From their earliest days, we teach our children about wild things. Even as more and more of them grow up in cities or suburbs, seemingly isolated from anything truly wild, we tell them stories and read them books about elephants and bears, monkeys and tigers. When you're a kid, almost all the good books are about these wild things, most anthropomorphized and friendly. To those of us reading these stories, this obsession with the wild might seem pointless or silly. But to a kid these pages are an introduction to our world and its amazing capacity for strangeness and beauty. We take our kids to the zoo---even ignore the unnerving vacant glaze in the eyes of penned polar bears---because we know there is nothing quite so magical to those tiny minds as seeing what was fiction become suddenly so real.

But in time, of course, every child will see a zoo for what it is: a place where nothing is real, a place where wild animals cannot be wild, where every instinct is curbed by confinement or scheduled feedings.

This place will never be a zoo again. It is home to a pack of wild dogs now. A reclusive badger or two. Red foxes and red squirrels. A bluejay and a cardinal. A mile away, the fallow deer sit in their million-dollar home, but within the zoo I still find a broad-tined antler shed by a buck during his temporary stay. Half buried in the ground, it is already starting to rot.

We take our kids to the zoo and think we're teaching them about wildness, but really we're teaching them about dominion. A lesson in the power of fences. While all the time, along our highways, outside our very windows, wild things are there. Waiting.