One of America’s latest and greatest shames is arguably the tale of Detroit’s lightning-fast decline. Much of the talk around its recent ruin is often shrugged off as simply being further evidence of what folks have always thought they knew about the city, that it’s dirty, run-down, pocked with abandoned buildings, drugs and extreme violence, that it’s been that way for decades.
The attitude by most of the nation today seems to suggest it’s simply wishing Detroit away, sweeping it under the floor mat as a less than deserving place filled with degenerates, pimps, drug pushers and the poor. Who wants to see that? America seems to be asking. Let it drown in its own used motor oil and sludge off of the American landscape.
But this illusion has not always been the case. Detroit was once one of the most prominent cities in the world, bustling with life, enterprise, a hardy economy and culture galore. Though it’s true it has been suffering a slow bleeding since its small renaissance in the 60s, the city was nonetheless still in much greater shape five years ago than it is today.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and it’s true; often a single image can convey what would take several sentences, if not entire novels, even epics, to write out for folks to understand as much as a picture can convey at a single glimpse. How many words, then, might these staggering street view images from Alex Alsup’s Tumblr page, GooBing Detroit be worth?
Morningside Neighborhood
?Around 7 Mile, West Side
West Golden Gate
Springwells Village
?Patton St., NW Detroit
Hazelridge Between Celestine And MacCray, NE Detroit
Corner Of Thaddeus And S. Leigh St., SW Detroit
Alsup’s blog is a fabulous study of a series of Google and Bing street view pictures illustrating the progression of Detroit’s freefall due to the 2008 banking and housing collapse. GooBing Detroit helps pay witness to and clarifies the assumptions many have made in order to dismiss Detroit. Though it has been a struggling city for some time, it was still making its way in the world before the robber barons in their corporate towers collaborating with the world banks to rig financial markets proved too much for the city.
Just take a look and see for yourself how rapidly sections of the city declined in only five years’ time after the great financial collapse from 2008 to 2013 in what’s being referred to as a “Hurricane Without Water.”
While it may be true that Detroit was a struggling city for some time, it’s easy to see the deathblow this once great metropolis was dealt by the greed and gluttony of the ever-growing, ever-incestuous corporate bodies leeching and preying on the world.
Don’t let them fool you; it’s not that the city could not take care of itself, whether allegedly due to corruption or incompetence, though both those issues have played heavy roles in the city’s demise. Yet in spite of so much of both — traits that most likely exist in nearly any city government to some extent — Detroit could have kept on idling along, if not eventually bolted down the roadway again with a hot rumble.
No, what’s truly killed and continues to feed off of Detroit’s carcass is the corporate hunger of the robber barons. Just like those railroad, iron, steel and coal folks you used to read about in history class, before fierce class struggles finally helped shape this country into something more respectable to workers and human beings. Such struggles are already very much under way.
Americans are witnessing a great cultural molting that will only progress in fight, pull and tug until folks are able to shine and breathe again, until folks can wipe the grime from their faces and get back to being human beings again.
And it’s human beings at work that will be — that in fact already are — rebuilding Detroit by, for, and of the people; by, for and of the communities themselves. Here’s to those forgotten in the belly of civilization, in the navel of society, and here’s to those brave enough stay, to live, to love and to rebuild.
For many more disturbing images, videos, and a whole lot of interesting information on the decline of Detroit, you can visit GooBing Detroit here.
Dylan Hock
is a writer, professor, videographer and social activist. He earned an MFA in Writing from Naropa University in 2003 and has been an Occupier since Oct., 2011, both nationally and locally in Michigan. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology Star Power: The Impact Of Branded Celebrity due out July of 2014 by Praeger. He is also a contributing writer for Take Ten, Addicting Info and Green Action News. Follow him on Google+!
