Nature Begins To Eerily Reclaim The Abandoned Neighborhoods Of Detroit

"A daunting and surreal image of a city once bustling with activity is depicted by an anonymous blogger (because of his employment as a writer elsewhere) who writes DetroitBlog.org.

In his (or her) report about a city emptied out by the economy (the median home value there has been reported to be a mere $18,000), he writes, 'The city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures.'

His eloquence is articulately haunting, 'Detroit is far greener than most major cities, as seen in the runaway vines swarming old mansions in Brush Park, trees sprouting from the rooftops of skyscrapers, tall grass fields encircling the lone house still standing on a residential block, and abandoned homes swallowed by shrubs thriving unchecked.

Whole neighborhood blocks cleared of houses by arson and bulldozers have reverted to urban prairies, visible in satellite photos as unusually large green patches in the middle of the inner city. Sidewalks vanish beneath creeping grasses, while aluminum fences between homes become entwined with the branches of dozens of saplings growing as high as the droopy utility wires.

Alleys in parts of the city start resembling hiking trails as growth from the yards on both sides narrows their width. All around town, even smaller empty lots become thick, grassy fields, because the City doesn’t often mow in easements and right-of-way areas, allowing weeds to grow 3 feet high.'

He goes on to describe how half of Detroit’s population fled to the suburbs and rural areas over the last half-century, leaving behind an irony difficult to grasp: the city itself has become more rural, 'with wild animals and lush green plants coexisting with an industrial, modern metropolis.' Centuries of nature, originally driven back by civilization, have aggressively reasserted itself in recent decades, reclaiming abandoned land.

This blogger says it has gotten to the point that civic groups over the years have floated the ideas of farming some of these areas, 'reminiscent of Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree’s program that turned city plots into potato farms to feed the hungry in the 1890s.'

He goes on, 'Abandoned industrial sites like the Fisher Body 21 plant, the Studebaker plant, the Continental Aluminum plant and the Detroit Screw Works plant have been overrun by trees growing through walls and roofs, impervious to the chemicals and toxins left behind.

Even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers, with windows left open to the elements, become giant pigeon coops, with upper floors covered in inches of pigeon droppings, as generation after generation of pigeons live uninterrupted by humans in the middle of a major downtown. Buildings like the Wurlitzer, the Lafer and the Broderick house hundreds of pigeons between them.'

He says that the most visible wildlife in the city are the roving packs of wild dogs in Detroit neighborhoods. 'Groups of usually four to seven dogs, each litter progressively wilder and stranger-looking than their predecessors, roam through even well-kept neighborhoods, occasionally making the news when they attack someone, usually children or mail carriers.'

Even pheasants have become commonplace in some of the metro area’s grassy fields, along with foxes, opossums, turkeys, roosters and raccoons, many of which have been spotted deep inside the city, bravely roaming through downtown locales.

The starkness he describes sounds like some familiar science fiction movies. 'The gradual greening of Detroit adds to its fascination as a place of contrasts, where century-old mansions share borders with burned-out crack-houses, where urbane lofts exist in the same city as crumbling homes resembling shacks in the deep neighborhoods, where unrestrained nature is intertwined with the sharp lines and angles of the cement and steel of factories, where blocks of skyscrapers stand atop a sea of concrete only a mile away from grassy expanses and wildflower-filled meadows whose small flowers bloom as colorful as any up north.'

Are things in this country as bad as we hear on the news? In places like Detroit, it seems progress is now the loser and Nature, the ultimate winner."

ORIGINAL SOURCE: www.examiner.com