Another bad week, news-wise, for the drive to preserve Detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers.

There’s this:

In a sharp memorandum sent to the Detroit City Council and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Auditor General Joseph Harris called the mayor’s plan to renovate the abandoned Michigan Central Depot and turn it into the new headquarters for the Police Department a “fiscal pipe dream.”

The four-page letter questions the wisdom of retrofitting the 91-year-old building to meet the Police Department’s needs, the fiscal impact on the central business district of moving the current headquarters out of the area and whether the city will be able to rehab the building without raising taxes as the mayor has promised.

But more importantly, this:

The demolition of the Statler-Hilton Hotel on Washington Boulevard will cost up to $7 million and could start later this year unless a development firm can be found to restore the 18-story structure, a city official said.

I knew this Superbowl was going to do more harm than good. There are indications that a whole lot of familiar buildings will be gone just to try to impress a bunch of out-of-town media for one single day two years hence.

Even if every single abandoned downtown building were miraculously renovated and occupied by the time the Superbowl comes, the city will still get horrendous news coverage because of the simple fact that downtown is still an island surrounded by miles and miles of rotting ghetto neighborhoods that have seen zero improvement over the years. Most of these journalists are going to venture away from the limited routes that the city prefers visitors stick to, and once they get a look at what’s in Detroit outside of downtown, they’ll have a whole non-Superbowl angle they can milk for days. Just wait until one of them gets lost somewhere. The “I almost died” articles will be picked up on the AP wire and sent everywhere. And no amount of demolition is going to stop that from happening.

The city’s going to wake up the day after, with litter everywhere, tourists fleeing in droves, and many landmarks replaced by gravel lots, with Detroit in the same shape it was in before. And then what? What will be gained, apart from a one-time influx of tourist dollars? The city will be bleaker, and even more abandoned, with even less history remaining.

Friday night: The Bronx + The Well + band rehearsal beers + nasty late-night Pabst at the Comet bar = very bad buzz. Pabst, that ghastly swill, has a way of causing everyone to start bickering in a drunken way everytime we drink it. Awful. They fired our favorite bartender a few days earlier. Even more awful. Then the hipsters started arriving, trying to act ironic. Argh! Staggered to the Magic Stick and ate some booze-sop pizza, then sped down Woodward, home.

This weekend’s explorations were a bust as far as I’m concerned. Whatever streak of luck we had in the first two months of the year has evaporated. The past few weeks have brought problems galore. A couple weeks ago, while exiting a small opening in a building in Capital Park (results of this still to be posted), three people appeared out of nowhere and started snapping my photo with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens. Other than a cop waiting outside the building, nothing else could strike me as quite as alarming. Who the hell were they, and why were they there? I mean, WTF?

Then this weekend some menacing jerk approached us as we sat in the parked car and started snapping pics and threatening us. What the hell?!? I think he saw us scoping out a building he may or may not own, I’m not sure. He was incoherent. We drove off before things escalated. The week before, as mentioned earlier, someone threatened to shoot me. So needless to say, my brazen confidence in urban exploration has all but vanished for now, and every time I turn a corner in D-town it’s with great trepidation.

So this weekend we and our frazzled nerves had to settle for the Fisher Body 21 auto plant, one of the most explored and, to me, least visually interesting (but also one of the safest, relatively speaking) places to crawl around in town.

The 85-year-old Fisher Body plant is the kind of setting out-of-town filmmakers go to when they try to create an image of a post-apocalyptic industrial town. It’s a typical abandoned factory, with all sorts of giant metal things strewn about, and eerie dripping water sounds, and broken windows and gloominess everywhere, especially on a cloudy, grey, early spring day. There were stalactites on the ceiling, and strange calcium blobs on the floor, trying to be stalagmites but spreading out in a stump instead.

I foolishly forgot to bring my tripod, so the majority of my photos turned out blurry. Almost all of the shots that turned out OK were the ones I didn’t really care about anyway. At one point we saw others walking in there, at a distance, and soon after, as we stood on an open ledge on the second floor, we saw them circling the plant in their car, with what appeared to be a video camera pointed at us. We waved at them. For two guys trying like hell to be secretive and anonymous, we’re suddenly the most photographed and filmed urban explorers ever.

Went to the roof, tried to climb the rickety ladder of the water tower, but the bottom was detached and would have left a climber swinging in the wind, dangling several stories up. I gave up on that idea. I tried to get some skyline shots, but the combination of dense fog and whitewashing clouds spoiled even that.

The professional, rational, and well-reasoned behavior of Detroit’s governing officials continues to be a shining example to other cities:

Councilwomen Kay Everett and Sharon McPhail exchanged heated words during the public meeting Wednesday morning at the Coleman Young Municipal Building.
The exchange started when Everett appeared to be irritated with McPhail’s request to move forward with the voting. Everett reportedly wanted to wait.

Everett, who was heading the meeting, eventually gaveled TV crews to shut their cameras off so that she and McPhail could settle their differences, according to the station’s reports.
A security guard stood between the two women to apparently prevent them from doing any physical harm to one another.

This weekend’s city explorations began on several unlucky notes. I tried to hop a loose fence bordering a Merchants Row project, but I got halfway across it and it flipped me over, dropping me with great force to the pavement directly on my formerly broken collarbone. Well, at least I know it’s fully healed. Got up filthy and shocked, and explored a couple of buildings on the west side of Woodward, including what had been Butler’s Shoes, where we found graffiti from the 1940s on the wall in the employees’ area and pages of Vogue magazine from the 50s taped to pillars. Graffiti obviously reflects the time in which it was written, and the walls here were no different. “Mumford is the best high school” is a typical example. Others featured doodles, caricatures, dates, people’s names, jokes, and not a single obscenity was to be found anywhere. The rest of the buildings were useless to us, as they had been stripped clean in preparation for lofts projects.

Next, the building we originally had intended to get into turned out to be guarded by a man who basically threatened to shoot me once he discovered me poking around, so we reluctantly gave up on that idea and headed to Park Avenue by default.

The Charlevoix building, a 12-story, beaux-arts structure completed in 1905, sits just north of the Park Avenue building, yet another abandoned structure in the area. The rear of the structure serves as an illegal dump for tires, bricks and an abandoned car. The only people I’ve ever seen lingering around it are hobos and winos passing through the alley next to it.

It was easy enough getting into the building, but once inside we discovered a huge impediment to our explorations – some clown had systematically removed nearly all of the iron staircases that led from each floor to the one above it. Standing at the ground floor at the foot of the staircase you can see straight up to the top floor. The only way up was to scale the edge of the wall where a small piece of iron remained somewhat attached, or take one of the totally rusty, damaged fire escapes up. The problem with those is most were missing several steps, and the steps they had were either loose or fully detatched on one end, and the handrails were often severed, proving useless in providing any sense of grip. Everything else rattled when touched.

But we were here and so we figured we’d take it one floor at a time, and give up when it became impossible to go any farther up.

This was by far the most foolish exploration we’ve embarked on, and without a doubt the most dangerous. On each floor we had to go back and forth and examine both the side and back fire escapes to determine which one had the most remaining steps, and decide between them. Often we’d spend a few minutes debating whether to continue going up. But each time we did head up, clinging to the wall or to the iron connecting the escape to the building. It was harrowing.

At one point one of the steps on the fire escape we were walking on gave way, nearly sending one of us plunging eight stories below. On other steps we could hear small pieces of metal breaking off the fire escape and crashing through the steps below us. It was totally dumb of us to be there.

The location of the building afforded a unique view of some of its neighbors, such as the Detroit Building, and it gave us close-ups (left) of the strange relief sculpture on the Park Avenue Building.

It’s common knowledge that parts of the city have reverted to a prairie-type situation, accompanied by an invasion of wildlife normally not seen south of M-59. Pheasants are generally the most commonly noted wildlife, but this was the first time I found a racoon, in a downtown skyscraper no less, on the seventh floor. Luckily for my nerves upon discovering him in a closet, he had recently died.

The upper floors had been wholly devoted to unions, and had housed a number of small union locals with names like the Detroit Theater Employees Local B-179 and the Film Exchange Employees Local B-25, as well as a Hughes and Hatcher workers’ union.

The higher we went, the more building materials had fallen from the ceilings and walls, revealing the skeleton of the structure. A 100-year-old building left rotting and open to the elements doesn’t age well, and this was structurally suspect throughout. We got to the roof, which sagged under our feet in spots and had holes in others. Gingerly stepped around for a while, but we got there just as it started snowing amidst high winds. We didn’t spend too long up there.

The Charlevoix contained indications of the usual layers of occupancy we find in the city’s skyscrapers – a few hints of pre-Depression glory, followed by mid-50s office papers and materials, then evidence of the presence of the building’s last-gasp, low-rent businesses, and finally 70s and 80s junkie needles and porn.

For those who’ve never had the privilege of witnessing a Detroit City Council meeting, a short brief in the Freep today perfectly represents the typical activities that take place. This short anecdote captures it all – the race baiting, the demagoguery, the grandstanding, the self-importance, the bizarre thought processes. It’s exactly what happens when you get several very, very stupid individuals who in any other context would be utterly unqualified to hold any sort of decision-making power over others, and put them in charge of something. If anyone ever wonders why the perception across the state is of a city that cannot responsibly govern its own affairs, this should explain it somewhat.

Company takes a beating

It started out as a discussion last week to get the Detroit City Council to mediate a year-long dispute between residents in the city’s Midtown section and a city contractor, Posen Construction.
It veered into a harangue by council members over Posen’s hiring practices and its headquarters in Utica.
“Utica — that’s in Macomb County,” said Councilwoman JoAnn Watson. “Macomb County was in the news this morning. There are a lot of cross burnings out there.”
The councilwoman was referring to an interracial Chesterfield Township family that found a burning cross on its lawn last Tuesday.
The discussion got more heated as council members grilled the company on the number of minorities and city residents it hires.
“It seems to me you take advantage of Detroiters,” Councilman Alonzo Bates told company representatives. Onlookers cheered as Bates declared the company has not hired enough of the city’s unemployed people.
At one point, as the company owner tried to respond, Bates barked: “Why don’t you shut up and listen to me?”
The dispute — over noise and the company’s alleged trespassing on a resident’s property — has yet to be resolved.