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.