We finally broke our streak of bad luck. The past few weekends of exploring had brought nerve-wracking encounters with weirdos with cameras, threatening building caretakers, and an unpleasant encounter with authorities. We were like a sports team on a four-game losing streak. We needed a win to restore our confidence, which had been utterly shattered.

Most people are familiar with the Motown Museum on the Boulevard, but a lot of people don’t realize there are actually two Motown sites in Detroit. In 1968, Berry Gordy moved the business operations to the Donovan Building on Woodward, then abruptly abandoned it a few years later when he moved the label to California. There’s been talk of renovating it (or demolishing it) and turning into a newer, bigger Motown museum, but so far nothing’s really happened.

We had targeted the Motown Building before, but law enforcement officials interrupted our explorations. We were determined to have another go at it.

But we almost didn’t even get the exploration off the ground. Just as we were scouting, getting ready to go in, a junkie and his friend made themselves at home at the back of the building, where they proceeded to take turns using a newspaper as a toilet. Then they kind of nodded out on the spot. We drove around. Came back – they were still there. Finally they left, and as we tried to get in we had to maneuver around the stinkiest pile of shit I have ever smelled. It caused me to gag and hold my breath just as I needed to breathe the most, i.e. during strenuous activity. Meanwhile, there were hypodermic needles and used condoms all over in the dirt. Wonderful.

I managed to slice my arm up going in, on a rusty piece of metal. Well hello tetanus, I thought. I’m used to cold-weather exploring, with layers of clothing, and hadn’t thought this through for an 80-degree day. Note to self: no more short sleeves.

The first floor had been occupied by a security firm called JOWA, and had boxes that had contained guns in them, targets for target practice, and other pseudo-law enforcement gear. Hobo stuff, like empty boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken from when it was still called Kentucky Fried Chicken, were mixed in big piles of trash.

The second floor is very surreal. The windows have been covered on the outside with some sort of thick, blue plastic, so the rooms are tinged in a very deep blue.

Various large printing machines are scattered about, some knocked over, left on their sides. A sort of inadvertant light court exists between the Motown building and the Sanders building next door, and someone punched a huge hole that allows access to the empty neighboring structure.

A bunch of Jackson 5 LP order sheets lay scattered in boxes, along with envelopes and stationery with the Motown address on them. Four Tops LP covers lay scattered around. A Diana Ross poster was wrinkled and dusty on the floor. A bunch of Rare Earth pins, announcing “Rare Earth Day,” were left scattered and rusting. I had expected the place to be stropped clean, yet there were indications everywhere you looked that Motown had indeed once operated out of there.

Normal light again enters the building on the third floor and up. The offices are the same as in most of the abandoned skyscrapers in the city – paper scattered everywhere, desks overturned, pigeons appearing out of holes in the ceiling, flapping their wings maniacally and banging into windows as they try to get out. There’s a hell of a view, though, of all of downtown to the south, and the still out-of-place Comerica Park, and the miserable Crosswinds condos that look garish and strangely fake, plopped in the middle of century-old structures. If they looked bad from the ground, they look more ridiculous from above.

Just being in the Motown building was cool enough because I’m very big on soul music, and my all-time favorite soul singer is Marvin Gaye. But I found the jackpot of strange memorabilia on an upper floor. First, it’s surprising anything is left in there, because people have been roaming through the building for years, destroying things, taking souvenirs and dirtying up anything of value. So I went into utter shock when I went looking through the pieces of paper left in a desk drawer and realized that all the stuff I had in my hands once belonged to Marvin Gaye.

One envelope was addressed to him and had his Blue Cross insurance pamphlets issued by Motown. Other forms had his name on them. There were other snippets of envelopes with his address on them, as well as a proxy card for what appeared to be a General Electric stockholder vote. I was floored. Yeah, it wasn’t much, because the building had been picked over pretty well over the years, but finding anything was a treat.