Tucked away along the shore of the Detroit River, on the border between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park, sits a small plot of land that for nearly 80 years has housed the Lakeside Trailer Court, a collection of busted-down trailers sitting on one of the best pieces of real estate in the area.

We first discovered it in the late 80s, when we’d take sneak-missions over the border into Grosse Pointe to pick up our girlfriends and hightail it the hell out of there back into Detroit before the police spotted us (black people aren’t the only ones that Grosse Pointe cops harass; poor-looking white kids like us, driving beat-up cars, got hounded by them constantly.) We got to know the Alter Road border area well back then, and that’s how we discovered the strange park with its even stranger tenants.

Even when it was occupied (as seen above), many of the trailers were abandoned, though the only difference between an occupied trailer and one that was not was often only the presence of a car parked right up against it.

I hadn’t been by there in years, until recently, after I read that the park might soon disappear.

It didn’t take long for that to happen. The owner of the property announced that he’d sold the land to a developer, and that meant that all the tenants, even the few who actually still paid some form of rent, had to go. In no time at all, “mysterious” trailer fires began breaking out all over the court, no doubt hastening the process of eviction. And in a matter of months, 60-year-old trailers that had sat relatively intact were stripped down to a layer of wood and insulation. Many trailers still had people’s belongings inside, scattered across floors and countertops.

The trailer court now is spooky as all hell. A fallen tree blocked one of the roads leading into the court, reminding me of an old 1980s Detroit trick where carjackers would lay a large branch across a road and hide, and when you’d get out of the car to move it, they’d emerge and acquire a new car for themselves. We didn’t take that particular road, opting instead to park at the thoroughly weird, mostly empty store across the street and walk over.

Fireworks remnants lay strewn in the dust from someone’s lakeside celebration. Rose bushes, now slightly wild and unanchored, arched gracefully in different directions. Cats left behind popped out of various overgrowth here and there, but they didn’t seem too startled by us. Little gardens that had once been carefully tended had surrendered to the encroaching weeds that now threatened to smother what remained of them. Random pieces of pipe and metal lay in the curving roadway that cuts paths through the court.

You get the uncomfortable sense while walking through the trailer court that someone’s going to pop out of the weeds or from inside a hollowed-out trailer carcass. We could hear the rat-tat-tat sounds of several hammers and chisels working away in various parts of the trailer court. It was hard to pinpoint their locations because the sound of the hammers echoed and reverberated off the trailers, making it seem as if they were coming from everywhere. We watched one dirty, skinny derelict crouched low on top of a trailer, hammering slowly at a small strip of metal remaining on the roof. He didn’t seem to be very energetic or in much of a hurry.

But apart from those noises, and the steady chirp of crickets, the area is eerily quiet.

Explored some interiors, but there wasn’t much to see except scattered belongings that the former residents didn’t bother to take with them when they abruptly left their homes.