The message, spray-painted on a double door at the back of the building, was hardly subtle. “Come on in fucker, I’ll make sure you get severely hurt.” Normally a taunt like that only encourages me to do exactly what they don’t want me to do. After a minute, though, I began wondering if some nut booby-trapped the place, and entry by me might cause me to get stabbed or banged in the head by some planted falling debris. But after a little bit of cautious testing and poking around, I went right in.

The Graphic Arts Building, located on Burroughs between Woodward and Cass, was built in 1925, and officially opened June 15, 1926. Its facade was highly detailed, cream-colored terra-cotta done in Italian Romanesque style. Located in what was at the time the heart of Detroit’s advertising district, the four-story building was designed by the architecture firm Murphy and Burns.

Its original tenants included the Northern Electrotype Company, Thomas P. Henry Typesetters Company – advertising typographers, the Wayne Color Plate Company – photo engineers and commercial photography, and the Brown Art Studios, among others. The building’s tenants remained steady through the decades – the Wayne Color Plate Company, for example, retained offices there through the 1970s, until gradually the advertising industry relocated to the suburbs, and the building lost too many tenants to remain viable. Of course, once it closed, the elements, scavengers and vandals did their best to hasten its demise.

A Wayne State cop sitting in a nearby parking lot doing absolutely nothing with himself delayed my entry considerably. I had to walk around and wait until he decided to do some work. Getting inside the building was easier in theory than in practice, and I received a small gash in my back from a rusty spike of metal as a reward for my hubris and hastiness as I climbed in. The building is currently undergoing renovation, which means anything of interest has been scraped out and shoveled out into dumpsters that sit in the alley adjacent to the building. In fact, the only thing noteworthy was the unique sentiment finger-written in dust on the dumpsters outside. “Fuck this world. I love heaven. Jesus is God,” it said. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “fuck” in a religious statement before. Come to think of it, you don’t usually see much Jesus-themed graffiti in general.

The upper floors are totally decayed, and the roof is little more than random patches of concrete with large holes in between. Graffiti is all over the place, both inside and on the roof. Small sculpted lions heads are arrayed along the roof at the front of the building, though one or two seem to have been chiseled out, perhaps following their stolen Lee Plaza bretheren to some townhouse project in Chicago.