Nice spread in the Free Press about the city’s plans for fixing the downtown area (warning: it’s a cool map, but it’s PDF) up for the 2006 Superbowl. Ambitious, but so are all the other failed schemes the city has come up with in the past 30 or 40 years. And questionable, because in a mad rush to convince outsiders not make fun of us for being poor and run-down, I’m guessing a lot of old-but-salvageable buildings will be torn down to be replaced by new-looking, uninspiring buildings.

Because of this plan, now I’ve got to go out and take photos of the city like mad, before more of evertything vanishes and becomes, like the Comerica Park/Ford Field area, a pretty yet soulless facade designed to coax skittish suburbanites back downtown.

I’ve taken hundreds of photos of Detroit over the past year, mostly to capture images of the Detroit I grew up in before it all goes away. It’s funny how ugly things you’ve spent a lifetime taking for granted suddenly appear poignant when threatened with death.

Back in the 80s we always hung around Detroit because it was like the Wild West – anything goes, unlike every single person from the suburbs we knew, who looked astonished when we invited them to the city. For us, relatively wild kids, it was heaven. You could drive 100 mph down the Woodward, past cops who didn’t even look twice; you could run every red light between you and your destination with impunity; you could buy liquor and beer at nearly every party store in the city at 16 years old without an ID; you could (though we didn’t) buy prostitutes in full view of lazy cops who didn’t give a shit; you could (this we did) get dimebags of stinky pot in broad daylight in parking lots all over town; you could fire a gun in broad daylight with hardly a fear of being caught by authorities; you could park anywhere day or night, because the city was totally abandoned. No speed limits, no rules, no laws, and no safety.

I remember Brush Park, with hundreds of dilapidated, spooky, late-19th century Victorian mansions still salvageable; nowaday there’s barely one or two on each block, and those are being demolished fast to make way for hideous, cookie-cutter condos. I remember Woodward, pre-Fox Theater renovation, when all of it looked like Highland Park – vast stretches of empty warehouses, storefronts and buildings from the Detroit River up until the city line, with a few exceptions. I remember Greektown being an island in a ghetto, with nothing more than Trapper’s Alley, a sort of mall of miscellany, to act as a draw. I remember the abandoned warehouses and small, old buildings that stood where a gleaming Ford Field now stands.

It seems counter-intuitive to yearn nostalgically for the days of full-on blight, but apocalyptic blight was the setting of my fondest memories.