The demolished Motown Building downtown is now just a pile of rubble waiting to be hauled off, but since its demolition is still fresh I figured I could squeeze off one more post about it.

I went by the site last night, saw some useless rent-a-cop circling the illuminated pile of debris in his little security buggy. Also saw that the same taggers who marred the top of the building in the first place — and thus officially nudged the building fully into the category of “eyesore” — came back and tagged the concrete barricades surrounding the site. Bravo! A brilliant artistic statement unequalled ever! It’s not enough to be a contributor to the destruction of a historic building; one can’t claim complete victory without pissing on the corpse, I suppose.

The pulverized asbestos and other hazardous dust that had been free-floating has now settled into the dirt, the sewers, and the neighbors’ lungs, and the memorabilia freed from imprisonment within the building has blown off or been picked up by foolish people who think collectors’ items should be collected or something.

Admittedly, the Motown Building, architecturally speaking, was nothing special; though it was another Albert Kahn designed building, it was relatively undecorated and had grown decrepit through 30 years of neglect, though contrary to news reports it was hardly crumbling. Those floors inside were among the sturdiest in town. It would’ve needed gutting had it been renovated, but the building could’ve been saved.

Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick made an offhand promise to build a new Motown museum at the site, though if that’s really the intention, why not just renovate the old one? You’d have a cheaper project, with the inherent history to boot. Truly, there ain’t nothing like the real thing. I guess his administration will get that project underway once the renovated Train Station is completed. Oh wait — that’s another empty Kwame promise that never amounted to anything whatsoever. So I’m not going to hold my breath on this one, either.

The plot of land where the Donovan Building stood is one of the worst downtown – on the corner of a loud, smelly freeway, surrounded by streets that have no on-street parking. Nobody would want to live there, and who would want to work with the noxious fumes of I-75 drifting inside day after day? With the Donovan Building already there, it stood a chance of being the site of something, but now that plot will likely remain as empty as the plots adjacent to it have for years.

These grand old buildings can’t all be saved, but it’s hard not to hold out hope each time.

OK, enough rue. Here are some more scans from the building.

One lower-floor room had a pile of lapel pins promoting Motown’s subsidiary Rare Earth label, as seen above. You bend the upper nub over your lapel and off you go! For 30 years stuff like this sat, and nobody thought it was worth collecting. Piles of Motown paperwork were spread across floors and used as bedding by drug addicts. Though I guess when you’re a junkie and you’re roaming around a hazardous building in the dark, the value of pop music collectibles is somewhat below your radar.

Another item found in Marvin Gaye’s desk, along with all sorts of his paperwork, was this matchbook advertising a car wash that stood a few blocks north of Motown, blocks where grassy lots now provide an unobstructed view of things far off in the distance. The reverse side features the enigmatic motto “Save with Gas.” And check out the size of the boat, which now shines with radiating lines unmistakably suggesting cleanliness. Motor City, baby! Note too how the word “Detroit” is set off with a different font, a fossil from back in the days when the name Detroit conjured images of exciting, big city life.

Finally, this last one is a receipt for a payment on Marvin Gaye’s life insurance policy, one of many odd documents he left in his desk in the Donovan Building. One can only wonder whether it was still in effect when his dad shot him almost two decades later. And the only reason I and other like me have this stuff is because in the course of three full decades nobody else — not Berry Gordy, not the Motown Museum, not the City of Detroit — cared enough to see what remnants of the city’s musical heritage remained in that building, or thought to preserve them rather than consign them to a pile of pre-Depression rubble, leaving them to drift as litter through the streets of downtown that the creators of that heritage once roamed.