It’s always fun to go up north here in Michigan, to the country, where people are scattered and open land is plenty. You find little towns where small, old houses sit on grasslands or prairies, seen only by the few cars that drive through on old roads that go unnoticed by most people as they pass the area on the highway. Most homes up there, like this little house nestled in a wilderness of trees and underbrush, are the only houses nearby.

The only thing is, this house and the backwoods that contains it aren’t up north; they’re in the middle of the city of Detroit.

These scenes are from the city’s north end, in a neighborhood known as State Fair, so called because one end of it borders the Michigan State Fairgrounds. It’s one of the neighborhoods that’s been hardest hit by crime, population loss, and decay in a city known for all three. Some blocks have been cleared entirely of housing over the years, one house at a time, until nature runs rampant, untrammeled by human endeavor, leaving nothing but telephone poles that still carry electricity past open fields with no homes to light.

It’s the astonishing evidence that an entire neighborhood, and the society that it held, can vanish, with most traces of its presence wiped out in a matter of a few years, returning to the natural state in which it began.

The city defines the State Fair neighborhood as between Six Mile and Eight Mile, and between Woodward to the west and the Canadian National Railroad tracks that slice through to the east. Though there’s little difference between the State Fair neighborhood on one side of the tracks and the Nolan neighborhood that lies on the other, State Fair has had the notoriety as one of the worst neighborhoods in the city.

The ‘80s crack epidemic hit particularly hard here, and prostitutes working notorious stretches of Woodward routinely used the adjacent State Fair neighborhood to conduct business, drawing in a flood of related criminal activity that drove out the longtime residents and left the area blighted and bleak.

After steadily losing residents like the rest of the city over the years, State Fair lost a full 25 percent of its remaining population in the ‘90s alone, and the outward rush hasn’t stopped. Of course, the neighborhood is varied like any other, and not all blocks are disasters. Some parts of it, particularly those streets just off Woodward south of Seven Mile Road, are dense and have well-maintained, old, architecturally unique homes. Other streets still have more homes than space, but a lot of the houses are boarded up, some torched, some crumbling bit by bit as they sit ignored. The roads are cratered and hazardous.

Other parts of the area, though, especially along Oakland or John R near Six Mile, are devastated, with whole blocks devoid of all but one crumbling structure or piles of debris dumped illegally. By midsummer, the empty blocks become a thriving prairie, growing thicker each year, with game birds and wildflowers flourishing just a half-mile from the city’s main artery.

In the worst neighborhoods, much of the population is unemployed and illiterate, leaving them with scarce prospects in normal, productive society. Their fixed presence results in little enclaves — like so many others in the city — that are utterly hopeless, where the residents are consigned to living outside the world everyone else lives in, participating in a largely underground economy where crime festers.

Drugs saturate the area, with sales taking place in broad daylight in the middle of the road. Cars parked on Woodward on the neighborhood’s edge are reliably broken into, leaving shattered window glass strewn along the curbsides. Gunfire is common.

Some residential streets have become wholly overgrown with trees that grew untended for years and then died with the neighborhood, creating a spooky, tangled canopy of interlocking dead branches arching over the street. It’s as if they died en masse when everyone packed up and left. Nobody cuts them anymore, since there’s almost nobody on these streets to be bothered by them anymore.

John R, the neighborhood’s commercial strip, collapsed along with the neighborhood. Although the road is occupied with industry in the north end, the southern half is notable mostly for what’s now gone. Green lots stand where tightly packed businesses once were. The main enterprise on the street at certain hours of the day is prostitution, with a number of hookers roaming openly and hollering at passing cars to stop.

At one point, John R was lined solidly with a mixture of residences and small businesses such as grocers, butchers, furniture makers, diners, printers and bars. Most of those little buildings have long vanished; others remain, waiting to be razed, torched, or — less likely — reused. In 1922, this brick building was Goss Drugs, later becoming a branch of the Cunningham’s Drug Store chain, and later, the locally owned Capitol Drugs. Eventually most of its customers moved from the neighborhood, and it outlived its purpose. And there are dozens of buildings here like it that lived pretty much the same life.

The population of the area changed along with the greater shifts in the city. Before the 1920s, the area that’s now the State Fair neighborhood was barren fields, apart from a few roads like John R that passed through it. By the 30s, the entire area had been blanketed with housing.

One fascinating part of the area was centered on Brush. Originally, the neighborhood’s residents were Germans, whose presence was reflected in the number of German beer gardens lining John R, and a sizable Jewish population, a striking anomaly on Detroit’s east side, as most of Detroit’s Jewish neighborhoods were concentrated on the West Side.

In those days, you could find businesses like Kohn meats and Saul Rothenberg Drugs in the neighborhood. All traces of those businesses are now gone. The only lingering evidence of a Jewish presence in the neighborhood is the former United Hebrew Schools branch on Brush, standing astride a prairie, and now converted – like so many Jewish schools and synagogues in Detroit – into a black church. Hebrew lettering, faded and weather worn, remains above the door, the only evidence of its roots.

Not all parts of the neighborhood are in free fall. South of Seven Mile, just east of Woodward, the streets feature beautiful large homes that could easily fit into nicer parts of the city like Boston Edison and Indian Village. The Grixdale Subdivision, in particular, features a large stock of well-maintained homes built in the 20s and 30s. The residents there live an uneasy existence as the neighborhoods bordering them descended into madness and the population fled, leaving a wasteland behind.

The downward spiral is slowing in some parts of the area. The neighborhoods just south of the fairgrounds are now seeing infill housing, tiny new houses offered to low-income residents who don’t mind living in a former war zone. So far, though, it’s just a beginning.

State Fair has oddities galore: The Theatre Bizarre, someone’s backyard converted to several sets and stages for elaborate circus-style events; the Stonehenge biker bar across from the fairgrounds; the muscular, stubble-faced transvestites who roam the Six Mile/Woodward area, strutting past the bewildered diners at La Dolce Vita, an enduring Italian restaurant on the edge of the neighborhood.

There’s also the strip of Chaldean restaurants and bakeries along Seven Mile, designated Chaldean Town a while back. It’s a very strange area, a slum of streets streaming north from Seven Mile with dilapidated houses like many others in the city, but with old, Iraqi men sitting in groups on porches, clutching beads as they speak. Nowadays it’s more of a stopping-off point for newly immigrated Chaldeans, who move to other parts of the area once they get established. Some of the Chaldean shops that lined Seven Mile are now boarded up.

The State Fair neighborhood has all sorts of different, unique pockets, but the common characteristic of the area remains the eerie, spreading countryside that replaced what was long ago a stable residential neighborhood, where people could walk to stores and restaurants and churches in safety and comfort.

Today, the neighborhood is post-apocalyptic, having passed through the worst standard stages of neighborhood decline: falling housing values, longtime residents moving to the suburbs, crumbling properties converted to rentals, a growth of criminal activity, abandonment by anyone who can afford to leave, and finally the disappearance of the houses themselves.

Now it’s the realm of crickets and meadows, where besides the dope dealers, the hookers, and the walking dead ambling past empty fields, are regular but poor people who have to live surrounded by decay and misery, in a neighborhood most others are too scared to drive through, surrounded by grinding poverty and the dregs of society, the only world they know, utterly unaware that a normal, safe neighborhood once stood here but was wiped off the face of the earth.