With the streets of downtown Detroit once again a ghost town now that the Super Bowl is over, and with law enforcement shifting their attention to their perpetually unsuccessful hunt for murder suspects, it seemed the right time to get back into the fabulous buildings that make up the city’s darkened skyline.

So last week, after a brief tour of Ash Wednesday services in the cold, mostly empty splendor of Catholic churches in former Poletown, during which handfuls of parishioners, standing beneath the illuminated splendor of rich altars, had ashes placed on them to signify their origins and their fate as dust, we stood in the darkened hotel lobby of the Fort Shelby Hotel, itself slowly returning to dust in its grim, somber afterlife.

The hotel is the same as always, a sealed tomb cracked only by explorers and the elements, which still tear mercilessly at its fabric.

Inside, light spilled into the brightly painted main dining room, spreading elongated, honey-colored parallelograms of light across the ruddy floors.

We peered into the basement, an inky blackness of ice shining back the beams of our flashlights, too spooky and suffocating to explore. Debris that had been lifted several feet off the ground in the warm summer water sat immobile in the thick, murky ice.

A dusty mirror propped in a hallway on a mid-level floor featured the finger signatures of several explorers who’d passed through in the past couple weeks. It was so crowded with names there was barely room to leave our own.

Each level of the ascending iron stairs is in worse shape than the last, until you get near the top, and mounds of powder and dust from disintegrating walls and ceilings have settled on the steps, culminating at the upper level, where you’re basically climbing a rounded sand hill and the walls surrounding the stairs have collapsed. One slip, and you fall out of the open stairwell and drop into the emptiness.

We got to the top and stepped outside. The roof trees had grown taller than last year, their bare branches awaiting spring’s approach, eager to blossom with swarms of leaves more profuse than those last summer, increasing their claim over the old building.

The sky, a wash of yellow-tinted clouds, grew blurry as rain moved in and began falling softly on us.

Over the eastern edge, the black granite and steel walls of the old Manufacturers National Bank Building, now occupied by Comerica, glowed gold as its rigid lines reflected the streetlights off their strict edges. Built in 1970, it looks every bit the part, a dark grid meant to house polyester suits and the dreary business of bankers.

Hardly a car passed through the streets below. Nobody was walking anywhere. We shielded ourselves from the breeze against the central peak of the roof, its ivory terra cotta violated by waves of artless taggers, too coarse and uncultured to see the delicate charm of the detailing that they destroy.

On the icy Detroit River, the soft yellow lights from the Ambassador Bridge were reflected back upwards as a mirrored necklace, while a soft puff of smoke rose quietly from the other side of the water.

This is my city, unfurling in all directions, and I see something different every time I stand at another summit, far from the madness of the streets below, or each time I wander cautiously through the dim light of an empty hallway in a deserted building.

There’s always something new in its sameness — light pouring in from changed angles, illuminating flecks and corners unseen before, or old treasures unburied by a night’s strong winds stirring the stale air.

It’s the other Detroit, away from the race obsession, the evaporation of public money and trust, the self-devouring criminal mayhem, the desperation of those trapped by poverty, the madness of the wandering hobos down below. Up there, it’s nothing but silence and remembrance and possibility.