Well said, Weaverville Studios. Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States. I wonder where the Detroit metropolitain area ranks among its peers. -Dave
"no reason"? um, my grandmother had to dump her nice two-story home at 96 Geneva and get the hell out. her neighborhood was no longer safe. the house is now an empty lot because i was destroyed by human filth as was the rest of the city. there's a lot of blame to go around however including greedy auto makers who built SHIT-CARS to counter the japanese auto Juggernaut. then our moron leaders and cops started a drug war which turned entire neighborhoods into gang-infested nightmares. to put the nail in the coffin; with jobs getting scarce, they opened the floodgates to immigration....
what a shame. those building should be preserved by the city because of the historic relevance they have. cool photography thou
The Model A was built at the huge Rouge Assembly complex, far from abandoned. Most of the original building is gone, but the property is used for the state of the art F150 'Dearborn Assembly Plant'. The older area Ford Model T plants, Highland Park and Piquette, are also very much in use (Ford storage and a museum). Model A plants in other parts of the country may be in bad shape. Steve
by all means,do not single out Detroit. the whole Great Lakes manufacturing corridor is a ghost look at Youngstown,Cleveland,Toledo,and Chicago. they all have vast wastelands that used to be neighborhoods. This country got lowballed by overseas manufacturers,and the only ones to blame are the people that buy the stuff they manufacture. Those people would be everybody in this country.
How can we get folks to quit shopping at walmart??? Or buying imports??? You'd look like a madman trying... But! If you get a bunch of laid off people together and get them to protest, you wouldn't look so bad...
I don't think it can be done. Wal-Mart is here to stay, unfortunately, as are all the Japanese cars--bought by people looking for a better deal no matter the ultimate cost to our country.
And, since my daily driver is a '95 Honda with 140,000 on it (my shoebox is still blown apart) I'm part of the problem too. I keep telling myself--"At least I bought it used."
Please guys, let's not turn this into a "American labor priced themselves out of the market" versus "American consumers are too cheap to buy their own stuff" thread. That's a bit too political. -Dave
I was Bing-mapping around the Chrysler plant and sad to see a lof of houses demo'd and open land standing in their places. There is spotty houses on once packed blocks of housing. The amount of grassy land showing up in the middle of neighborhoods is mind boggling. I can only imagine the houses that once stood there Where in detroit did the king-pins of the autmobile industry live?
The early auto pioneeers lived in the Boston-Edison district, then the next wave was in Indian Village, after that out of the City. Both of those areas are still vital and worth visiting. Henry Ford's first big house was in Boston-Edison, then he built his Fairlane estate in Dearborn. Edsel Ford had a place in Indian Village, then built his estate up in Grosse Point Shores.
I don't know if someone already posted about it of not (I did not read the complete thread) but someplace on the web there are photos compairing Detroit in the late 40's to today and also showing Japan in the late 40's (after the war) to Japan today. the point was that Detroit now looks like Heroshima and Nigasocka after the two bombs were dropped. (Sorry don't know the spelling of the two Japan citys) Now the two citys are rebuilt.
Can anyone imaging this happening in America today? A neighborhood built for employees. Just another cool thing about the Detroit area that no one outside of here knows about. http://www.fordhomes.org/
I was watching Fox 2 News this morning and they mentioned that the old train depot is getting a new face lift... They're in the proccess of putting a new roof on and changing out the old glass windows.. Well, at least it's a start...
I think you mean "changing out the old, empty window frames". It's primarily a publicity stunt to make the station's owner look better to the public, as he's trying to kill a publicly funded bridge to Canada in the area that will break his monopoly. I hope it sticks, though. There's a lot of potential in that beautiful building. I was just there on Saturday, and watched a constant stream of visitors come by and take photographs of themselves with it. Everyone was quiet and in awe, t was like a religious site, almost. -Dave
Yeah, I've been trying to get the wife to take me down there so I can take some pics of the old place..
It's too bad that's the reason for this result though. Sad but true. It's like ignoring burning bodies on the side of the road.
this is so awesome! very scott haefner-esque. Im a huge fan of photography of urban ruins, Ive been trying to get some friends together to go photograph Gary, IN with me for a while, but, unsurprisingly, no one has the balls lol.
If we keep ignoring the problem, we'll end up ignoring our selves out of a job... We need to make a stand and end this madness.. Sorry guys!
I'm glad that this has not turned into a union bashing and conspiracy thread. There are many cities in the USA and Canada suffering the same fate. For me, what killed North American manufacturing is complacency and greed. Both unions and management were content to take the money while it was coming in while ignoring the competition. Cars: Look at GM. We went from Cadillac being "Standard of the World" in terms of luxury and technology in the 1950s to embarassing overpriced land yachts with 1960s technology in the 1970s. You could get fuel injection in a 1978 VW Rabbit but Oldsmobile, Buicks and lower model Cadillacs were carbureted? Appliances: Up until the early 2000s, American appliance manufacturers offered their customers outdated and expensive appliances with 25-30 year old technology since the only competition were European appliances that offered the technology (i.e. front loading washers, convection ovens etc) but cost more than twice as much. Then along came the Koreans and offered European technology at American appliance prices = Game over. Only GE survived without major problems. American innovation, manufacturing economies of scale and the largest domestic market in the World made the USA great. We got too comfortable and now its shifting from blue collar to white collar jobs. I see it every day. Accounting, IT and engineering professionls charging $10,000 for something that can be done in India using more exprienced staff for $1,000. Are we 10x more efficient. NO, at best the same. Economics 101 says an equilibrium must be found. Therefore the N. American professional will have to work harder and smarter to make 50% of the previous fee and the Indian professional will make 4X the more, jumping into the middle class when the fees hit $5,000. Sound familiar.
No offense to you, but I'm not ignoring the problem; I just am not talking about it on the HAMB, either, because all it takes are a couple people on opposite sides of the labor/consumer divide to get a thread locked. Try doing HAMB searches on "Walmart" or "Ethanol" and see where they lead. HAMBsters can't discuss this stuf civilly, and it's too far removed from traditional hot rodding to be tolerated. Urban archeaology connected to the auto industry isn't, and I'd like to see this thread stay open. -Dave
The Jalopy Journal
