field trippin': the heidelberg project

This past Saturday Nate and I caught the Art Spiegelman exhibit over at Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art, and since we were only a stone's throw away from The Heidelberg Project we decided to finally go and see it in person. For those who don't know what this is, allow me to quickly summarize the backstory:

When Tyree Guyton returned to his home on Heidelberg Street after a brief stint in the Army in the 1980s, he was shocked at the rapid deterioration of his neighborhood, remarking that its looked as if "a bomb went off." Unfortunately, there's no shortage of neighborhoods like this in Detroit; however, rather than pull up and abandon his street to the rats and the weeds, Guyton felt compelled to do something. In 1986 he covered his own house in polka-dots, and from that grew The Heidelberg Project: an outdoor community art project that's part political protest, part museum, and part love song to a fallen neighborhood. (Source)

Although I've known about the Heidelberg Project for years, this was my first time seeing it, and ....wow. Approaching Heidelberg Street is like entering a total fantasyland - an entire street's worth of mostly abandoned houses covered in paint and garbage. One house is completely covered in trashed stuffed animals. Brightly painted discarded doors form sculptures that sit on now-empty lots. Shopping carts and old shoes hang from the trees, old tires are now sculptures, and a row of broken vacuum cleaners topped with gloves form a waving line. It looks every bit as crazy as it sounds, but it's also totally MAGICAL. These artists have taken a street that would otherwise have been a dangerous eyesore and turned it into this amazing, warm, welcoming place that's become a must-see tourist spot.

I fear that my pictures don't even come close to doing it justice. You really need to see this thing for yourself, but here's the best of what I could capture on "film" just the same:

random posts of pretty

In case you missed it, Time Magazine recently featured a photo essay by two French photographers depicting Detroit's urban decay. The subjects of many of these photographs were once some of the swankiest, most impressive architectural offerings the city was once proud to boast, now left to sag, rot, and die. Its title - "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline" - is completely fitting, as the images are as eerily gorgeous as they are overwhelmingly sad.

random posts of pretty: detroit edition

Detroit's Guardian Building is one of my all-time favorite skyscrapers. The interior - lavishly decorated with mosaics created with pewabic tiles - is absolutely stunning, but all my previous efforts to capture it on film have failed.

Until now. Because now, I have the technology.











Easy to see how it earned the nicknamed "The Cathedral of Finance," eh?

random posts of pretty: detroit edition

Until this story ran in last Thursday's Detroit News, I had no idea that Burning Man - the annual desert event that draws a slew of performers, artists and nudists - has become a national civic-minded community, so of course I had no idea that there was a very large and active branch of that community right here in Detroit.  Ordinarily, this news would only be of mild interest to me, but when the article went on to announce that the Michigan Burning Man community had constructed an elaborate, hand-made temple right smack in the middle of one of the most blighted communities in the city, and that they would be unveiling said temple on Summer Solstice, I had to check it out.  There was too much potential for the bizarre to not.

Unfortunately, there were no nudists or fire breathers at the temple's reveal, but seeing the odd, beautiful thing in person was worth the trip. According the those who had a hand in building it, the purpose of the temple is to put art in the center of a community that lacks beauty, serving as a symbol of hope. It's intended to function as a gathering place for the community, particularly for the Motor City Blight Busters' summer youth group.

Pictures really don't do the thing justice - it's really incredible.  Also incredible is how much it detracts from the blight that surrounds it.  Of course, I'm not so naive as to think that things like this are enough to change the atmosphere of a community, but at least it's something.  At least it's a start.  

a beautiful day for blight

Yesterday was a positively gorgeous autumnal afternoon, and so we chose to spend it like any ordinary couple would – by tramping around abandoned, derelict houses, of course!

(Okay, so perhaps it’s not so normal, but bear with us for a minute or two.)

In his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman theorizes what would happen to the world if all humanity suddenly disappeared, and a driver heading Westbound on Detroit’s Davison highway can get a glimpse at this apocalyptic possibility first-hand. Weisman (quoting Chris Riddle) writes, “‘If you want to destroy a barn, a farmer once told me, ‘cut an eighteen-inch-square in the roof. Then stand back.’” Eventually, nature will take care of most of the structures man has built, and for the handful of abandoned homes left on Lincoln Street it becomes glaring clear how quickly nature can work.


Detroit is a city that has seen recent redevelopment and growth, but is still deeply scarred by the past. The riots of the sixties, the crack epidemic of the eighties, white-flight, and the relocation to the suburbs by anyone with a means of doing so have left the city with neighborhoods of sprawling, 100+ year old mansions sitting a block away from overgrown fields - all that remain of neighborhoods torched many years ago.

With people fleeing Detroit at such a high rate, the city is now demolishing between 1,000 and 2,500 vacant buildings a year. The sad truth is that it is not enough.

In an effort to bring light to the blight, an anonymous group of artists have chosen several highly visible derelict properties - most visible from highways - and painted them bright construction orange. Their hope is to draw attention to the buildings and have their art demolished. Of the first four buildings they painted, two were demolished in the following weeks. We’re not sure whether the city demo'ed the structures in an effort to get rid of the unsafe and unsightly buildings, or if they simply did not like attention being drawn to the problem.




The pictures posted here are ones that we took of a row of houses on the north side of the Davison Highway. They were painted almost two years ago, but closing and barricading the road was the only action taken by the city. No one lives there, so no one seems particularly bothered by them, however the houses can't be ignored by the people driving twenty feet below along the Davison Highway.



Eventually, nature will take care of these houses on her own, however it would be nice to see them given a proper burial sooner rather than later. (That pile of abandoned tires is forever, unfortunately.)

The original anonymous letter written by the orange artists can be found at The Detroiter, and please read Detroit Funk and Detroit Blog for some truly beautiful pictures and stories of the real Detroit.