Urban Exploration and the Journey of the Self

I admit, I fell prey to the bug that was sweeping 20- to 30-somethings all over Detroit that caused otherwise law-abiding citizens (speeding tickets and public intoxication aside) to break into other people's property. I like to rationalize my brief foray into criminal activity with how much it taught me about a city I hardly knew but came to love. Walking into a building that has been absent of life for long periods of time can be simultaneously haunting and magical, a kind of Kasper Friedrich-brand of sublime that celebrates the beauty in decay, the dark poetry of man-made structures slowly worming their way to dust. Sitting sometimes alone amidst a modern-day ruin filled with light and growth, I often considered how like the living thing these monuments to man's industry are, how much a metaphor for the dying body they become, moldering away in the rotting casket of a city. We humans become the fly, the ant, and the rooting seed becomes the bacteria, nibbling away, returning matter to energy, copper piping becoming air conditioner sinew, antique fixtures becoming someone's much needed cash. All this may be why I have no readership.

Obviously, I digress. The urban exploration fever isn't isolated to Detroit as evinced by sites such as Infiltration and the plethora of talented photographers on Flickr who have broken into all the same places (and more!) that I have, but who documented it far better. Rest assured, somewhere in the world right now, eager suburbanites are pulling back broken boards over the windows of some crumbling behemoth with hearts full of entitlement and tinged with fear. Wait. Did I say "entitlement?" That's right, I'm going to get preachy on your asses.

But not before photos:

First, there is the Packard Plant on the East side of Detroit. Commissioned in 1903 and built by the ubiquitous (in Detroit, at least) Albert Kahn^[1], the factory fell into disrepair after its closure in 1956^[2] and appeared that a portion of it was being used as storage until fairly recently.




Our friend, in a desperate attempt to see as many of Detroit's abandoned beauties before heading to San Francisco, put an ad out on craigslist for exploration buddies. We had gone on several sorties with him, usually just the few of us, but, when we joined him this particular time, we met an enormous group of exploration virgins who stuck out in the neighborhood like a glowing white hipster sore thumb. They came completely unprepared, some in sandals, and turned out to be a much larger liability than going in alone might have been. By the time we visited Packard, we were tried and true explorers, and so we found ourselves giving stern lectures to everyone as soon as we were all safely inside the walls of the building. Some important things we've learned that no one else should learn the hard way:

1. Use the buddy system
2. Wear close-toed shoes, with thick soles
3. Bring a backpack
4. Bring a flashlight
5. Bring extra batteries
6. Bring a cell phone (with a charge)
7. Bring a basic first aid kit
8. Bring gloves (work or latex or both)
9. Bring a respirator or at least a cloth face mask
10. Bring water and food if you can't go more than a few hours without eating
11. Let someone on the outside know where you'll be and when you're expecting to return
12. Don't park outside the building
13. Don't be a dick and hasten the destruction of the building
14. Don't set fires
15. Don't disturb any people (or their belongings) who might call that building home
16. Use the hiking rules of "pack it in/pack it out"
17. Don't take souvenirs
18. Be respectful of the people who live next to the buildings

Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

Second, we visited the Roosevelt Warehouse (aka the DPS Warehouse) on Michigan in Southwest Detroit.



Walking into this building was, at first, disappointing because the first floor is largely empty and, at the time we went, the basement was flooded and frozen. We thought we were in for an empty space when we climbed the stairs to the second floor and discovered piles upon piles of school supplies. When we went to the building, we didn't know what it was, only that it was connected to the train station (below) by an underground tunnel that we had tried to manage previously. Looking at all of the supplies, it became apparent it was a warehouse for a school but not knowing anything behind it made it, perhaps, more special. The wonderment that comes with discovery was pure, the feeble mind trying to piece together the complete picture of an experience before your own. What I was unable to capture, because my camera batteries died (how I learned Rule #5 above), was the astounding third floor. Though the racks of late 1960s school books were amusing (in content and artwork) and their sheer volume overwhelming, my breath caught in my throat when I turned a corner to witness a section of collapsed ceiling that had been completely reclaimed by the urban wilds. Such a thing was beautiful enough to trigger an emotional response that would make Stendahl proud.

Sweet Juniper ^[3](whom I linked to earlier and who has photographs of that third floor) is the only easy source for the history of the building which is, in short, that it was built as the city post office, then purchased by the school system before it succumbed to fire in March 1987. The fire is certainly apparent when you visit the building and the piles of disintegrating school supplies makes for an exceptionally heartbreaking experience. While we were living in Southwest, there were two fires that I was aware of, though they were small which did more damage to the building in the time since we've been there. The changes in what we saw (in early 2005) and what Sweet Juniper documented (in late 2007) in the two and a half years between our respective visits was staggering and I suspect that, while some of the damage is the inevitable force of reclamation, much other of it is by people just like us who wanted to see it with their very own eyes, to feel the complete 360-degree phenomenon.

Lastly, for the pièce de résistance, we also had the opportunity to visit the Michigan Central Station.



I originally likened visiting this building first of all of the abandoned buildings in Detroit to losing my virginity to a porn star, meaning that nothing would ever compare in intensity and joy but, in truth, of all of the buildings we've been in, they are uniquely beautiful and so color our memories of a city we've come to adore with every fiber of our being. And here is where I pull out the soapbox.

See, we participated in this urban exploration because we wanted to know the city, we wanted to understand, and I think that, on many levels, that's why predominantly white kids from the suburbs of cities around the globe like to spend their bright Sunday afternoons in places that everyone else has rejected. The funny thing that happened, once we moved into the city and became involved in its everyday life, was that we stopped going to those places. Living between two abandoned houses in Southwest Detroit and working with the homeless and drug addicted in the city, I came to a fuller understanding of all that abandoned structures are, all that they mean, and the manifold roles that they play in a community and stopped seeing them as this disregarded thing that existed simply so I could conquer it.

Three situations changed my perspective and quenched forever my desire to enter another abandoned building.

The first situation was simply living between two abandoned houses and being a part of the daily vigil to prevent them from being vandalized and burned. While I fall on the very far left of the general US population when it comes to issues of squatting, property rights and theft, I didn't want to feel physically vulnerable in the place that I lived, be it from fire or assault. And, being a part of the community (meaning, I knew all of my neighbors and similarly cared about their well-being, as well as knew some of the people who might make those houses a home and cared about those neighbors, too), wanted to prevent the kind of fear and instability that can deteriorate the sometimes delicate infrastructure of that community. Timid growth in a depressed area can be immediately eroded by happenstance or carelessness or outright maliciousness and I loved my neighborhood and my city enough to not see it suffer because some people might be of the notion that certain members of our society are allowed to trespass and make silly while others are not.

Secondly, as a social service provider in the city, I came to understand the greater political and social issues associated with building abandonment, race and class. My neighbors taught me that abandoned buildings can be shooting parlors, shelters, hideouts, storage units, homes, rape sites, and tombs. One of my clients died in an abandoned building, an association that many people who have lived in the city their whole lives share. To many people in Detroit, abandoned buildings are a constant reminder of oppression, poverty and pain which is only worsened when the people on the other side of that wall of suburbia come in at will like some colonialist expedition to view the noble savages and their vicious jungle habitat. That seems harsh and I certainly don't mean to offend, either with my metaphor or with my criticism, but I think it's necessary to illustrate a point because I think that urban exploration and colonialism come from the same place, albeit on a decidedly different scale, and that is a place of entitlement. There are people in the world who look at the wonders it furnishes and believe that, because those wonders exist, they must exist to be conquered (or at least viewed). And then there are the people who are trod upon in the conquest who may well be like the former if they had the means. A fair amount of our earth's bounty has been razed or consumed in the pursuit of conquest and that need-for-the-panoramic-in-the-flesh experience.

Lastly (although this happened early on in my exploration), I got caught by the police in one of the buildings. The getting caught isn't actually what did it for me, it seemed an inevitability over a long enough span of time. No, what made me think was what happened after we got caught. I was at the Fisher Body 21, participating in a photo shoot that ran into the night. I should say, many of my aforementioned rules were learned that night. As we were all shivering in the snow, the police officers berating us with not-so-hyperbolic stories of junkies, murderers, and wayward white kids, one of the officers took me aside. They had picked up all of our licenses and were threatening to tow our cars when we first exited the building and I quickly learned that the only reason I was singled out was because I was the only city of Detroit resident in the bunch. From that point forward, I was someone apart. The officers spoke to me in a much gentler way and, on the whole, treated me like I was one of them which I found curious at the time. Later I realized it was because those officers knew that, by living in the city every day, I should have developed a certain level of common sense and respect for the ways of the mean streets that they couldn't be certain my companions shared.

I'm not saying that no one should explore abandoned buildings or that those people that do are all entitled white kids from the suburbs (despite my fervent generalizations to the contrary in my post, I realize) but I am saying that we should be aware of the impact our every exploration has on the planet and on other cultures (or communities) in addition to the impact we hope it will have on us. From someone who fights her own issues of entitlement and burning thirst for exploration to any others out there, sometimes maybe a photograph should suffice.

[1] - Detroit News

[2] - Wikipedia

[3] - Sweet Juniper