"It was just under ten years ago that my friends and I began traveling from our suburban homes in Royal Oak, Michigan into Detroit looking for nightlife. We were typical middle-class teenagers seeking to change our environment and explore the 'underground' of an aging city. The destination was often an abandoned warehouse converted into a makeshift nightclub, where by 2 a.m. bass shook the rundown building from foundation to roof. Over time and after becoming acutely more observant, however, I realized that these surroundings were more than a suburban nightlife. The boarded-up homes, the all too rare museums, and the businesses polarized between mild victory and failure, all came into context—my observations matured. Through the study of economics, these observations became first-hand illustrations of poverty, real estate markets and labor dilemmas.
...
I clearly remember paying $20 to stumble into a nearly pitch dark doorway of Detroit's Packard Plant. The walls of the abandoned building, certainly the size of a football stadium, were adorned with black garbage-bag-like plastic to create boundaries for the event. There were some scarce hanging lamps and one other thing that looked a touch unreal: an industrial heater. Seriously, it looked like someone had taken the propulsion unit from a fighter jet and mounted it on the floor. Its flames poured out a good 6-8 feet and the only thing keeping you from igniting yourself was a a remote, albeit real, sense of mortality. That was it in terms of the venue. One thousand other kids paid the same and made the same entrance into the city's largest expense-free nightclub...it was a good time before glowsticks and pacifiers made their way into the scene. "