Detroit in Ruins

Dramatic imagery, but check out this for a counterpoint [1]:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/oct/20/dirtbo...

Watch enough of the video to see the mention of the photos of the "abandoned" high-school ... as the camera pans over towards the brand-new high-school next-door.

[1] Found via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059208

Given the lack of comments on this, I thought try and write why I posted something that's not exactly HN material

I found this collection of pics put me in a very melancholic mood. For me, they remind me that everything we do, no matter how much work, sweat and love we pour into it, is ephemeral. Work is required to keep decay at bay and slow the increase in entropy, and one day, sooner than we expect, people (sometimes us) will decide (often not a conscious decision) that what was once worth preserving/keeping is no longer worth the effort

Saddest of all was the picture of the library with books still on the shelves. It's like it wasn't worth the effort moving them to another library (or even giving them away!) or perhaps they were never willing to admit this was the end; perhaps they were always telling them selves it was just temporary, someday they'd reopen the library. someday soon. so sad

I don't understand ... what is the systemic problem that is keeping these buildings from being bought and repurposed into something else? Is it a screwy tax code or building code situation? What?

Reminds me so much of this well known verse

  This thing all things devours: 
  Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; 
  Gnaws iron, bites steel; 
  Grinds hard stones to meal; 
  Slays king, ruins town, 
  And beats high mountain down.

I have heard a lot of negative comments about Detroit in my life but had not seen anything like this before. It is not too different from pictures of cities abandoned near Chernobyl because the high radiation makes them no longer habitable -- only people still live in Detroit. The city still exists.

It also makes it all the more clear that buildings are the way they are only so long as living humans make active use of them and, thus, routinely maintain them. I think I and most people tend to think of buildings as being more static and permanent than they really are. Our cities/structures are imbued with life only as long as people imbue them with such, not because of the buildings that were once built there.