The Park Ave. had wireless, which was great. A lot of these weekly or monthly hotels don’t, you have to go to a coffee shop or some fancy hotel lobby and pick up their signal to get online. Using the satellite images on Google Maps, I took a top view of the city and found myself searching for parts of Detroit that looked industrial and depressing. Like how North Korea looks on Google Maps. Sadly, there were a lot of those areas in Detroit. Using pen and paper, I marked down locations to explore, since my heart was now dead set on exploration of our greatest industrial relics. This would have been my dream when I was a kid, to do something like this someday. There, in the room with U FUCK UP scratched deeply on my door, inside one of the greatest hotels in the country, I felt lucky.
With a fully charged battery and two empty memory cards, my camera and I set off for the Packard auto plant. The night before, I’d read up on the place for a bit. It had first opened in 1903, closing its doors in 1957. At one time it was considered the “most modern automobile manufacturing facility in the world.” It was located on East Grand Avenue, on thirty-five acres of land, and occupied 3,500,000 square feet.
You could put a lot of condos in that space.
When I arrived, I parked the Caliente by an archway over the street, which at one time read “Motor City Industrial Park.” Each letter had been painted on a pane of glass, and since some of those windows were now shattered, it read like that one game show where you select a letter and guess the word or phrase.
I was amazed by how far it stretched, a city unto itself. This place opened just at the start of the human experiment with the automobile, and it must have seemed like a permanent monument to American primacy. A century later, the whistling wind was its only sound, and it sat next to a cemetery in the middle of a quiet residential community.
After I parked my car on a side road, I got out and walked toward an open door. I looked around: residential houses, lawns, birds chirping, a family car or two parked on the street. When I took my first step inside, it felt as if I was stepping into a whole other planet. It was like walking into a building the Allies had bombed during World War II. Some spaces were littered with trash, some were not, and some were like theme rooms. One room was nothing but old smashed-to-hell television sets from the 1970s, and another room was nothing but old tires. A couple rooms had absolutely nothing inside them, and then all of a sudden you’d come across a room with several old boats just sitting on the workroom floor, spray-painted. Bags of trash here and there. In one room, somebody had spray-painted in careful cursive, “What happened here?” The hallways and rooms were endless; they seemed to go on and on forever.
At one time, we actually made things within these walls; people made a good living and worked in teams and shipped items off our assembly lines. Now the Packard plant and the ruins of Detroit are large open coffins where artists and vagrants pay their respects, or gravediggers come in to pick a corpse of its copper bones, or people dump yesterday’s garbage, or amateur photographers practice f-stops and shutter speeds and find perfect locations for Urban Exploration.
Kerouac had his great enthusiasms, but none greater than jazz, and the improvised life, and the lovely notion of being alive—alive—moment to moment. Now jazz is something of a museum piece, not as alive as it once was. But these things that have been left for dead from a different America—they are alive, and merit exploration. At least for me they do.
The America that Kerouac escaped into was vast, anonymous, and disconnected from one part to the next. It was a place that matched his reckless, restless energy. His rootlessness was a celebration of freedom, a throwing-off of the shackles of convention, the only limits being how much your liver could stand. In the America of his discovery, there were no more bad wars, our wealth was measured in tangible gold bars, and gleaming massive cars like my Caliente were rolling off an endless assembly line that stretched from here to heaven. This prosperity would never, ever end. Or so they thought.
Walking from one room to the next room, I came across a quote printed on a piece of old card stock. “Press On,” read the card. Underneath that, it read, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent.”
The card was just lying there on the ground, all by itself in the middle of this huge vacant cement-walled room inside an even larger abandoned factory that used to employ thousands of Americans. I wondered how long it had been sitting there, since there was a thick film of dust on it. After taking a photograph of the card in its natural setting, I folded it up and put it in my back pocket. As I was exploring the building, taking pictures, listening to the camera shutter echo against all the cement walls and long dust-covered hallways that went on for days every time I clicked a snapshot, I wondered how that quote ended up here, lost in Detroit.
I’m assuming you probably don’t see too many “the world is full of educated derelicts” quotes posted up on the commons walls of the Ivy League, where people tend to pride themselves on being overeducated—but where I can see a quote like that being posted is on an old dirty fridge at a small auto shop, or in the break room at the assembly line, places where people could once make an honest living without a college education. It takes persistence to wake up every morning and work a hard, thankless job day in and out.
With one memory card full, the juice nearly drained from my camera, and only about a third, if that, of the Packard plant explored, I decided to go back to the hotel to safely download everything onto my hard drive, come back the following day, and keep on coming back till every single room here was fully explored.
On my way in, I ran into Mrs. Harrington, and she told me that it had been busy today; the phone had been ringing off the hook with people calling to ask about vacancies. The city just recently shut down three of their homeless shelters, and a lot of new people needed a place to stay. She told me that she wouldn’t rent a room to someone that didn’t have a job, that she’s tried in the past to rent out to people without employment and it was very problematic and just one big hassle, so she no longer does that.
“How was your day, Colby?” she then asked.
I told her about the Packard auto plant, and showed her a couple pictures from my camera.
In shock, “You went again all by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
She then of course told me again to be careful, it’s highly unsafe, and you never know what could happen inside those buildings.
“I know.”
When I got to my room, I stared at the “Press On” quote for a while, then set it on my desk.
Like owning real estate, there’s something very American about purchasing and owning an automobile. You have to pay money to have one, you have to pay money to keep it maintained, you have to pay money whenever it breaks down, you have to pay money for the insurance, you have to pay money every time you put fuel in the tank, whenever you receive a ticket, pass a toll booth, wash it, or park the fucking thing.
It all gives me a headache, the fact that everything costs money. It had been several years since I’d owned an automobile, and now that I’d been reminded of all this once again, by the time I arrived in Detroit my enthusiasm for owning a car had all but disappeared. I lost that one somewhere around the Wyoming border. Sick and tired of paying for everything, I decided not to drive unless I had to and to leave the Caliente parked up on the top floor of the parking garage a block away from the hotel. Out of sight, out of mind.
While passing through Atlantic City, Iowa, I had purchased an old-school bicycle off an old-timer who owned and operated a corner bike shop. It was one of those beach cruiser kind of bikes with only one gear, and I really didn’t need a bike, but since he was so nice and was only charging twenty bucks for it I picke
d it up. It’s been stashed in my trunk ever since. So today I grabbed a wrench, put it back together, and went off on a bike ride.
Since I had been unable to explore the entire Packard auto plant in one afternoon, I decided to ride my bike back over. While pedaling, I was passing one abandoned and burned-down building right after another.
I passed by the huge cement building I’d explored several days ago, when I saw one of the guys who’d been taking out pipes, the one with the decade-old Lions hat. We did the fist-bump greeting, and he asked me what I was up to. I told him that I was just riding my bike and on my way to check out another abandoned building. I asked what he was up to, and he told me that he was still pulling copper pipes out of that building. He asked how the writing’s coming along, and I told him that it was going fine, and I’d come back and chill with him in a couple days. I worry about him in his toxic water.
Back at the Packard auto plant I stashed my bike over in the bushes by the neighboring cemetery. There was a guy there, standing in front of a grave, talking to it. I stared at him for a while, several minutes, before I snapped out of it and went inside the building.
My goal was to explore every single room in this massive structure. Up on the third floor, hanging out in a huge room that was nearly pitch-black—some sort of part had been fabricated here—I could hardly see or make out what was around me. I was taking a couple photographs of some abandoned boats and an RV of some kind, wondering how in the hell they got those up here, when I heard footsteps. Not again. I wondered when my luck would run out.
I completely froze while I listened. They were coming from down the hallway, a group of them, heading toward me, and there were voices attached to the footsteps, male voices. Slowly, gently, trying to make as little noise as possible, I walked over to the door at the end of the room so that I could look down the long hallway where the footsteps were coming from, then I turned the corner, and there they were.
There were four of them. The closest one to me freaked out, and screamed. Literally, he jumped five feet back like a cartoon character. I apologized for startling them like that. I said hello and asked what they were up to, though I could tell by the way they dressed—with full backpacks, and spray-paint cans rattling—that they were graffiti artists. All were in their early twenties and turned out to be from Hamtramck, which isn’t too far from here.
When I asked if it was cool for me to tag along with them to see what they were up to, they said sure, no prob. While we were walking down the hallway, which went on for days, the one kid I’d freaked out the most looked around. He asked if I was here all by myself, in a tone as if to say, Are you fucking crazy? I told him yeah, that I was alone, and that I liked hanging out in these buildings alone. It was peaceful and, I don’t know, somewhat relaxing. Not quite sure if he believed me, or if he thought I was a liar and just saying that because I was a loser with no friends. I asked if they came across a lot of people hanging out in these buildings. While walking together they tell me they do, but usually other graffiti artists.
When I asked if it was safe going inside these buildings, a kid who had said earlier that he was a graphic design student told me that he had actually been robbed once in this very building.
“Yeah, at gunpoint. By another graffiti artist! He pulled out a gun and stole all my paint. Didn’t take my wallet, money, or anything, all he wanted was my paint. I even had an expensive camera in my backpack, but he didn’t want it.”
What a pussy. Not the guy who got robbed, but the guy who did the robbing. This kid was totally harmless, weighed about a buck and a quarter, and his fellow artist robbed him for his fucking paint? It’s, like, get a fucking job at McDonald’s and go buy your own paint, you know?
He went on to tell me that I had to be careful of other graffiti artists. Some of them were total dicks who would either tell you to get the fuck away from them or try to rob you. He told me that I got lucky, that he and his friends weren’t like that. They just came into these buildings to do their thing.
While I was talking to him, I overheard the other guys in conversation. One of them was asking the other if he’d ever heard of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. I butted into their conversation by pulling out my iPhone and showing them my Basquiat screen saver. I was slightly embarrassed, since I didn’t want to come across as the old thirty-something with no friends who was trying to impress them. As I was telling them the little bit I know about Basquiat, basically shit you could pull up on Wikipedia, like a pretentious asshole in a white-walled art gallery, I realized that these abandoned buildings are like contemporary art museums you can enter free of charge, that every day is a free day just as long as you’re not worried about asbestos, or getting robbed at gunpoint by the artist who’s “showing” up on the third floor.
On the roof there was a huge water tower that stood a good couple hundred feet up in the air, as well as a couple large trees. The view of Detroit was spectacular. The sun was out, and you could see for miles in all directions. Two of the guys have found a wall to paint; setting their backpacks on the ground they went to work. I looked down and could see two photographers a level below us taking pictures of the walls. They looked like professionals, with fancy gear and equipment. Not only that, they looked to be around my age. I went down to talk with them.
I also had a camera on my neck, which made me feel confident in approaching them. Like, Hey guys, I’m just like you! I’m taking pictures too! Isn’t this fun! Let’s hang! I guess I was hoping to make friends.
The photographers were both from Los Angeles and flew out to Detroit here just to do this. They’d been going around all over the city all weekend, going into all the buildings and structures, taking photos. They did this as a hobby.
One of them told me this was the easiest place so far to get inside, and that the others they had to kind of sneak in. He looked around at everything and then said, “It’s like a bomb went off here.”
And that was pretty much it. They didn’t seem too interested in chatting or hanging out with me any longer—they were busy taking photos. I started getting neurotic, thinking that these were the cool kids and I was the nerdy dork with no friends; so I thanked them and excused myself.
I went back up onto the roof, where two of the four graffiti artists were hard at work spray-painting a wall. The other two were doing what I was doing—just kicking back, sitting against the edge of the roof watching the writers, enjoying the glory of the day. A couple minutes later the two photographers from L.A. came up and sat next to us. The one photographer opened up his camera bag and offered me half of his granola bar, which I accepted and thanked him for.
While watching one of the guys paint, I asked one of the L.A. photographers whether a lot of photographers came here to shoot urban decay. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s Disneyland here. This is the number-one place in the U.S. to come for urban photography now.
“What’s more trendy is sticking a naked chick in the middle of this.”
“I’ve heard about that,” I said, “I read an article once about this girl in New York who does that, I think her name’s Miru Kim?”
“She’s a goddess. She’s awesome. No, she’s great, but what I’m talking about is people who are just copying each other, just people who want to get into fashion photography. Their thing is shooting tied-up girls in urban settings.”
I asked where they were planning to go next, and he told me they were thinking about going to an abandoned mining town in the San Bernardino area back in California.
“Have you been to the Michigan Grand Central Station yet?” he asked.
I told him that I’d tried to get into that building, but there was a police car parked in the post office parking lot next door watching the location like a hawk, so I wasn’t able to hop the fence to get in. He told me that he and his buddy got into that building the other day.
“You got in?!”
“Y
eah, we got in. I guess we got lucky. We ran into some guys there and they were saying Canada railroad cops patrol it, and they’ll arrest you on the spot. But on the side of the building—you know how the road goes underground?—there’s a section right there that’s not boarded up, and you go underground basically, and you come out in the building. The guys there told us about a tunnel that could get us inside the book depository across the street, so we went underground to the book depository, too. There’s a conveyor belt from when they used to load supplies from the third floor and convey them down to trucks, so we actually climbed up the belt and that was the most interesting part. Inside there are hundreds of thousands of books that are just sitting there disintegrating.”
I spent the rest of the day pedaling around East Detroit. I came across a street in the middle of the ’hood that had been converted into folk art with a strong Basquiat influence. A whole street converted to a work of art, a gallery. And white people were parking their cars, getting out and walking around to look at it.
I came across a black guy who was about to walk into a house on the street, and asked if he was the artist, which he was. I asked if it’d be cool to chat with him. He told me sure thing, just give him a couple minutes, and he went inside his house and turned on some classical music. I walked around, taking pictures, and ten minutes later he returned. I said hello and told him what I was up to, that I was a writer traveling across the country talking to people, and I told him that he had a very interesting thing going on here, and I’d like to talk to him about it.
He looked at me with a flat expression. “I don’t know who you are,” he said.
That’s funny, I want to say, neither do I. Not quite sure how to respond, I said hello and told him my name, and he said, “Well, I don’t know who that is.”
Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey Page 17
