Posted on Monday March 16th by Jebediah Reed | 1,584
Check out Vice magazine’s stunning gallery of photographs of the Jane Cooper Elementary School in Detroit. The building has been out of use for less than two years, and already gangs of urban “scrappers” have harvested everything of value and left the building looking like an ancient ruin.
Some of the shots bear an eerie resemblance to those taken in the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl (for example this, and this.) And the sapling taking root among the piles of books in the abandoned library also calls to mind Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us.
It’s always useful to be reminded how quickly the foundational structures of our society can go to seed when neglected.
More photos after the jump.
Photos: James Griffioen
March 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
[...] as demonstrated in the satellite image above. Even with its 900,000 citizens, Detroit is a ghostland of a city. Its downtown appears dense at first glance; indeed, its skyscrapers are tightly knit and look [...]
March 17th, 2009 at 8:41 am
[...] had your coffee this morning? Well, if not, this will wake you up. Check out these photos of an abandoned school in Detroit. Yes, this is in America. The effects of a difficult economy in Michigan are not exclusive to the [...]
March 17th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
If you think that’s interesting, check out this fascinating project about two years from the Detriot Free Press. They drove every street of the entire city, and took quite a few photos:
http://media.freep.com/drivingdetroit/stories.html
March 24th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] Traveler, LLC is proposing to build an elevated high speed maglev train running between the depopulating metropolis of Detroit and the state capital of Lansing as the first leg of a multi-use national [...]