The Most Wondrous and Depressing Web Site

DetroitYES is a forum for exploring the ruins and history of Detroit as well as discussing its potential futures. In 1950 the population of the city had swelled to 1,849,568. Today it's fallen to 916,952. The history of racial conflict and economic decline in Detroit is way too complex to go into here at this time and I don't know enough about it.

I first got a sense of the city's decline and parlous state after I read "Devil's Night" by Zev Chafets back in 1992 or thereabouts (which I got in the temporary discount book store that was in the old Richmond Avenue Rockbottom back around that time). Detroit was a city that held no place in my brain except as some sort of place with car factories. Little did I know that that was increasingly a thing of the past and that the city founded in 1701 by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was a rotting corpse with little chance of revivication.




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The Urban Prairie of St. Cyril's - Seemingly countless blocks of working class homes have been swept away by time and tide and the wrecker's ball.

Since then I've learned a little more about Detroit and its fall, particularly following the riot of 1967. Economic collapse, racial animosity, political corruption and just plain meanness took a city that once numbered almost 2 million down to under 1 million and its populations continues to fall.

I once thought cities aren't disposable. How could things ever happen that would lead to the abandonment of vast swaths of expensive or desirable real estate? Recently I've been reminded of the great lost cities of antiquity like Ur and Sumer. Time passes them by, populations shift and the flow of history is diverted to flow in other directions. That's what's happened to Detroit and other American cities like Baltimore and Newark. It's just happened in our own short lifetimes, not over the ages like in the Fertile Crescent.


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Just tooling around on GoogleMaps I found this liquor store housed in the husk of what was probably a bank in the midst of nowhere.


Also check out: Forgotten Detroit

One More Neighborhood Church

Next to my neighborhood (Cottage Hill, once Hamilton Park) are Livingston and Snug Harbor. Livingston is home to an old and storied Unitarian Church. The present building is the third home of Staten Island's Unitarians, following the original building on Cebra Avenue(which was sold to the German Lutherans to become the original Trinity German Evangelical Lutheran Church who moved the whole thing over the hill to St. Paul's Avenue and Beach Street),





then the "St. Roofus" building in the same location as the present building's.







Finally, in 1895, years after the Great Blizzard of 1888 brought down the roof of "St. Roofus", the present building was erected. It's a tidy little building with a pleasant look to it. You can see the small trees in the older photo now grown old and larger surrounding it in the contemporary picture.


Unitarianism has been described somewhere as a soft pillow on the descent to atheism. Perhaps that's a bit extreme , but it is a bit nebulous and feelgoody. Nonetheless, the track record of the Unitarians on abolition and civil rights is laudable and the building does fit nicely into the neighborhood.

An Unpaved and Vacant Lot

Town of Castleton's Village Hall



Built in 1871, this building was the center of municipal operations for the town of Castleton that once existed as a unique entity along the north shore of Staten Island. Until a few years ago it was one of three remaining village halls that once operated in Staten Island and Queens. Now only the one in Stapleton and another in Queens remain.

In the recent past this once beautiful building, then crumbling, was demolished for safety's sake. The firm that had purchased it to convert into residential units in 1985 had walked away from the expense and responsibility entailed in owning a landmarked property.

All through the earliest days of my childhood this red and slate building had marked the the last leg of the bus trip to my grandmother's house on Henderson Avenue. We'd take the #5 bus from the corner of Victory and Cebra, ride over the hill and get off at Jersey and Richmond Terrace. There'd we'd transfer to the #102 and ride west along the Terrace and turn left on Lafayette and then onto Henderson and my grandma's.

The Village Hall was visible as soon as you turned onto Lafayette and my eyes were usually drawn to it. It was imposing, decayed and had the look of adventure in it. That I, nor my friends, never tried to enter it may seem odd based on the few other adventures I've mentioned but it was far from home by foot and not really in a neighborhood we'd end up in by accident.

Today nothing but an overgrown fenced in lot remains of building.


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Castleton Village Hall from Mike Dominowski's site