“In the early morning light, under the sky-gaining plane, lay a large city with its suburbs: downtown Detroit, an oasis the size of a square mile, like a miniature Manhattan, and immediately behind it was an interweaving of dull streets, buildings, factories, residential buildings, highways, in most stained with mud - huge Augean stables, for which there is not enough money to clean them. Arthur Haley, Wheels.
Large and small
What are abandoned cities, ghost towns? These are either once secret military settlements (there are many of them left on the territory of the former USSR), or towns of prospectors who left in search of a better life after the gold, silver or diamonds that gave life to the village ran out. Or satellite cities that have grown up around some large enterprise and abandoned as a result of an economic recession or a man-made disaster, such as Pripyat.
Usually several thousand people lived in these abandoned cities: soldiers and officers, miners or workers. That is why the traces of their life are quite modest - a dozen stone or even wooden buildings on the only street that was once the main one.
But there are cities, one might even say - megalopolises, still inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people, who at the same time can safely claim the title of ghost towns. Detroit, Michigan is one such dying city.
Auto America
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This city, almost the same age as St. Petersburg (Detroit was founded by the French in 1701), has developed and grown thanks to the car - a symbol of technological progress in the XX century. Ford, General Motors, Chrysler - leading US carmakers made Detroit their capital by the 1950s. The city was surrounded by endless buildings of assembly plants, stamping workshops, mechanical workshops, design bureaus and, as a result, hundreds of hostels and inexpensive "anthills" - apartment buildings for workers. In the center are skyscrapers with offices, eateries and restaurants, cinemas and museums, train stations and stadiums. Dozens of luxury villas for top managers, police stations, fire stations have been built in elite areas …
In the center of the city, at the intersection of two main highways - named after Edzel Ford and Walter Chrysler - a meter with one and a half meter numbers stood on a giant advertising board for a tire company known to the whole world. The numbers changed every minute, showing how many cars were currently produced in the United States. Precisely in the USA, because the automobile industry in Detroit is the automobile industry throughout America.
Escape
In the 1970s, a crisis hit. Gasoline prices rose sharply, and buyers began to turn away from the classic American "land cruisers", preferring inexpensive, fuel-efficient, and most importantly - reliable Japanese cars. In Detroit, the crisis hit unskilled assembly line assembly workers in the first place. Mass layoffs followed, transfers of entire families to beggarly benefits.
Those who could afford to change their place of residence left, others stayed. In the period from 1970 to 2005, the city's population fell by half - from 1.9 million to 880.7 thousand people.
The "others", as we understand it, were the poorest, dark-skinned part of the population. They had nowhere to go, there was only one thing left - to survive.
As a result of "survival" in the city, the crime rate rose sharply, which prompted the remaining whites to a hasty flight. Shops and banks that were still open began to close. The building of the once famous Michigan Theater, built in 1926, turned into a parking lot, the surrounding skyscrapers acquired a gloomy look, and in 1988, Detroit Central Station ceased to operate.
Last Halloween
Despite the obvious devastation, the local population still had some hopes for a long time. But on June 1, 2009, General Motors, the world's largest automobile corporation, officially filed for bankruptcy. The collapsed auto giant closed 12 of 20 American factories, more than a thousand dealerships and laid off 21,000 workers. So now Detroit will not save anything, and the only thing left for the authorities is to demolish this once flourishing city and build something more promising in its place.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №35. Author: Konstantin Fedorov