![]() That’s how this piece started, but then I kept thinking about what amazing characters these two individuals are… Mickey Cohen, LA’s Mafia boss after Bugsy Siegel and Harry Houdini, someone who may well have been the most famous person in the world at his height.Īlso, in the ongoing quest for information, I wanted to pose a question to the community about each historical figure. If I come across something fun I think my audience would find interesting or enlightening, I want to share it right away. This is a research and community-building web site. I’m not fully trying to do that here, but I can’t keep myself from doing it entirely. How about you? Add a comment below.Ĭheck this out bigger and in Paul’s My Detroit slideshow.I love the concept of taking two seemingly opposite figures in history, putting them up next to one another and then seeing what types of comparisons we can draw and what ironies might present themselves. I still don’t know where I come down in this whole debate, but I think that I prefer the work along the lines of Johnny Knoxville to the reporting that he mocks in the opening of his great video about the D. Ference takes issue with the assertation that ruin photography cannot help but exploit a city’s misery and takes you through the work of some earlier ruin photographers. It’s a probing and critical look at ruin porn that is well worth your consideration that asks “What does ‘ruin porn’ tell us about the Motor City, ourselves, other American cities?” The second is a thoughtful response to Leary’s article On ‘Ruin Porn’ by photographer and historian Ian Ference. The first is Detroitism by John Patrick Leary in Guernica Magazine. There’s two really excellent essays that look at roughly two sides of the ruin porn/ruin photography coin. That thought is “Am I adding something positive to the discussion and struggle to redefine Michigan or am I just exploiting the pain behind these ruins?” ![]() In looking at them, however, I was struck by the thought that seems to always come to mind when I research and write about Slumpy, Michigan Central Station and even the ruin in redevelopment where my office is, the former Traverse City State Hospital. The photographs are no doubt gorgeous and there’s no denying that ruin photography provides some powerful commentary on what has happened to Detroit in the last 40 years. ![]() The images are drawn from the new photographic book Ruins of Detroit from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. That’s a 60 percent decline from its 1950 peak population - 1.85 million - and the lowest count since the 1910 Census put the then-promising Motor City’s population at 285,704.ĭefinitely shocking numbers, and like many media outlets, they chose to drive the numbers home with pictures of some of the many ruins of the Motor City: United Artists Theater, Michigan Central Station (MCS), the Whitney Building and (of course) Slumpy. …census data indicates Detroit’s population dropped by a startling 25 percent in the last decade, from 951,270 in 2000 to 713,777 last year. The culprit for this increased traffic was Haunting Images Of Detroit’s Decline by Nicole Hardesty on Huffington Post, a photographic tour of Detroit’s ruins produced in response news that: The other day I noticed a big spike on one of the most popular posts of all time on Michigan in Pictures, slumpy … the William Livingstone Mansion in Detroit’s Brush Park which tells the story of the fall of this iconic ruin in 2007.
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