Sure, two of Detroit's greatest "ruin porn" structures -- Michigan Central Station and the Packard Plant -- are slated for a major overhaul. The Brewster-Douglass towers have been razed. Southwest Detroit Hospital has been cleaned up and fenced off.
Still, with all the other abandoned buildings, is Detroit no longer a ruins-sightseeing magnet for visitors?
That's the case, JC Reindl suggests at the Detroit Free Press under a hgeadline saying "Detroit lost its title as 'ruin porn' capital."
German toiurist Jakob Schweizer tells Reindl he came last week iin search of abandoned industrial sites.
“I came specifically to Detroit for the ruins," Schweizer, 41, a biologist who lives in Berlin, said Saturday outside the old Packard Plant, one of the city's best-known urban ruins. “Once I saw a book with these photographs of the ruins, I was really intrigued.”
He was disappointed to find many of the blighted buildings he saw photographed are now locked up and off-limits to exploration. He also expected to see more.
Reindl reports:
There is still no shortage of empty houses, school buildings, factories or storefronts in Detroit, yet most of the big structures whose decay and fallen grandeur attracted photographers and so-called urban explorers from around the world no longer exist in the startling condition they did a decade ago.
"That chapter in history is gone; we're onto the renewal," said Andrew Moore, a New York-based photographer whose 2010 photography book, "Detroit Disassembled," showed dramatic images of the city's many desolate buildings at the time.
