April 22, 2010

on touring your hood

Imagine having your own firehall...how cool would that be? Lots of space for your cars and bikes and what have you, photo by: tourdehood.wordpress.com
I've always been interested to visit Detroit. Not only because the Pistons have always been my Team in basketball or the fact that I'm a car nut at heart, but also because it's a city with an interesting history. It's also a representation of the rise, and more recently, the fall of American industry. Detroit used to be a metropolitan city of 2 million people. Now, it's a city of 700,000. I've always liked to photograph, industrial landscapes, and the more abandoned and desolate, the better. This is also (perhaps strangely to some) part of the appeal for me as far as Detroit goes. But since I can't see myself traveling there any time soon, I travel there virtually every once in a while through http://tourdehood.wordpress.com/. It's one man's photographic documentation of his weekly rides through his beloved city. I'm sure it must be sad at times to ride through neighborhoods that are falling apart, but the author of the blog does a good job of looking on the bright sides, and brings us a very interesting view of a city you never hear about here in Western Canada. To quote the author of tourdehood: "Detroit is [also] a synopsis of America’s rise and fall as one of the world’s manufacturing powerhouses. It was the “Arsenal of Democracy”. Much of Detroit was based on making things – from cars and all their ancillary parts, to giant machine tools, to smelting and banging and forging. That’s all gone now, and the hulking remnants of that 20th Century glory still stand, empty, and collapsing, while someone tries to figure out what to do next. (No one’s come up with a workable idea yet)."

3 comments:

sabinna said...

Pittsburgh had the same problem. But the place has been transformed a lot. From a producer of steel to a producer of services. Maybe there's some lessons there for Detroit?

misterarthur said...

Thanks for the post & comment. I'll put a link to your blog on mine

The People of Detroit said...

If you're interested in life in Detroit, then check out this portraiture project: http://thepeopleofdetroit.com