Out of the chrysalis of 1906, we are, 92 years later, a different people in a different city. Yet, the partial ruins of the urban core inspire a curious nostalgia for the people and things left in the wake of our past. Detroit, America's "Dynamic City" in the first half of the American century, drew its energy from the hopes and American dreams of those who flocked to it.
They overran its Midwestern Victorianism soon after the 1906 depicted here. The unregulated aggregate of their individual strivings for social improvement and quests for the spoils of Progress pushed the city outward from its core on the banks of the river. With the wild and explosive growth came a national reputation for recklessness and lawlessness as well as dynamism.
We, the heirs of the dreamers and strivers, continue to extend this restless energy further across the planar face of Southeastern Michigan, reaching into farmland and field with fingers of concrete.
The central urban core of 1906 simply could not contain the force of so many aspirations and ambitions, and so it burst, then deflated, abandonned. And yet we, the abandonners, are compelled to look back. Perhaps it's just nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the "simpler" past; or perhaps we seek in the past something that the future does not appear to hold.
We have come a long way in achieving the dreams of our forbearers who left the farm, the village, and their Old World for "five-dollars-a-day." Yet, we turn back, browsing the cracked and fading glass plate photos, poking and prodding images populated with the places and faces of the dead, searching for ???
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. [F. Scott Fitzgerald]