A photo slideshow of the wonderful urban ruins of Detroit includes this photo of the East Side Public Library:
Now how in the hell can a library be abandoned and *not* cleaned out? Even if the local government simply shut the door and walked away, books have monetary value. At the very least you’d think some enterpising and larcenous used book dealer would show up with a truck, an armed guard or three and a couple of burly guys to box all that stuff up and sell it a bit at a time. There has *got* to be some money in that… they can’t all have been books by Oprah.
This seems to be a theme in a lot of the photos. Buildings were abandoned with the stuff still in them, and the locals thought of nothing better to do than to trash the stuff… not sell it.
Weird.
32 Responses to “Free Books! Free Library, In Fact…”
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All the photos in that series show odd things just being abandoned in place;
The police station has tons of photos related to criminal cases lying in a heap on the floor: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/12/31/1293797760628/Offices-Highland-Park-Pol-007.jpg
A lot of that stuff should have salable value if for no other reason than its age, like the art-deco chandeliers: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/12/30/1293734009996/Vanity-Ballroom-001.jpg
If they are just going to let it rot away, they should let people come in and take anything for free they find usable or want to sell.
There are bound to be some very desirable books in that library simply due to the total number of them.
I’d say it looks like the third world, but there the populace would have stripped everything out of the place. This looks like a city after its entire populace just dropped dead one day.
That is just sick and insane
I wonder how exactly they got rid of that French house….guys must have felt like Ty Pennington!….(joke)
Busdriver….move that bus!!
Shocking. Formerly valuable developed property abandoned. If the owners didn’t themselves have the means for upkeep you’d expect them to sell to someone who did. Did circumstances make upkeep more than the property was worth? How much of that upkeep expense was taxes?
I presume the library was owned by the city, in which case failure to sell could be another case of gooberment stupidity.
Starnesville
My understanding is that “white flight” became not just a propblem for the city, but actual city policy under many years of Democrat/black separatist mayors who actively encouraged white to pack up and leave (or just… leave). When you are chased or hounded out of an area, especially an area where the property value have crashed, sometimes you don’t give a damn about selling the property… you just want out. Remember, a lot of properties in Detroit have sold for ONE DOLLAR. That’s because nobody wants to live there.
It’s remarkably easy to make a neighborhood unlivable. Jack up the crime rate somethign fierece, and then don’t do anything about it, and soon enough the houses will be abandoned.
3: Profit
this is weird
if look on picture, i think oh movie Sets of
The Omega Man
The Ultimate Warrior
Mad Max (part one)
But this is reality, creepy
the states of library in Europe also Insane
here book get “lost” most because to vacate more space new Books
most they they end in Papermill !
and they not replace the “contents” of book but by other subjects like cooking
wat means technical books like old Aerospace book ARE LOST FOREVER
tne end is near…
Well it *is* Detroit we’re talking about here.
Like others, I’m shocked not just by the extent to which Detroit has decayed (that it was happening was obvious to anyone paying attention since at least the late 1970’s), but the fact that so much stuff of value was simply left sitting in place with no attempt to salvage or sell off assets. Much of this looks like pictures you see from the towns and villages that were abandoned in the wake of Chernobyl (in particular pictures from Prypiat, the largest city near Chernobyl – some pictures here: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/ )
In the case of Chernobyl, at least the waste is understandable. People left quickly and were told they would be coming back in a week, or a month at most, so they took very little. And of course, most of was was left behind was now radioactive so it could never be reclaimed.
But Detroit is something different. These abandonments took decades. Some were the result of explicit city policy (the police station and libraries for example). But, you’d think that everything was radioactive the way valuable assets were left behind so carelessly.
The police station is particularly disturbing. Forget that those pictures represent in some cases private information that should not be left to be picked over by whoever might pass by. There may well be the answer to major unsolved cases lying amongst that rubble. No one knows.
That there is a pathology present in Detroit is obvious. Of course, it goes without saying that the city has enjoyed some of the most leftwing Democrat party polices for the last 50 to 60 years.
For me, the fact that all those books were left untouched by the local inhabitants says a lot.
Never mind the potential value of the books in terms of financial terms, but just the value of the knowledge contained within the books that might enable or inspire people in that area to attempt to improve their lot in life and their community.
It was a terrifying judgement 35 years ago… and time has not made it any less so:
“Why” indeed…
The place is now an ideal, inexpensive set for post-apocalypse movies. How can anyone charge the movie company for wrecking a place that is abandoned?
The only problem is that the movie companies will have to hire effective armed security to fight off the *actual* mutants that seem to really live there.
Take him to Detroit! Kentucky Fried Movie ….. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of that piece of Americana 🙂
The library reminded me of the scene in George Pal’s “The Time Machine” where the time traveler asks the Eloi if they have a place where they keep books, and they take him to that ancient library where the books are crumbling into dust.
The Internet has largely made physical libraries obsolete (our city library has largely turned into a place where the public can get free internet access amid piles of old books), but the Internet is very fragile compared to physical paper and books for storing information.
Surprisingly, the “Fahrenheit 451” scenario of everyone losing the ability to read and write in a world where all information is communicated either orally or visually has _not_ occurred*; in fact, just the reverse has been the case, with the blogs giving everyone the ability to express their opinions – political, philosophical, economic, or other – on a minute-to-minute basis that would have made the patriots of the 1776 revolution weep tears of joy; we have the electronic equivalent of tens of millions of printing presses in the US at the moment, and their output can be considered and judged by hundreds of millions of citizens within seconds of the things on them being written if they so desire.
If there ever was an enemy of the tyrants of the world, its name starts with a “http:”.
* In fact, maybe a bit _too_ much in a written form versus verbally; why talk to your friends when you can Twitter them, with the total message length forcing you to compress complex thoughts into things as brief and complex as haikus. 😀
2 demented thoughts:
– The next season of Survivor should be in Detroit, or maybe Chicago.
– Zombie film set with no need to hire the zombies, they come with the setting. If only the local police would let you clean out the local zombie population.
I can’t figure out why in Detroit you have:
1.) Loads of homeless people living on the street with no roof over their heads.
2.) Abandoned roofed buildings with no people in them.
Even if the buildings weren’t heated, they at least would be a place to get out of the weather, and if enough homeless were in them, their own massed body heat would elevate the interior temperature to considerably higher than the exterior temperature.
Maybe it’s something to do with asbestos being used in them, and tearing them down or making them habitable by removing the asbestos costing too much.
I know that when asbestos has been taken out of old buildings around here, a team shows up that is clothed like they are dealing with the Andromeda Strain being in the place.
It’s embarrassing as an American to see a major US city look like this. Look at who has run Detroit the last 50 years, and you have your answer on why the place has gone to shit.
> It’s embarrassing as an American to see a major US city look like this.
Remember, there was also New Orleans. Another success story for the political party that has run it forever.
I love books, I mean I really REALLY love books. My personal library is getting close to 2000 last time I counted and might have hit that by now.
Then to see a picture like that, row upon row of decades of our civilizations collected knowledge and culture being left to molder on the shelves due to apathy…
There aren’t words sufficient for what I feel right now, and the only consolation I have is that at least it looks more or less intact so perhaps someone who knows this places value might be able to recover it some day.
I think I need a rum-n-coke now.
> might be able to recover it some day.
In fiction, abandoned libraries are found after decades or centuries, and the dusty books recovered and read. In reality… unless the library is in an arid desert, if it gets busted open to the elements, the books will be eaten by bugs and turned to mush by humidity, rain and snow in a relatively few years.
I’m honestly surprised that the books haven’t been consumed by fire. People willing to ignore the value of books tend to be the same people who like to watch things they don’t understand go up in flames.
Hey… where are *these* guys? You’d think they’d be all over this…
I know, I know…
It’ll probably either be burned by hobos or rotted in five years and I can add it to my list of things to keep me up on my darker nights while I stare at the ceiling.
When I said ‘Someday’ I meant ‘In the next year or so’ but honestly even that’s probably not going to happen.
I love our city library as much as anyone else here loved theirs.
I can still remember as a kid getting my full “Adult” library card at age ten to replace my “Children’s Library” card that only allowed me to take out books from the downstairs section.
That was good (I still have in my book collection a copy of “Dirigibles That Made History” that the library sold in the 1980’s for ten cents…what makes it fun is that its inside cover has the card with the due date stamed on it when it had to be returned in two week’s time… the last due date stamped on it is from 1968… that was me taking it out for around the third time.)
But what completely blew my mind was when I got my first computer back in 1997, linked up to the Internet, and after a week or so’s time realized that I now had a library card to something that would make the Library Of Congress look small by comparison.
I didn’t even have to consult the card catalog, go digging around on the shelves for it, or get it through inter-library loan.
It was all just sitting there, only a minute or so away.
My friends thought I’d gone completely off my rocker; I was talking to them like some wild-eyed religious fanatic, spreading the gospel of the Internet.
“Do you have _any idea_ what you can find with this thing? This is the _damnedest thing_ you’ve ever seen!!!”
Interesting observation about the parallels to “The Time Machine”. I guess that makes the average Detroit citizen one of the Eloi and the roving gangs and politicians the Morlocks.
Boy, hard to route for either side in that fight. I’m tempted to say what Henry Kissinger said when asked about the Iran – Iraq War in the 1980’s – “Too bad they both can’t lose”, but in the case of Detroit …. I think they both did.
Yeah, the American Pickers guys could find some stuff there, but they’d have to suit up with some Kevlar and hire a team of well armed guards.
If you watch the video of Empire at the edge of Chaos from the previous post, you’ll get the feeling Detroit is just the first city of many that will have the same fate if we don’t control the debt.
> Detroit is just the first city of many
Well, maybe. The problem with Detroit (well, one major problem) is that piss-poor local government – which was, apparently, repeatedly *legally* elected, which means a large percentage of piss-poor voters – actively drove away the productive people in favorof setting up a welfare state…a welfare state that was funded by taxing productive people *outside* Detroit. But the US debt problem is going to hit everywhere at once, and there will be no outside taxpaying productive people to fund it.
Think of Detroit as being at the *positive* end of the bell curve for possible outcomes if we don’t get government spending under control.
“Think of Detroit as being at the *positive* end of the bell curve for possible outcomes if we don’t get government spending under control.”
So reassuring.
It would be a nice base for survivalists to take up residence. Good place for sci-fi modelers to showcase their wares–who wants to steal books these days? Sigh…