Post #100: Dearborn, Detroit, Chelsea

Abandoned rail station and hotel (Roosevelt Park in the foreground) Note: After publishing this post, I looked through the photographs on the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit. The building in my photograph is the Michigan Central Railroad Station. Read and see more at Fabulous Ruins. Recently I visited a friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We spent sometime in Dearborn; we drove through Detroit; and we had lunch in Chelsea, Michigan (we did not eat any Jiffy products). I left Michigan looking forward to another visit--soon--especially to Detroit and for much longer. The city is somewhat of an enigma in the landscape architecture and planning fields. My first introduction to Detroit were the Michael Moore movies then The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. Sharon Zukin has also written about Detroit in Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World. There are many more publications about Detroit; a search of UCB's Environmental Design library shows 117 with "Detroit" in the title (Amazon posts 85,431 results with keyword "Detroit"). I have not come across fiction about and/or set in Detroit. I would like to read from this genre as well as books about the city's ecology and green spaces. left: Arab-American Museum, Dearborn left: Tiger Stadium (read and see more at Fabulous Ruins) right: Roosevelt Park, Michigan Avenue The People Mover, downtown Detroit left: Jiffy factory at the edge of downtown Chelsea (Amtrak line in middle-ground)