Here’s the last two parts of the video those two guys made about the Whittier Hotel in Detroit.
Some of the language is kind of rough…they drop the “f-bomb” fairly frequently….so be prepared for that.
I’m fascinated with Detroit.
Why something falls so far…and seems to keep falling…is, thankfully, completely foreign to my experience.
Look at this hotel…at one point it was so beautiful.
Now, it’s just a big reminder of something that used to be good.
That’s crazy.
I was thinking about this old Motown song while I was driving the mail around in an earth-shaking downpour yesterday.
The version here is by David Bowie, but the original was a huge hit for Martha and the Vandellas (and Motown) in 1964.
That would have been a high point for both Motown and the “Motor City”.
How does one of the wealthiest and most prosperous cities in the world fall so far? It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy thing.
Detroit was huge. The automobile industry was pumping out great cars, the music coming out of Detroit was extremely influential and popular…people were moving to Detroit for a better life.
Then it started to change…and now you have beautiful buildings like this that lay vacant and decaying…and Detroit is bankrupt.
Motown moved out of Detroit in 1972…but you can’t blame Motown for a fall this deep.
Maybe the people just lost heart or something…I can’t figure it out.
I’ll probably do more posts on Detroit in the future.
It’s a strange new frontier.