How Detroit Became the World Capital of Staring at Abandoned Old Buildings For decades, a succession of city officials has struggled mightily to rebrand Detroit's battered image. Their ideas have included casino gambling, an "80s festival mall, new ballparks, hosting a Formula One grand prix, hosting a Super Bowl, even commissioning (this was Mayor Coleman Young, in 1984) Berry Gordy (who fled Detroit for Los Angeles by the early 1970s, taking the entire Motown operation with him) to write a city theme modeled after Frank Sinatra's "Theme from New York, New York." Another member of the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr., was conscripted to handle the vocals, but sadly, Gordy's song, "Hello, Detroit," failed to burn up the charts. But now much of the attention being showered upon Detroit from the trendiest of quarters comes, in no small measure, thanks to the city's blight. Detroit's brand has become authenticity, a key component of which has to do with the way the city looks. Does fixing the very real problems faced by Detroiters, I began to wonder, mean inevitably robbing Detroit of some part of its essential Detroitness? This is not exactly a question of gentrification; when your city has 70,000 abandoned buildings, it will not be gentrified anytime soon. Rather, it's one of aesthetics. And in Detroit, you can't talk aesthetics without talking ruin porn, a term that has become increasingly familiar in the city. Detroiters, understandably, can get touchy about the way descriptions and photographs of ruined buildings have become the favorite Midwestern souvenirs of visiting reporters. Still, for all of the local complaints, outsiders are not alone in their fascination. My friend Phil has staged secret, multicourse gourmet meals, prepared by well-known chefs from local restaurants, in abandoned buildings like the old train station; John and his buddies like to play ice hockey on the frozen floors of decrepit factories. A woman who moved to Detroit from Brooklyn began to take nude photographs of herself in wrecked spaces (thrusting the concept of ruin porn to an even less metaphorical level). And Funky Sour Cream, an arts collective originally from New York, arranged an installation of little cupcake statues in the window of a long-shuttered bakery on Chene Street. A few days later, the bakery burned down. People debated whether or not this was a coincidence. Meditation on ruin is a long and noble tradition. In Renaissance Italy, antiquarians like Leon Battista Alberti and Poggio Bracciolini began to promote the study and preservation of Roman ruins, which, to that point, had been unsystematically pushed aside as the city expanded. According to Alberti's biographer, Anthony Grafton, they also "made fun of those who became too depressed" about the ruins, like poor, oversensitive Cyriac of Ancona, who "seemed to mourn the fall of Rome with excessive emotion." My grandfather, who traced our family origins back to Florence, insisted we were related to Leon Battista Alberti, also a Florentine and a prototypical Renaissance man: playwright, poet, architect, painter, astronomer, lawyer and prizewinning horseman. And thanks to the efforts of proto-preservationists like cousin Alberti, many later generations of painters and poets continued to meditate on the transitory nature of man's greatest achievements in the shadow of once-majestic edifices like the Baths of Caracalla, built in the early third century by a Roman emperor and pretty much destroyed by the sacking Ostrogoths roughly 300 years later. Perhaps not incidentally, Michigan Central Station, the best-known Detroit ruin - a towering 18-story Beaux-Arts train station with a lavish waiting room of terrazzo floors and 50-foot ceilings, built in 1913 by the same architectural firms that designed New York's Grand Central - was modeled after the Baths of Caracalla. After the station closed in 1988, a developer talked about turning the building into a casino; the current owner, Manuel Moroun, had discussed with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's administration selling the station to the city as part of a plan to turn the place into police headquarters and police museum. Mostly, though, Moroun has allowed the station to molder. Sitting nearly a mile and a half from the high-rises of downtown, Michigan Central looms like a Gothic castle over its humbler neighbors on Michigan Avenue. It's hard not to think of it as an epic-scale disaster that seems engineered to illustrate man's folly - as if the Titanic, after sinking, had washed ashore and been beached as a warning.