When My Words Aren't Enough

For the past few years, I've been mildly obsessed with the blog Sweet Juniper. It is written by a husband and wife--Dutch and Wood--who moved to Detroit more than a year ago with their daughter Juniper [they have since had another child, Gram]. Dutch is a stay-at-home father, and one of his [what do you call it? a hobby? A passion?] favorite passtimes is photographing the falling-apart city.

One of the subjects that he has most prolifically photographed is the Detroit Public School Book Depository, a huge warehouse that holds old materials from the public schools. A fire broke on in the building 20 years ago, and the warehouse is now filled with drug dealers, prostitutes, and trees that grow out of the ashes of burnt pages. His pictures incited quite an outcry about the state of things--whether it be the government or some handful of shitty individuals that caused it--and he did further research into the depository, posting a beautiful vignette about it today.

I think the thing that connects me most to this post is, surprisingly, not how it makes the book-lover in me feel. Instead, it is the amount of connection I feel to his place in a city that is falling apart. The difference between our homes is that my city works unbelievably hard to take care of its old buildings. In fact, I constantly find myself wanting to do what he does, to peruse through old buildings in the city. But the truth is, they are hard to find. I can't think of any that give me the ease of access with which he has been able to enter the buildings in Detroit. Here, houses are bought and "flipped," and the city keeps gentrifying and pushing out. What we once referred to five years ago as "dangerous" has now become upscale, a street full of beautiful shops, expensive restaurants and bakeries for dogs. Regardless of anyone's feelings on the morality of gentrification, Dutch gives a glimpse into what happens when things aren't this way:

"Here we get to see what the world will look like when we're gone. We see that the world will indeed go on, and there is a certain beauty to nature's indifference. Someday the books will tumble from the shelves at the Bodleian and there will be no one to replace them."

Indeed. Go read it--it's worth the time.