Troubled Assets is a photo series that documents the abundance of repurposed bank buildings in Detroit, Michigan. The dominance of these buildings, and the bold architecture they employed, was a testament to Detroit’s wealth. Today, many of these historic structures still stand — no longer as banks, but rather as churches, hair salons, nightclubs, pawn shops, and day cares; others are abandoned, for sale, for lease, or status unknown.

Most of these structures were the property of the Detroit Savings Bank company or the Peninsular Savings Bank company. When Detroit’s wealth was sucked out of its neighborhoods and transplanted into the suburbs, these corner banks became superfluous. Many banks, including Detroit Savings, folded or were absorbed. Their assets, including their properties, were liquidated, leaving behind the structures for commercial and sometimes residential use.

The buildings have always intrigued me, but they grabbed my attention more lately as the economic situation has grown. While these buildings were not abandoned during today’s economic crisis, they are the physical remains of Detroit’s own money disaster.

The map below compiles the locations of these bank buildings. Many of the GPS data points are connected to images, while others are still waiting for a photo. Keep checking back here for updates — more photos will be added, and the map will grow as locations are scouted and added.

Green tags signify buildings with images, red tags signify buildings without images. Yellow tags signify buildings that may or may not have been banks.

As I waited on State Fair Road in the damp October cold, dressed as the only non-zombie member of a zombie marching band, sipping from a shiny metal flask, I knew I was about to see something special. “Theatre Bizarre” had been hyped up among the hardcore Detroit locals for the last few months, and I heard it was not to miss, despite knowing very little about it or what to expect. Alas, my friend John and I had waited until the last minute to find tickets. Which was probably a good idea. Despite the sold-out show, we snagged some tickets through a friend, and that night we rounded up some friends and some costumes. John had recently started an urban marching band and found a bunch of used marching costumes from a man on the west side of the State. A little zombie makeup, and… Perfect.

Just hours after deciding to attend, I was waiting under the crumbling homes on State Fair, quiet and observing. A man chanted the fable of “Zombo the Clown” to the waiting attendees. The dirge of the party filled the obscured backyards. From here you can’t see anything. Tall fences line the sidewalks, and above them one can only see the roofline of a row of rather typical 1940s Detroit single-family homes, lit from behind by a bright orange glow. If you worked for Henry Ford in 1945, you might get a house like this. State Fair is one of the last neighborhoods in Detroit. A lot has been cleared. It faces the recently-closed State Fair Grounds, just north of Seven Mile and south of Eight Mile, Detroit’s infamous line of demarcation. It takes fifteen minutes to reach from my home downtown–another forty seconds on the freeway North and we would be in Oakland County, where the average income is three times that of Detroit’s.

The concept is simple enough. You enter the home of a fictional serial killer only to find yourself transported into the killer’s own twisted nightmare: a bizarre fantasy circus world from an unplaceable era and dimension. This translates roughly into the most outrageous and brilliantly-executed Halloween party in the United States, possibly the world. And it could only happen in Detroit, where artists have acquired a block (literally) of abandoned and vacated homes and transformed them into this nightmare world.

The serial killer’s house is something out of the best horror movies. Hacked cadavers hang from the basement ceilings, and the walls are decorated with perverted drawings seemingly sketched by a young child. The bloody kitchen is something to marvel at. Every detail is labored over. Making your way through this killer’s maze, you come upon a very, very dark tunnel. Now keep this in mind: Theatre Bizarre doesn’t really follow any safety codes. You’re kind of on your own here. This is Detroit, after all.

The tunnel is black — totally black — and the cieling is very low, and the ground covered with sawdust and woodchips, and there are twists and turns. It reminded my of the abandoned coal mines I explored in Pennsylvania, only I was dressed in a marching band outfit and clumsily feeling my way around with my arms outstretched.

I was sure this would end with bumping my head into something, or not being able to find the way out. But alas, a small haze of light appeared in the distance. I made my way to the opening, where a thick fog blocked the view beyond. Then, I emerged. The smoke cleared. The clouds parted. And I gazed upon…. THEATRE BIZARRE.

It is a phantasmagoric Midway of some perverted alternate-dimension circus. Costumed oddities wander everywhere; vaudevillian performers shout the story of Zombo the Clown in a mysterious cadence; a burlesque show is being performed on the main stage; a mummified mermaid, preserved in a glass case, twitches with the last dregs life; men and women hang under the canopy of trees from hooks pierced through their skin; and jets of fire explode into the night sky, warming my face and illuminating the Midway. So this is what the inside of a serial killer’s mind looks like…

It is an unreal sight. I have seen movie sets, but this was something way beyond. This was a labor of love. And the astonishing thing was this: I was only seeing part of it. Theatre Bizarre stretches across no less than six back yards, with at least three stages and performances going on non-stop, countless bonfires to huddle around, the forest and trees illuminated from underneath by red- and green-gelled lights. Well-rendered, hand-painted Freak Show posters drape the confines of the encampment, and flashing vintage signs invite you to the “Scaredy Cat Club” or “Hell’s Mouth” or the “Ghost Train”. The atmosphere was one of total elation. Everyone was excited to be a part of this moment. And everyone was in total character. No one was themselves. This was one place you could be totally different. Did I mention there was free beer? Well, there was free beer.

The attention to detail is astounding. I wandered the site for hours, hardly saying anything, just taking everything in… the people, the sets, the firebombs, the performances. In one, a tattooed man is swallowing sabres and neon lights. His girlfriend is putting apples in her mouth and cutting them in half with a chainsaw… blindfolded. They’re eating fire, hula-hooping with fire, smashing cinder blocks on their crotches.

There was a stunning burlesque performance, with sets design and lighting rivaling that of the most elaborate stage shows. A pale-bodied dancer performed brilliantly with such class and attitude that for a moment I thought we were in an exclusive Paris club. But we weren’t. We were right in my home town, right in the city limits of Detroit, the freest city in the United States. A city where anything is possible.

My fellow partygoers were equally in the moment. Judging by the looks on their faces, these young professionals and artists and businesspeople who, for one night, decided to let all things go, displayed a range of elastic emotions: from total frenzied confusion; to rabid participation; to bliss. Some were drunk or had no idea what to make of their surroundings. Others were fascinated, as I was, by the level of detail and the amount of labor that went into this one-night-only mega-performance.

Theatre Bizarre’s creators are credited as John Dunivant and Ken Poirier, but it is really a whole community of artists and performers who band together in this off-the-beaten-path Detroit neighborhood to create something out of nothing, to create culture out of crumbling homes and vacant lots, and to create friendships and entertainment from the people and things they find right here in the city. You know, I always laugh when the national media makes out Detroit to such a dead place. Theatre Bizarre is precisely the kind of thing that could only be possible here. Because in Detroit, where so much has been lost, the people that are left here are forced to create their own culture from the bottom-up. No one will swoop in to save Detroit, at least for a while. And in the meantime, while no one is looking, this place can be the canvas for a whole range of fantasies …. or nightmares.

Happy 9.9.09.

About a year ago, I was exploring the stunning abandoned Lafayette Building when I came across a surprising sight. Now there is a lot of window art in the Lafayette Building. They seemed to be similar to the well-known “Mayan” window art that appeared in the United Artists Building before the art was removed for the Superbowl. A lot of it was pretty interesting, a design and sometimes a figure or a face. It looks like Pop Art but instead of being screen-printed on canvas it is spray-painted on windows. They all appear to be by the same artist or group of artists. But when I saw this giant grasshopper, drawn across three office windows with almost perfect attention to anatomical detail & scale, with the light pouring through and bathing the room in a sickly yellow-orange, I was stunned.

The Lafayette Building is currently being demolished by the city. This is another long story, but it means that we’ll lose yet another historic downtown skyscraper. This one, designed by C. Howard Crane in 1913, was unique for its V-shaped site plan and beautiful cornice which was somehow spared during the infamous cornice removals of the 1950s and 1960s.

It also meant no more sneaking into the Lafayette Building to marvel at the window art, particularly my favorite grasshopper.

Well I was pleased to see that around town, in other spots, the grasshoppers have started to reappear. They all share the same features: spray-painted onto the windows of vacant buildings, in highly visible locations, the grasshoppers are a kind of beacon. They are hardly considered ‘graffiti’ or ‘vandalism’ in my book. Rather, the grasshoppers are part of a brilliant installation art project that covers the whole city. The grasshoppers are part of a series of murals that liven up even the most depressing abandoned buildings around town. And the anonymous artist behind them has found a perfect gallery for his particular brand of art. The empty windows of Detroit’s thousands of empty buildings are appropriate canvases for this type of colorful pop art.

And while meant to be viewed from the outside, the works are truly most stunning viewed from inside, where the light is filtered by the greens, blues, and purples of the spray paint. Each room has a unique color or hue that is dictated by the colors of the grasshopper.

There are a lot of familiar graffiti artists around town. Everyone knows “Vomit”, and the ever-present “WARD”. Or “SID” — who writes “SID LIVES” everywhere he goes (the only time I’ve seen him write something different is when he wrote “I like the grasshoppers – Sid” on a chair under the Lafayette grasshopper). But those tags, nothing but giant stylized nicknames of the tagger, seem so immature and inappropriate compared with the giant anonymous grasshoppers.

The artist is also an expert at scale & alignment. Since the grasshoppers are created across several windows, the images on each ‘pane’ must match the one adjacent to it. This is illustrated most clearly in the latest grasshopper find…

When I saw a grasshopper on four upper-floor windows of the Hotel Ansonia in Detroit’s Lower Cass Corridor, I knew I had to photograph it from the inside. I made my way into the building, which was littered with the debris of Detroit’s homeless. Piles of excrement festered in the corners, and the hotel’s rooms were occupied by a cohort of Detroit’s most dazed and confused. Trust me when I say this is somewhere you most definitely do NOT want to go. Between the overwhelming stench of human feces, the collapsing stairwell, and the building’s homeless population, this place is really and truly one of those ‘death traps’ that your mother warns you about when you tell her you’re going urban exploring.

So considering all that, I went in anyway. I made my way up to the top floor and pushed open the door that I thought would lead to the ‘grasshopper room’. I was astonished to see that the grasshopper was actually in two separate rooms, each room with one half of the grasshopper on two windows. Wow. I was in the room with the “head” and upper torso of the grasshopper. So I went to the next room over. The door was closed. I pushed it open and–CLUNK. The door was chain locked from the inside. I looked down on the floor, which was covered with a mess of blankets, clothes, and plastic bags. Then I saw him. Sprawled naked amidst the piles, a sleeping homeless man. He didn’t wake up, despite my noise. I left quickly. Looks like I wouldn’t get my shot….

….In the mean time I found another grasshopper on the wall of an abandoned high school on the West Side. Now this one was unusual. There are no windows in this high school — not a single one — because they have all been removed by scrappers. However, the artist has placed this grasshopper in an equally visible spot. He put it high on the wall in the second floor, so when you’re driving by you’ll catch sight of it through the holes in the school’s walls.

A week later, I returned to the Hotel Ansonia, determined to get my shots. Up the same stairwell and to the same rooms. This time, I came when the man was out. I made my shots — one in each room — and quickly left. On the way down I walked by a homeless man doing his thing in the hallway. “Get the fuck out!” Don’t worry buddy, I’m outta here…

Please let me know if you have seen other grasshoppers around town, or if you know anything about the artist. In the mean time I’ll write an update if I find any others!

This post is in honor of Labor Day 2009.

U.S. Auto Supply, Inc., a nondescript white building on Warren Avenue in Detroit’s Westside, has seen a boom in business in a town where other businesses are closing their doors and anything to do with the auto industry is in danger of falling by the wayside.

But thanks to the Cash for Clunkers program, this local business has seen a jump in work. Car after car is being scrapped here, where a giant hydraulic press flattens up to seventy cars a day. They are stacked in the back yard, ten or fifteen cars to a pile, each pile a relatively stout 15-feet high.

The auto carcasses, deemed out-of-date due to their low gas mileage, are the leftovers of a $3bn government incentive program. Every crushed car represents up to $4,500 in government rebates and another, more fuel-efficient car on the road in its place.

The workers here are a mix of all different types from the region. Some have wives and kids and travel from suburban Sterling Heights to work at the yard. Others live blocks away in neighborhoods devastated by urban decay. They provide a kind of sampling of the people who find themselves working in Detroit, for one reason or another, during the worst economic recession in seventy years.

But this does not mean they are safe from the effects of the recession. Despite the jump in work lately, overall the numbers of cars being scrapped has gone down. And sales of spare parts, the business’ main source of income, is also down.

It remains to be seen if businesses like U.S. Auto Supply will stick around, and what will happen to the men & women who work there. But for now their spirits are up and they’re hoping for the best during the winter. Indeed it is not the happiest of places, and everything from the cars to the building to the workers themselves seem to be coated in a fine layer of oil & dust.

“This is like a big playground, this place,” one worker tells me. “We take our jobs seriously, but you can’t help but smile and have some fun when you’re crushing one of these cars.”

On September 2 I was featured on a radio panel about photography & Detroit on 101.9FM WDET’s “Detroit Today”. I spoke with a couple other photographers, Steve Perez from the Detroit News and Sean Galbraith of Toronto, Canada. Producer John Notarianni was inspired to do the segment after reading Colleen Hill’s essay “Editors and Imagemakers: On Photographing Detroit”. Lots of interesting stuff discussed about Detroit & how each of us, in our own way, try to photograph the city “truthfully”. Still leaves a lot of room for debate and I know I didn’t get to say everything I wanted, but that’s radio and it was awesome being on the show! Thanks Craig Fahle & John for having me on the show, and to Steve & Sean for a fun & enlightening conversation!

Listen to the segment below. Total runtime is 21 minutes, 10 seconds.

I’m back from my travels to Europe. I was sent by Wayne State’s Jazz Studies Department to document the city of Turin, Italy for the Detroit-Torino Urban Jazz Project. What an amazing experience! Images from Turin and more on the project will be featured in a future post. That translates to: I’m still digging through the thousands of images I took in Turin. Here’s a preview, a portrait of Antonio Grimaldi, who gave me and my Italian photographer friend Piero Ottaviano a tour of the Mole Antonelliana, Turin’s major landmark. Antonio took us into the substructure of the dome and up above the observation platform into the seemingly endless spiral stairway inside the narrow pinnacle of this incredible structure.

While in Europe, I took a side trip to Paris to visit Florent Tillon, the documentary filmmaker who had recently returned to France after making a feature documentary in Detroit (which, amazingly enough, I will be appearing in). He gave me the grand tour of the city’s various industrial districts, tourist spots, suburbs, and subway system. But the highlight was when we went to Luxembourg with a couple friends to see Terre Rouge, the huge industrial complex on the Luxembourg-France border.

Recently, my work was featured in the part one of a two-part essay called “Editors and Image-Makers: On Photographing Detroit” by Colleen Hill. Thanks for the press Colleen!

I recently took a trip up Detroit’s infamous River Rouge, one of the most heavily industrialized rivers in the world, with writer Joel Thurtell and filmmaker Florent Tillon. Many thanks to them for the amazing opportunity & experience. These images offer views rarely seen because photography & exploration are prohibited and heavily-enforced in the industrial districts surrounding the river. They were taken from the public waters of the Rouge & Detroit rivers with the permission of the Coast Guard. Be warned when attempting to photograph the Rouge or Zug Island from land.

The River Rouge is a place where industry & wildlife clash in a stunning juxtaposition. Turkey vultures pick at the remains of dead fish along the concrete banks of the river. Just beyond the concrete, the riverbanks sport a narrow band of cattails or grasses, where Canadian geese and blue heron spend their time. Sparrows nest in cocoon nests tucked away between the steel beams of freeway overpasses. Beyond that, enormous factories loom like whales or ships, and barges pushed from as far as Halifax and Muskegon cut through the 180-foot wide waters. Where the Rouge & Detroit rivers meet, the brown hues of the riverwater collide with the aquamarine-blue waters that dominate the Great Lakes, coloring the water with varying rusty & tropical tones.

The industrial landscape of the River Rouge was shaped almost entirely by automobile tycoon Henry Ford. His enormous River Rouge complex was the largest integrated factory in the world at the time of its construction in 1928. Here, Henry Ford’s assembly line has been perfected: iron ore is melted down to steel and shaped into auto bodies. The frame is pushed down the line towards the end of the complex, and along the way various components are added, from seats to dashboards. At the end of the plant a finished automobile is rolled off the line & numbered and placed on a freight train or semi trailer to be shipped across the world.

Astonishingly, in the midst of this industrial landscape, just a few miles up the river from the Rouge plant, nestled on the riverbank in a wooded area just a stone’s throw from the most heavily-industrialized neighborhoods in the nation, is Henry Ford’s magnificent Fairlane Mansion. And in the river next to the mansion, Henry Ford & Thomas Edison created a hydroelectric dam that doubled as a gorgeous waterfall. It is amazing to travel the length of the river, from where it meets the Detroit River at Zug Island, an enormous center of steelmaking, past the Rouge plant where steel is turned into automobile, to Ford’s mansion in the woods, just a few miles upstream.

Henry Ford, in his push to become the world’s greatest industrialist, aided in the destruction of the same bucolic and utopian lifestyle he created for himself at his Fairlane Mansion and Greenfield Village museum. Whereas Ford created a village with tree-lined streets sided by the historic workshops of Edison & the Wright Brothers and traversed by a tiny steam-powered choo-choo, and built for himself an artificial waterfall at his provincial manor in the woods, the industrialized portion of the River Rouge and the wildlife that call it home are surrounded by criscrossing freeways, piles of deposits, train crossings, and heavily polluted factories.

The people who live among the behemoths of industry along the river in the communities of Delray and River Rouge hardly experience the small-town feel of Greenfield Village or the beauty of Fairlane. And one cannot help but think about all those cars, many of which originated from this very spot over the decades, and of all the freeways, stripmalls, tract homes & drive-thrus that have consumed the American landscape as a result. The River Rouge is truly a metaphor of Detroit & its industrial history, and a stunning example of American capitalism & one man’s control of a way of life.

Here you will find live documentation of Detroit & the rest of the world, and the musings of the always-curious kid behind the lens.