Sweet-Juniper photographed the beautiful decayed remains of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository. They also blogged about it. [ThingsMagazine]

“Detroit, with its thousands of abandoned structures, is something of a mecca for kids and adults who still do this sort of thing. There’s a whole community of them here, and people come from all over the country to ‘explore’ the city’s ruins.
…
This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven’t burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and ‘sadness’ some get from a beautiful abandoned building.”

ChicagoBoyz’s Urban Archaeology had a less negative perspective.

“Sometimes a ruin is just a ruin, and at least the warehouse can be partially recycled as an art object before it is ultimately razed and replaced by something else. It isn’t the Parthenon or even Aerojet, merely a decrepit warehouse owned by an inept municipal bureaucracy. It fits into the bigger story of Detroit’s many abandoned buildings, which is a story that interests the person who made the photos, but that is not a story that can be understood merely by looking at photos. But they certainly are nice photos.”