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SummertimeSummer is in cruise-control mode right now. I find that summer is alot better when it’s not ruined by a confining-to-the-house brokencollarbone, as it was last year, so this year I’ve been doubling up onthe fun to make up for lost time, which means lots of going out andpartying, which also means everyone I know thinks I’m aboozehound now.

Not last week, though. Friday I skipped work, using a mild cold as anexcuse. It’s mid-July and I get a week-long cold. Unbelieveable. Mid-July seems cursed by colds or collarbones or some other such summerinterrupter. Wandered Belle Isle aimlessly, talking to strangers, takingphotos of pretty things, trying to avoid coworkers and beingdisinterested in the boat races, though for a few minutes I stood on thebeach, leaning against a stoop, watching the boats speed by. Peopleapproached and asked if they could go in the water. They thought Iwas the lifeguard because I had no shirt on and just shorts and wasinadvertantly standing against the lifeguard platform. Go ahead, dowhat you want, I told them. They went in the water. Then the policewalked up and chased them out of the water. I left with a badsunburn.

Saturday was the Fourth Street Fair, consisting of us watching all our friends walking around in a stupor, openmarijuana smoking, booths selling trinkets, and lots of bands, including this month’s detroitblog favorite, LeeMarvin Computer Arm. I sat with friends at a booth where a photographer was selling photos of buildings aroundtown, but he kept wandering off to stand in the beer line or talk to strangers, leaving me by default to sell his stuff.I didn’t know what to tell people when they had questions about his photos, and most potential customerswandered off after waiting for him awhile. I felt bad because he kept missing sales, but I wasn’t sure if I wasauthorized to sell his stuff. He seemed to be having a good time nevertheless, puffing on some of the dozens ofjoints that kept being handed to our booth by generous potheads, and sipping beer all afternoon.

But who cares about all that when there are buildings tobe photographed and described. The WoodwardBuilding, on the corner of Clifford and Woodward, is onthe same block as the Merchants Row loft projects butsomehow has so far escaped their attention. Eight storiestall and built in 1914, it’s been abandoned since the mid-1970s. That’s thirty years on Detroit’s main street, in theheart of downtown, empty. The only sign of life is anopen shoe store operating out of the bottom floor, whichis unconnected to the rest of the building.

The nice thing about the Woodward is that it’s relativelyundamaged inside. No tagging, no broken windows, fewsigns of squatters, most things left as they were on thelast day of work in 1974. To find an abandoned buildingin Detroit that hasn’t been ransacked by jackasses istruly a remarkable thing, though it’s probably that way only because it’s so hard to get into.

During the 20s and 30s the building housed a variety of businesses,including some rather unusual ones like Sarah A. Smith Hemstitching onthe seventh floor, Adolph J. Krug Violin Maker in 303 and the MichiganFurriers Exchange in 305. For some reason, by early 1941 the buildingbecame essentially abandoned, with only Radeff Fur Cleaning and FurMatching remaining on the seventh floor. All other floors were empty.

The building rebounded in the 1950s, however, and new businessesfilled most of the floors, mostly jewelers. But by the 1970s, as happenedall around town, businesses began leaving, some floors were usedprimarly as storage for other businesses down the street, like LaneBryant and Kresge, and by the mid-70s it was completely empty.

All of the calendars we found remaining on the walls were from 1974.The décor, the fixtures, the paperwork, all are frozen in that year. Theonly sign of post-business activity in the building were the remainingpersonal effects of a 34-year-old squatter, who left medical recordsbehind indicating his name was John, and that he was a snowboarderfrom Denver who blew out his knee and for whatever reason chose torecuperate in an abandoned building in downtown Detroit in 1998.

Remnants of carry-out food lay on window ledges, asnowboarding helmet rested on a shelf and snowboardingmagazines were piled up next to it. He also left a shopping list,things that would be handy when squatting such as pest strips, awork lamp, bleach, Spic and Span, a mop, a tool box andmasonry nails. Apparently he planned a long-term stay, becausehe also listed a couch, a rug, a writing desk and paper as futurepurchases.

The building had been pretty well cleared out when it closed, andlittle remained in the way of artifacts, apart from calendars on thewalls and retail shelves and displays. The seventh floor hadcheap fur hats scattered all over the place. They looked like deadanimals.

Other floors, like in a lot of buildings in Detroit, had rooms painted in intense colors – orange, pink, sky blue, limegreen. One floor had the word “qualifications” emblazoned across a full wall with Op Art-style black linesradiating from it.

The roof was a standard tar roof, offering a great sunlit view of thesuperb architecture of the buildings on the east side of Woodward, notto mention affording glimpses of the terra cotta detail on theWoodward building’s cornice and along its corners. Even on thecornice’s underside, there is exquisite decorative detail for no otherreason than beauty itself, something you almost never find on amodern building exterior, but is everywhere in Detroit’s pre-Depression buildings.

It is beauty that was put there by the architects and builders eventhough the majority of the public would never, ever see it, since youhave to climb to an adjacent roof to see the tiny details, or else peerdown while lying on the edge of the Woodward’s roof. In otherwords, art for art’s sake, delightful beauty for the sake of loveliness,and for no other reason.

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Somewhere in timeOne of my favorite abandoned buildings in downtown Detroit is therelatively anonymous Woodward Building, located on the southeastcorner of Clifford and Woodward, in the recently redevelopedMerchants Row area. I’d explored it about 18 months ago, and Irecently offered myself an invitation to root around inside there again.And wouldn’t you know it, I accepted!

The intersection of Clifford and Woodward was already a busy oneeven as early as the 1890s. Clifford, which heads west fromWoodward, was paved with brick even back in those days. At the timethe street was home to small businesses like McCray Refrigerator andCold Storage Company, and a small engine company of the DetroitFire Department.

The eight-story Woodward Building was built in 1914, as the city wasrapidly growing and entering an expansion phase in which theprevailing three- and four-story Victorian buildings downtown werebeing demolished and replaced with skyscrapers many times taller. Thelongstanding Jones Building, which would be torn down in a fewyears, was just west of it on Clifford, where a parking lot now stands.Across the street, on the northwest corner of Clifford and Woodward,stood the Detroit Telephone Exchange building.

Designed by prolific architect Albert Kahn using aneclectic combination of Chicago School influences, theWoodward Building featured narrow terra cotta piersand iron spandrels on its lower levels, now obscured bytypically tasteless 1970s-era remodeling. Classicalpediment inserts made of iron are necklaced around thebuilding between the third- and fourth-floor windows.The building is topped by an elaborately detailed cornicefeaturing terra cotta rosettes pointed downward,rectangular modillions, and pointed antefixes arrayedalong the upper perimeter.

The building was home to a curious array of offices andbusinesses during its lifetime. In the 1930s the sixth andseventh floors contained the Detroit CommercialCollege, training applicants in business and sendingthem out onto Woodward in search of employment in an era when it was pretty hard to find.

The second floor housed Karsten’s Cafeteria right after the buildingopened, a business that has several locations along Woodward over theyears, while the upper floors contained a number of jewelers,orthopedists, and watch repair shops. For years, Chandler’s Shoesoperated out of the ground floor, which houses a shoe store to this day,in an area unconnected to the rest of the empty building. RembrandtStudio Photographers held the top floor for many years.

During the 1940s, as World War II ground on, much of the buildingbecame vacant, but it rebounded in the 1950s, attracting the same typesof businesses it had housed before.

The building had its fair share of odd tenants over the years. During itsearly years, in room 502, was “E.P. Prophet and M.A. Prophet,Christan Scientists.” In fact, the building seems to have been a draw forfringe religious movements; the Scientologists held an entire floor inthe building’s later days.

The Woodward Building not only housed the Michigan Fur MatchingCompany, but also complemented that with the Detroit Fur WorkersUnion three floors up, so if workers and management came todisagreements at least it was within convenient walking distance. Tothis day the building is scattered with natty, old, imitation fur hats,filthy and coated with dirt, but appearing frighteningly animal-like atfirst glance when you’re rounding a dimly lit corner. It’s only whenyour heartbeat drops from fight-or-flight level do you realize that thefurry lumps are as lifeless as the building.

As the ’60s wore on and turned into the ’70s, the building had troublefilling its floors, until vacancies outweighed occupancy and it becameeconomically unwise to keep it open, handing it the same fate asdozens of downtown Detroit buildings. By late-1974 it shut its doors,remaining closed to this day, 31 years later. As millions of people inmillions of cars have passed by it every day and every night, yearafter year, it sat frozen in the state it was in on its last day. Recentlythere’s been talk of developing it into lofts, but so far the onlytangible sign of progress is the addition of a modern door on itsClifford side.

The Woodward Building is a perfect, life-sized timecapsule. Stacks of Michigan Bell telephone books in oneoffice feature the year 1974, as do several calendarsremaining on walls. The entire building is 1974 – itshardware, its decor, its memorabilia. Everyone who hadbeen in it just walked away one last time 31 years ago,leaving behind whatever they couldn’t carry or didn’tneed. Few of them probably imagined their things wouldremain there untouched for over three decades.

A once-prosperous retail floor was later devoted to ’70s-era advertising displays from Lane Bryant, includingrow after row of dress shirt stands in a room whose mainfocal point is an advertising display featuring a toweringreplica of a woodsy chalet, topped with shingles. The

floors were designated as surplus storage for Kresge and Lane Bryant, and they quickly filled up with uselessdisplays as business at those nearby retailers dried up. The economic slump of those years and the view thatDetroiters are flight risks is reflected in the sign on the wall: “Important credit rules – you MUST check in every7th day or sooner.” To them, recession + Detroiters = deadbeats.

Throughout the hallways and rooms, old paint peels offthe walls in large leaves, curling outward in tighter arcsafter each cycle of seasons. Shredded paint chips arespread throughout the hallways of the building, spillinginto each floor’s offices, coming to rest in wind-sculptedpiles along baseboards or under radiators.

Like a lot of buildings whose decor was conceived in the1970s, the hallmark of the interior is rooms and officespainted in bright colors. It seems the model for interiordecoration in downtown Detroit in those days was tomake every office like a 2-year-old child’s room. Lemonyellows, pumpkin oranges, lime greens, embarrassingpinks – no color was too foolish to impose on haplessadult business people. The offices in the DavidBroderick Tower had the same paint schemes inflictedon it, as did those in the Farwell Building in Capital Park, among others around town.

The Woodward Building also features an electricalsystem that would give modern electricians bad dreams.Featuring knobs the size of grapefruits and wires thethickness of pencils, it looks like it could have beeninstalled by Thomas Edison himself. This sort of antiquewould look strikingly engaging in a museum, yet it sitson the top floor of an abandoned building, wellpreserved but hidden.

It’s somewhat spooky being in an abandoned building atnight. It’s actually colder inside than it is outside,because the sun never gets a chance to warm most of therooms. Daytime is eerie enough in these places, but atnight every noise takes on a threatening significance.And since the winds penetrate through dozens of open orcracked windows, there are a lot of sudden rattling or

banging noises to be heard, not to mention ghosty howling. Dark corners are everywhere, potentially obscuringlunatics, squatters, or scrappers hiding in the shadows.

The view from the roof, always the icing on the cake inexplorations, provides its own form of a glimpse into thepast. The Woodward Building’s east end reveals justhow different Detroit has become in just the past fewyears. All along Woodward, lines of cars stood stuck intraffic, something that didn’t exist 10 years agodowntown. Now they’re lined up to be here.

But the view from the opposite side of the building,facing Capitol Park, with its open-air bus stop and hoboplaza, still resembles what all of downtown used to looklike – darkened buildings standing silent and abandonedin the winter’s night, streets lit but devoid of cars, andonly a few pedestrians, waiting not to get intorestaurants but waiting to leave on the bus. A mere blockover, yet a whole world away.

John wrote:

Detroitblog is a biweekly column of stories in the Metro Times newspaper.

I’m a local journalist at one newspaper also writing for the Metro Times under the byline Detroitblogger John

Detroitblog started as a way to share local, personal happenings with a handful of former Detroit-born friends who had moved out of state, and consisted mostly of anything Detroit related, which amounted to faintly amusing tales of me being drunk around town, among other instances of ridiculous behavior.

Then I started inviting myself into abandoned skyscrapers and photographing the architecture, posting the results with some researched history, so that transformed the site and gave it focus. The Metro Times wrote a profile at that time.

Now it’s features stories about extraordinary people and places in Detroit, and is nothing whatsoever like a blog. I like the name, though, so that part stays.

Urban ExplorerBy Nancy Kaffer, detroitblog.org12/14/2005

John leads a double life.

As a local journalist, he writes for a living, with a byline that allows all who read his work to know it belongs to him. And then there’s the identity he keeps secret from co-workers, friends and family. As the anonymous author of Detroit Blog, John comments on area news and chronicles his adventures exploring this city’s abandoned buildings.

The anonymity, John says, helps protect him from city officials who started cracking down on urban explorers a while back. His site attracts a fair amount of attention, and John worries that he might become a target if his name were to get out. Sure, the derelict skyscrapers and other structures he explores are clearly abandoned, but entering them is still considered trespassing.

His anonymous blog also provides something his day job doesn’t: Freedom.

“The blog gives me total freedom to write what I want, how I want,” he explains. “The news writing I deal with at my regular job is strictly tailored to very limited subject matter. On the blog I can hop from topic to topic regardless of whether it makes sense to do so. And it allows me to be open and honest and not couch things in softened terms. If I want to say on the blog that the mayor is a sleazeball, I can say it, whereas that’s just not possible in mainstream news writing.”

But it is often the accounts of his urban explorations, and the photos that accompany them, that make his blog particularly compelling.

John reckons that he’s gone into almost 200 abandoned structures over the past two years, exploring skyscrapers, warehouses, factories and old apartment buildings. The blog, he says, started on a whim. He didn’t intend to dedicate so much of the blog to urban exploration, but says that since most of his spare time was spent in abandoned buildings, “It kind of worked out that way.”

“I grew up around here, and I always saw these amazing buildings. I always wanted to get in,” he says. “So one day, I tugged on a door and it opened. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

Over the years, John has developed a pretty rigorous code of conduct for exploration. He won’t remove anything other than paper from buildings, and won’t damage a building to get in. He says he’s actually left buildings sealed more tightly than he found them.

He’s had run-ins with crackheads and scavengers, and even encountered a cop once (he wasn’t arrested). There’s also the time his exit was blocked by people having sex in the room that led out of a building. He started to meet other bloggers, he says, mostly from running into people in abandoned buildings who were carrying cameras. They’d exchange e-mail addresses, he says, and over time his site became a part of the larger blogging community.He didn’t expect his blog to garner a wide readership, but the site registers about 13,000 hits a month from people interested in seeing Detroit from his perspective.

“I love Detroit,” he says. “I love everything about Detroit. I love the deteriorating neighborhoods as much as I do the new developments in the downtown area. I think the decay is as beautiful in its own ugly way as the well-preserved buildings. I want to document them before they’re gone forever. And I’ve got to share it with someone. You can’t just keep it to yourself.”