This is a fascinating documentary that I just found and watched, about urban exploring in Detroit, over the last 20 years or so. It's narrated by a guy who goes by the moniker Detroit Unseen, a former heroin addict who got into UrbEx in the late 1990's or early 2000's. He has a passion for exploring, but also a love of the architecture and history behind all of these buildings that have been abandoned in the last 50 years or so. If you have any interest in urban exploring, or Detroit, this is a well done, great documentary on the subject, focusing on Detroit.
While the concept of urban exploring has really become a thing in the last 15 to 20 years, it's something that has always been around. But the decline of the Industrial Age in the modern world, the shuttering of thousands of factories that went out of business, or where the plant was moved to another location, has led to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings in the U.S. alone. As a now middle aged Generation X guy who grew up in several towns in Ohio as a kid, I remember the days when those factories, and all the other buildings were thriving. People of my generation from the Midwest remember when those smokestacks were still puffing out smoke, and we were told we'd probably work in one of those factories our whole lives as kids.
The odd juxtaposition of Gen X is that while the factories were still striving, we had all these post-apocalyptic movies that came out in our childhood, talking about the nuclear apocalypse that would, probably, someday happen. At least that's how lots of people felt then. The threat of global thermonuclear war was a big threat that our parents, and the civic leaders of our childhood, worried about a lot. Yet we have had an apocalypse that destroyed thousands of businesses, and led to all these abandoned buildings, but it wasn't a nuclear apocalypse. It was economic and social and technological.
As I've mentioned in many posts, I'm a huge fan of the late futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler. In Toffler's 1980 book, The Third Wave, he foresaw a future where the industrial-based society declined, and a new type of society, a knowledge-base society emerged. His books were some of the first, and still the best, to explore how big of a change we were all in for. Now, about 16 years after his last book, and seven years after his death, this transition continues. We're all familiar with the ideas of the fall of the Industrial Age, and the rise of the Information Age, as we call them, at this point. But few people think of us as still being in this long transition period.
It was this transition from one form of society to another that led to the shutdown of thousands of factories, and the migration of millions of people away from once thriving cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and many other industrial-based cities. As the younger generations, the Millennials and Gen Z kids grew up, abandoned factories, malls, and other buildings, became a part of their culture. Small groups took to exploring these rotting relics of the Industrial Age, and urban exploring, or UrbEx, became a thing with a name, and a subculture, with a lot of creative people, graffiti writers and photographers, mostly.
Like most of you, I imagine, I've explored a some abandoned places. I remember as a kid of 10 or 11, a few of us kids sneaking into an abandoned house we all thought was haunted, in the tiny town of Willard, Ohio. Then the city put a railroad caboose, on a small section of tracks, in the park by my house. We all explored, and then played in, the caboose for a few weeks, before it got locked up. In New Mexico and Idaho, I explored some buildings and old houses out in the desert. As a BMX freestyler, years later, I often went off on my own, exploring areas of the various cities I lived in, or traveled to, looking for cool obstacles for street riding. Skateboarders and BMXers have always been urban explorers, looking for drained ditches, swimming pools, and other places to ride or skate. That was our drive to peak over fences, into odd nooks and crannies of cities. When I drove a taxi in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 2011-2012, I used to park during the day, and sleep in my taxi at night, near a big abandoned industrial building, right above Hanes Mall. When someone else broke the lock, I went in and checked it out one day, dreaming of buying the place and turning it into a huge BMX, mountain bike, and skatepark.
Now there's a whole subculture of younger explorers sneaking into abandoned places, and usually documenting them. I think that's really cool, and honestly, if I had time and money, I'd go check out some of these places myself.
Well known photo of Rolling Acres Mall, near Akron, Ohio, when it was abandoned, early 2010's. Photo borrowed from the web.
In the early 2010's, the Rolling Acres Mall, near Akron, Ohio, became the poster mall for dead malls, the first images of an abandoned mall to really go viral. I was born within 5 or 10 miles of Rolling Acres Mall, and my family lived nearby until I was about three. I actually walked through that mall as a little kid. I don't specifically remember it, I was only there a few times, and we went to lots of malls. But seeing one of the malls I walked through as a kid, abandoned and deteriorating in internet photos, sparked my interest in all these abandoned buildings that people can't find new uses for. Rolling Acres was demolished a few years after the famous photos were taken. There's an Amazon fulfillment center on that property now.
All of these abandoned buildings hold some of our cultural history, and I, personally, appreciate the explorers, like Detroit Unseen, who document and dig into the history of these buildings. Buildings that were once so culturally relevant, in many cases, and that now rot away, or have been demolished. We will see a lot more abandoned buildings in the next several years, and hopefully many will find new uses before they crumble, or have to be demolished.
There's a concept called "Adaptive Reuse," which is the idea to take unused or abandoned buildings, and find new, 21st century, viable uses for them. Particularly with all the empty industrial and retail spaces, and now office buildings being added to that list, I think this will be a huge and growing industry going forward. Most adaptive reuse projects you see on the web are huge projects. But adaptive reuse can be done with a house, or a small retail building, even by small investors and entrepreneurs. My personal favorite adaptive reuse story is Ray's MTB mountain bike park in Cleveland, Ohio.
Abandoned buildings, from the 11,000 plus abandoned houses, and other buildings, just in Gary Indiana alone, to the struggling dead malls and half vacant office buildings across the country, from the last few years, abandoned buildings is huge theme in the U.S., and many other countries. This makes potential opportunities for adaptive reuse a big potential growth industry in today's world. What are your thoughts on how to use some of these buildings in the future? Hit me up on Facebook with any comments.
I've been doing a lot of writing on Substack lately. Check it out:
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