the first day of october

October tends to be a particularly... amazing/tramatizing month in my life. Today was freezing cold (57 degrees), i'm not ready for it. So here i go, diving head first into October, and into blogging... I felt today should be a fairly monumental photograph, to go along with the somber mood i felt all day. Something equal to the the gray moody skies, the fall warns us, are coming.



This Building is located on the cities west side. It used to produce rubber, i believe, and i remember coming home to my house in woodbridge, and seeing the flames off in the distance. My friends and I hopped into my car and followed the billiowing cloud on the horizon untill we ended here. The photographs from that night are buried on my hard-drive, and i promise to dig them out. However i watched this business burn to the ground. I returned to shoot this 3 years later.
Only a shell was left.
There were stripped cars and engines inside, it stands next to a still fuctioning auto business (though what kind i cannot say), I climbed up onto the roof, even though i could see the depression around the columns. The cement structure is slowly failing. It is still sourrounded by a large dirt field, and the building, alone with nothing on the horizon reminds me of a third world country. Exactly what a war zone would look like.
My friend is a realtor in the area, Dave Shanaman, (if your looking for commercial property in detroit, get ahold of him). Anways, he told me they were scouting this sight to open another school, but the ground was too contaminated from the fire for children to be playing on it. So I suppose it will still stand. A memory looming over the nieghboorhood.
This was a chilly cold day. But i eneded it warming my heart and tummy at Motor City Brewery.
the sloping in this photograph, is the floor collapsing