In the Capital of the Car, Nature Stakes a Claim
PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.
“My sisters and brothers gave me a pig for my birthday,” Mr. Weertz said, referring to his newest barnyard resident. “I am not sure what I am going to do with it.”
After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.
Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms — some consuming entire blocks.
A year ago, I mentioned a great site that cataloged the reclamation of Detroit by nature, but where that writer laments the waste, the NYTimes article looks at the situation more impartially (or ambivalently).
At the very least, enjoy the irony of this image: an opulent theater, emblematic of a modern cultured society, turned into a makeshift parking garage.
Are we headed for a post-industrial agrarian future, with the ruins of Motor City as our blueprint?