by Leila Taylor
The year 84, November, day 10
Overwhelmed by the wicked inspirations of an evil jinn
I realize my ideas has spawned for 400 years
Of blood sweat and tears
Detroit native, Esham The Unholy (Esham A. Smith), one of the founding fathers of horrorcore, raps about suicide in American Psycho, and the video depicts images of barren trees, skulls and dripping blood. He appears dressed in a suit and the title references the postmodern horror novel of vacuous corporate greed and rampant materialism in which serial killer, Patrick Bateman, has a meaningless job, unearned wealth, and a personality created by commodities. Esham’s American Psycho, feels the business end of Bateman’s capitalist agenda. Patrick Bateman is bottle service vodka and cocaine, Esham is a blunt dipped in PCP. While Bateman murders other people, Esham’s psycho self-destructs.
Esham wrote the lyrics for his debut album Boomin’ Words from Hell in 1988 when he was only thirteen and says:
It was the crack era, when I made Boomin’, and that’s where all that really came from. The city we lived in and just the turmoil that our city was going through at the time. We referred to the streets of Detroit as ‘Hell’ on that record. So that’s where my ideas came from.11
Esham later dropped the “unholy” and horrorcore became acid rap. His music is now more about evoking positivity and less about violence and psychosis and in 2008 he even made a run for mayor of Detroit. But even in the desire to do social good (“People think I’m makin’ this run for exposure, I’m tryin’ to stop these homes from foreclosure.”) there is still a wink and a nod to the darkness as he announced his candidacy with an EP called Esham 4 Mayor. In the song “First Day in Office” he raps:
I’m runnin’ for the mayor and don’t ask me why
Only thing you should do is just vote or DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE
When my Aunt Joan passed away the service was full of singing. She was a singer, her daughter is a singer and her friends were singers. I can’t sing and when obliged to sing from a hymnal I spend much of the time just mouthing the words. I feel awkward in these moments, struggling to feel what everyone else seemed to feel singing “This Little Light of Mine”, to believe what everyone else is believing. When family gathered before the service, eating and talking and catching up, I spotted a worn, brown book on the piano. It was her book of spirituals that she must have had for decades. The object resonated with me more than the songs themselves as I flipped through the pages, reading lyrics now and then, touching pages that absorbed decades of sounds and the voice of my family.
My Aunt Joan’s song book, photo by L. Taylor
THE HOUSE ON BOSTON BOULEVARD
Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
Whenever there was a strange, unaccounted for noise in our house in Detroit, my dad would say, “It’s just the house settling.” No one ever explained to me what that meant, but the idea that something as stable as a house could be “unsettled” is… unsettling. It implies that the house is a bit uncomfortable, shifting in its seat trying to find the right spot, or that the house is disturbed, anxious, or unsatisfied with its lot. Built in 1924, our presence was merely one more chapter in its story, and as in all old houses, the previous pages showed through. The paint on the front door had been violently stripped, leaving it naked and raw in preparation for a fresh coat that would never come. Leaks and rainstorms meant strategically placed trashcans and buckets had been scattered around my room, and I slept with one eye open, waiting for them to spill over.
Like many old houses, ours had the architectural remnants of a lifestyle that no longer existed. There was a superfluous door in the hallway that served as a secret access to the staircase, a dumbwaiter I never had the courage to climb inside and a perpetually stuffy but spacious attic. We never used the backyard garage for some reason, and I would peek through the dusty, broken windows to stare at the old water-stained boxes inside, wondering what they were hiding: evidence of a murder or classified CIA documentation of aliens? Maybe a cursed doll harboring an evil spirit set on revenge? The only explanation I ever got was that it was so-called “paperwork” left behind by the previous owner. I didn’t buy it.
The Abbey in the Oakwood, Caspar David Friedrich, 1809
Unitled photo by Sarah Feinstein
In the summer, there were invasions of bats, daddy long-legs, and the occasional human. In our time there, our house was broken into five times, and in one particularly personal theft, burglars stole a box of rusty old tools that belonged to my grandfather, the pin my mother received when she graduated from nursing school, and the change from my piggy bank. The house was never entirely ours. The past was always present, and the outside was always creeping in.
If you started at my house walking east down my old street, past the Barry Gordy mansion, after about a mile you’d reach a one-hundred-year-old, two-story Tudor. During one particularly brutal Michigan winter in 2015, a pipe burst in the upper floors, flooding the house from the top to the basement, water cascading out of the windows and freezing into a massive solid waterfall. In effect, it turned the house into a giant popsicle, earning it the nickname, “The Boston Cooler,” after a local treat of Vernors ginger ale and ice cream. The image is both shocking and beautiful. Each window is obscured and there are no photographs of the interior, so this bizarre spectacle is made even more mysterious by our being denied access to the heart of the chaos, but one can imagine pots and pans, armchairs, books, sweaters and table lamps frozen in space like bits of fruit floating in Jell-O. The house was purchased for $70,000 in 2011, but the owner was unable to keep up with the property taxes. So it was foreclosed, put up for auction, and padlocked without his knowledge, with all of his belongings still inside: furniture, tools, clothes, computers… It is an uncanny image; houses are not supposed to freeze into blocks of ice. The living room is not supposed to have thick, long icicles dripping down from the ceiling, the toilet is not supposed to be encased in ice. Nature and neglect turned what used to be a home into a sideshow attraction, a mutation of what security is supposed to look like. Obscure economic structures and environmental forces infiltrate spaces of comfort and stability, transforming a home into an object of terror like an eco-horror home invasion. My heart breaks for the owner, a pastor who lost everything he had, but I can’t stop looking at the photos.
We know how the gothic dresses, its color, its sound and its sentiment, but if the gothic sensibility was an object it would be the extreme conspicuous futility of the ruin. Time and the elements create a specific kind of decay. It’s not the decisive human design of vandalism or real-estate razing, but the relentless pull of physics and the chaos of the weather. The Livingstone House was a beautifully monstrous example of this. Neglect bent and twisted the building into organic forms, with shapes that are unpredictable and unfathomable, evoking a titillating slippage between the natural and the constructed that is both frightening and captivating.
Heavier on the left side, the house sags as if it has had a stroke, earning it the nickname “Slumpy.” The rectangular window frames have shifted down into parallelograms. The conical roof of its three-story tower points slightly to the left instead of straight up. The left side, where the front door used to be, leans to the right, and the front facade has slipped off, revealing the first and second floors and exposing the pale green wall of an empty closet. It is a structure that by all rights should not exist in a modern city and it’s a rare treat to witness a house of such stature age naturally — not torn down or lived-in but left to rot. It’s no surprise that Slumpy was one of the most photographed ruined buildings in Detroit.
The Livingstone House (aka Old Slumpy), photo by Kim via Flickr, August 2, 2007
In 1894, William Livingstone, Jr, publisher of the Detroit Evening Journal and former president of the Dime Savings Bank, commissioned architect Albert Kahn to design his residence on Eliot Street in the po
sh neighborhood of Brush Park. Designed in the French Renaissance Revival style, the Livingstone House was a classic example of Detroit in the Gilded Age when the city was known as the “Paris of the Midwest.” With the advent of the automobile in the early 1900s, people began moving further away from the city center, and single-family mansions were divided into apartments. As the auto industry boomed, freeways sliced through residential neighborhoods, leading people out of the city, but when the auto industry died, Brush Park went from being tony to derelict. The stately Victorian mansions that used to house society’s elites became dilapidated, drooping ruins like monumental Miss Havishams.
Around 1987, the Red Cross purchased the land with the intent of demolishing the house to build a new headquarters, but preservationists intervened and succeeded in saving the house by moving the building one block east. Unfortunately, its new foundation was not strong enough to support it and thus began a twenty-year slide into decay. Too expensive to either rehabilitate or tear down, the Livingstone House was abandoned to sink under its own weight. The houses that used to be on either side had long been razed, leaving it abandoned and alone in its decline. Slumpy was eventually put out of its misery and torn down in the late 1990s.
The decayed and ruined house is a cornerstone of the Gothic landscape. The decrepit castle, neglected manor, or abandoned Victorian house with creaking doors, crumbling walls and dripping ceilings are classic ingredients of the horror aesthetic. From the ruins of Medieval abbeys scattered across the post-reformation English countryside, emerged a fascination with architectural decay that has ever since been fundamental to the Gothic topography. In the eighteenth century, the architectural folly was a homage to a romanticized Medieval past, and faux war-torn remnants of archways and crumbling castle walls became fashionable lawn decor for the aristocracy. Paintings like, A Ruined Gothic Church beside a River by Moonlight, by Sebastian Pether and The Abbey in the Oakwood, by Caspar David Friedrich, romanticized the ruin with misty melancholic nostalgia. In Ann Radcliffe’s epic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily observes that the castle’s “mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object…” In Edgar Allen Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the house’s “principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity, the discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the caves.” The device has endured over the decades. The horror film, Dark Water, takes place in a dilapidated 1970s-era apartment building on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Originally known as Blackwell’s in the nineteenth century, the island was home to a penitentiary, the New York City Lunatic Asylum, and the Small Pox hospital whose ruins are still there. In the film, an ominous leaky ceiling above a little girl’s bed is enough to create a dreadful atmosphere, and the persistent, spotty black dampness that expands and grows elevates the ordinary annoyance of home maintenance to the horrific.
The ruin has no value other than as a spectacle, a metaphor representing our fear of the abandonment of civilization and our powerlessness over nature. The modern ruin speaks to both the pleasure and the anxiety of bearing witness to the limits of a post-industrial economy and the satisfaction of watching nature’s comeuppance. The ruin exists in a temporal liminality “[permitting] the viewer to see the intact object and its disappearance at the same time.”1 Like a zombie, the ruin is both alive and dead. Like a ghost, the ruin is here, yet not.
The fascination with the decay of the constructed environment and the proliferation of “ruin porn” (photographs fetishizing urban blight) shifts the aesthetics of disrepair and abandonment from the visual language of economic decline and into the realm of romanticism and entertainment, and there is a bitter irony in the commodification of the devalued. In the television series Abandoned on Viceland, host Rick McCrank skateboards through a deserted shopping mall in Ohio, a former nuclear power plant in the Pacific northwest, a crumbling NASCAR racetrack in North Carolina, and of course through the streets of Detroit. He takes us on a tour of the usual suspects: the monumental Central Station, the vast and crumbling Packard Plant, and the once-glamorous Michigan Theater turned parking garage. The 2010s saw a surge of coffee-table books of beautifully photographed derelict spaces conspicuously void of people, like specimen books of urban waste. These photographs allow a voyeuristic view of the inaccessible: The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore, and Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins by Dan Austin. There are images of a lawn of moss growing on the floor of an empty office, a school gymnasium with wooden floors so warped they look like rolling waves, and a knee-high pile of mugshots, wanted posters, and sheets of fingerprints in an old police station. In these frozen moments of ordinary life, the ephemeral becomes permanent and the permanent becomes ephemeral — and they are mesmerizing. I know the smell of exploitation, and that they ignore the people who live and work and play there, that they romanticize poverty and fetishize economic decay, but I keep looking. I shake my head at the piles of school books left to rot but I can’t deny the thrill of seeing society crumble right before my very eyes.
Michigan autumns remain for me the platonic-ideal of the season, and neither Ohio or New York can live up to my memory of a north-east crispness in the air, fresh warm doughnuts and hot apple cider, and leaves that stayed vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows for months not weeks. And Detroit in the late Seventies and early Eighties was the ideal time and place for Halloween. I grew up in that sweet latch-key kid spot, so my parents were attentive enough to give our candy a quick pass for razor blades but relaxed enough to let me and my friends roam the moonlit streets by ourselves. Even on our relatively preserved neighborhood, there was the occasional spooky Victorian house with boarded-up windows painted black (ideal for a vampire lair) and overgrown abandoned lots with tall weeds that rustled inexplicably when we walked by. On 31 October the veil between the living and the dead was lifted, disbelief was suspended, and the night belonged to us kids.
The same cannot be said for the night before Halloween.
It wasn’t until we left Michigan that I realized the night before Halloween, known as Devil’s Night, was a phenomenon unique to Detroit. What started in the 1930s with innocent pranks and mischief (soaping car windows, egging houses, and toilet papering trees), by the 1970s had grown into a night of extreme vandalism and arson — it was a given that you didn’t go out on Devil’s Night. On Halloween the fear and the danger were benign and self-imposed, but fear on the night before was real. One of my friends was even picked up by the police for being out on Devil’s Night after curfew. On 30 October 1984, when I was twelve years old, I watched the local news with fear and excitement as 810 fires were reported throughout the city, earning Detroit the distinction of being the arson capital of the world.2 A staticky recording of the traffic from that night is nightmarish, a real War of the Worlds, as one fire engine after another announces their positions: ladder 1 and engine 5 in service, engine 11 in service, engine 32 in service, engine 41 and ladder 16 in service, engine 40 in service, engine 5 in service, engine 6 in service, engine 21 in service, ladder 8 and engine 29 in service… It took seventy-two hours to extinguish all of the fires.
On 25 October 1984, Mayor Coleman Young held a press conference with the deputy chiefs and commanders from the police and fire department, representatives of the unions and the board of education, to assure the public that one thousand volunteer police cadets and reserves, citizens and neighborhood watches would be assembled in preparation for the night ahead. The on-duty police force would be tripled and fire personnel would increase by 33%. If you didn’t know what this press conference was about, it would be terrifying. One would think an alien invasion was coming, or a catastrophic natural disaster was eminent, until he says what the hopes of this effort will be — returning the night before Halloween to what it used to be, a night for kids to have some fun.
1984 is on record
as being the worst Devil’s Night in the city’s history. But the Devil’s Night ten years later saw three hundred fires. That night Tomika Wilson’s one-year-old daughter died when her apartment building went up in flames:
Some Detroit residents accused Mayor Dennis Archer of preparing inadequately for Devil’s Night. “He wanted to downplay it,” said Ernestine Gordon. “He called it ‘Halloween Eve.’ You can’t do that. It’s Devil’s Night. You have to treat it like it’s going to explode.”
The debauched chaos of Devil’s Night has steadily declined over the years and the night was rebranded Angel Night by troops of citizen watchdogs. But Detroit still has the most fires per capita than any other city in America. Between 2013 and 2015, more than ten thousand fires broke out in houses, apartments, businesses, churches, schools and other structures, claiming about one-hundred-and-twenty lives. In the film, The Crow, the resurrected Eric Draven is seeking revenge for the rape and murder of his girlfriend and himself on Devil’s Night. The film ends with the line: “Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.”
While the creation of the city is an authoritative, systematized, and logical project, the reduction of the city is chaotic, random, and left to the whim of human behavior, nature, and economics. Detroit was once the fifth largest city in the country. In the early 1900s, the burgeoning auto industry brought a great migration of southerners up north to work in Henry Ford’s factory. The 1940s brought a second wave, primarily of Blacks escaping the segregation of Jim Crow laws. However, they were still met with systemic racism and prejudicial hiring and housing practices. In the summer of 1967, after decades of police brutality, one of the most destructive and deadly riots in American history broke out. During the Rebellion, as locals call it, more than two thousand five hundred buildings were destroyed.