Last week the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy, becoming the largest city to ever do so. Hoping that waving the white flag saves the long suffering city from going the way of Cheronobyl, the city government believes this is the first step in a dramatic rebuild. The Motor City and its residents are holding their breath to see if their once-great city can be saved from ruin.
Once the epicenter of American Manufacturing, Detroit’s fleet of factories are withering away over time. Take a look at some of the decaying ruins of Motor City as captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre as featured on weather.com.
Marchand had this to say about his work in The D.
“Detroit is a very symbolic place in modern history,” Marchand told Weather.com. “In Europe, the ruins were mostly anecdotal, they were the very last pieces of a changing and gentrifying landscape… Detroit’s ruins seemed a bit like a natural component of the cityscape. You could find all the archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of abandonment, like an American Pompeii. We knew we would probably never have the opportunity to photograph such a powerful place anywhere else.”
