Abandoned Detroit:
Touring The D

Once a busy city of nearly two million people, today vast acres of Detroit have been abandoned. Places where people lived, worked, shopped and worshiped are now just ghost buildings and empty fields.

photos by
Theresa Welsh

Take a Drive Through The D

If you come to Detroit, take a drive through its main thoroughfares and its neighborhoods. You will see many buildings that are standing open, windows broken out, siding or bricks stripped, and personal belongings spilling out onto porches, driveways, sidewalks and streets. Piles of old tires are dumped in the empty lots, along with broken furniture and the remains of lives once lived in these spaces. Detroit is being abandoned, block by block, building by building.

See over 200 photos of abandoned houses at my Flickr page.

Abandoned Shopping Center
This former strip mall on the northeast side sits abandoned, its parking lot full of cracks and holes and strewn with debris and items left behind. Most of Detroit's commerical thoroughfares, which once had shops, are lined with empty buildings and empty fields. This suburban style strip mall is located in a nicer section close to the city limits.



Abandoned Church
Detroit is full of little storefront churches like this one. Commercial buildings that can no longer find tenants often end up as houses of worship, catering to the neighborhood. This collection of buildings on Rosa Parks (12th St) is decorated with Bible verses, and was operating as a church and soup kitchen.



See photos of St Rita Catholic Church and school, one of many Catholic parishes to close in Detroit.

Abandoned Factories
The automobile industry grew up in Detroit, beginning with a small building near downtown where Model Ts were built by hand and growing to encompass large factories and complexes of buildings that employed thousands of workers. Today, many of those places where workers toiled and great products were born are just empty walls and silent railroad tracks, ghosts of the former good times that once made Detroit a city of homeowners living the American Dream.

The Abandoned Packard Plant. See more photos of the packard plant.	The Abandoned Fisher Body Plant. See more photos of Fisher Body.

Abandoned Commercial Buildings
All over the city, buildings that used to be occupied by a business are empty, deteriorating. Most will never be occupied again and need to be torn down.






This building, with its lovely architectural elements, is at Fenkell and Livernois on the West Side
Abandoned Boats?
We've noticed as we tour Detroit neighborhoods that lots of people have boats in their yard or in the abandoned lots. But here are two abandoned boats that turned up in a North Side neighborhood. We have phtographed this area on a number of other ocasions, so we know these were recently dumped.