deco decline

check out these crazy photographs of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. I can't believe there are still abandoned places like these in major U.S. cities - such potential, such a mess.

Detroit’s Vanity Ballroom with its unsalvaged art deco chandeliers. Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey once played here.

The ruined Spanish-Gothic interior of the United Artists Theater in Detroit. The cinema was built in 1928 by C Howard Crane, and finally closed in 1974.


The biology classroom at George W Ferris School in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park.

East Side Public Library

Pretty unbelievable ... here's the whole series. As a colleague said, "Photographs for the illustrated edition of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire..."

yikes.