The Endless Garage

This photo from “The Ruins of Detroit” really stuck with me. It’s a long shot of the dilapidated, abandoned remains of the Fisher Body car dealership (now a small part of General Motors). The first thing I noticed was the color in relation to the photos around it. Most of the other pictures in this photo essay were grey shades and splashes of color, fading or muted with the passage of time.  This photo immediately stands out from those with its almost turquoise hue permeating the entire photo.

Through the whole space, bricks and detritus have crumbled to the ground in misshapen hills and piles, and exposed pipes and wires hang from the ceiling. The garage seems to stretch on for miles in the left foreground even though we can clearly see the window at the far end. This impressive use of perspective is done in such a way that our eyes are immediately drawn from the pile of bricks and rubble on the ground to the small light down that long passage, as if giving us a literal light at the end of the tunnel, a glimmer of hope for the future of the city.

I’ve always loved photos or videos taken from abandoned buildings, and to see one in such a state of decay and ruin is not only enlightening, but humbling. Who knows where Pittsburgh will be in ten or twenty years? Could it look anything like Detroit looks now? I hope not, but you never know. This photo tells a very powerful story considering that at one point Fisher was an extremely popular car, and now since the company went belly-up, hundreds of people went home jobless and the metal of millions of cars went to the scrap heap. This photo is the story of a ghost town that used to be one of the most burgeoning places in the country.