[Photo: Heidelberg Project]

While staying in Detroit, we head out toward 8 Mile and stop at the Heidelberg Project. It’s a two-block public art exercise that consumes the sides of houses, empty lots, the sidewalk, and even the trees of a long depressed, black (but once racially integrated) Eastside Detroit neighborhood. Tyree Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg St., launched the project in 1986 as a way of revitalizing his ‘hood through low-budget DIY creativity and it’s since become an ever evolving outsider art installation.

Guyton, who believes Detroit never really recovered from the riots of 1967, was disillusioned after returning home from his military service—finding a neighborhood (known as “Black Bottom”) seemingly beyond repair, and, as far as wider America was concerned, beyond care. He began by painting bright pop-art polka dots on houses, and artfully affixing them with detritus collected from surrounding vacant lots.

The site vibrates with energy and a playfully anarchic spirit. But while it’s ostensibly about restoring pride of place to the residents—and attracts 275,000 visitors a year to an area that people were once afraid to walk through—it still feels like the deeply personal work of its creator, eliciting a conflicting stew of reactions.

Heidelberg St. is not simply a feel-good restoration project; there is a palpable anger on the flip-side of its hopeful communitarian face, backed by an affinity for the grotesque. Guyton’s paintings on salvaged planks of wood, his welded sculptures and conceptual set pieces (stray, incongruous items assembled together just so, like the flag and phone on ironing board at top), riff on themes such as war, displacement, addiction and poverty almost as often as they seem to engage in pure silly fun. And because Guyton has a fixation for certain objects and images—brightly-coloured polka dots, painted numbers, shoes, chairs, crudely drawn faces, television sets, children’s dolls, stuffed animals, the word “God”, telephones, bicycles—there’s a perverse kind of unity to the whole scene.

Guyton was there while Mike and I were milling around on Heidelberg St. We introduced ourselves; he was polite and asked where we were from, but he was obviously preoccupied with the next idea he was working on. It’s a never-ending piece, a fragile, self-contained world, that he obsessively keeps adding to.

(Note: We’ll throw up more images from the Heidelberg Project in coming days.)

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Many are now looking to Detroit as an indicator of what many struggling cities in America’s post-industrial northeast may soon look like—or in the case of Cleveland, already do (see the feature in last week’s New York Times Magazine on how Cleveland is dealing with the foreclosure crisis). TIME Magazine has just posted a photo essay by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on Detroit’s many derelict, long vacant, but once magnificent twentieth century buildings (Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline).

(Photo: Michigan Central Depot, from Forgotten Detroit)

In addition to visiting the Heidelberg Project, we spent a couple hours scoping out the architectural decay. The most iconic of its ruins is probably the Michigan Central Depot, once the city’s main train station, now a hollowed-out shell that really does look like the last building left in a war zone. (When you cross the Ambassador Bridge and go through Customs it’s one of the first things you notice—this stolid, once stately, monolithic slab you can see right through.) A Detroit preservationist who hosts an excellent web archive called Forgotten Detroit, says, “I like to view [the MCD] as the ultimate symbol of the automobile’s complete triumph over public transportation.” Which, thanks to recent events, gives the building a whole new layer of irony, tragedy and resonance.

Maybe the MCD needs a Heidelberg Project of its own. Hell, so does the whole city. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more Heidelberg Projects—ingenious, intensely personal, quotidian stand-offs against the backdraft of history—all across the country.