I had to take another stab at writing some creative non-fiction in my English class.  This time around, we were instructed to choose an artifact, be it a place, thing, person, conversation, etc, but it had to be something that we had little to no real previous knowledge of and we then had to create a narrative around it.  We also had to address the moral and ethical aspects of creating a fictitious narrative around a real artifact.  Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was Detroit and the numerous abandoned buildings around the city and how, although I am aware of them and have seen pictures, I have never really taken the time to personally explore them or their pasts.  This is what I came up with and I’d love to hear some feedback on it being that this is not really my natural style of writing.

It was a warm day, but it was comfortable.  The sky was this rich, deep shade of blue and there was a cool breeze lazily blowing in from off of the river. It was the kind of day that one would see a painting of, the ones with the perfectly puffy white clouds and visible rays of yellow sunshine.  It was remarkably peaceful for the middle of a weekday afternoon but there was something so familiar and ordinary about it at the same time.  I walked down the empty sidewalk, without a single individual in sight, the same way that I had done so many instances before, steadily taking in the feelings and emotions approaching and departing around me.  I let the tall buildings cast their shade on me offering cool, brief moments of ease.  But today was different.  Today, for some reason I stopped walking and I stood there, looking.  I raised my head skyward towards the crest of the old structure, a building, lifeless and cold, caused my body to shudder slightly at the sight of such a magnificent corpse. 

It was resentfully cold with a wind that seemed to punish one’s cheeks with every blow.  The war was over and it was Christmastime in the city.  Winter, with all its brunt, managed to ignore the jovial season.  The cold didn’t stop them though.  Hundreds upon hundreds, masses of cloaked, red-cheeked individuals herded their way down the icy streets frantically on a mission of ample proportions.  A brand new ’49 Ford Coupe insisted on my attention as it roared its way past my line of vision through the slick, snow-covered roads, probably on its way back to a warm home for Sunday dinner.  The force of life that inexorably persisted in the dead of winter kept me walking briskly though as I searched for a storefront that interested me.  Upon reaching the corner of Lafayette and Michigan Avenue, I couldn’t take the wind any longer and I turned quickly right and went inside.

There was marble as far as I could see.  There was magnificent marble on the floors, the walls, the fountains all waxed and shining.  The large lobby of the building glowed a warm yellow courtesy of the glass and crystal chandeliers hanging high over my head.  I stared at the ensconced chandeliers in disbelief.  I had never seen something so delicate and meticulous.  There must have been thousands; no millions of individual glass crystal pieces, each taking on their own distinct personality as the light reflected off of them.  The gold colored ceilings with their detailed murals and tiles hinted of the utmost grandeur.  It was the same grandeur that had lured so many others to this city, the city where American dreams came true.  The sounds of Bing Crosby, echoing his promises that he’d be home for Christmas, coupled with muffled conversations and little children laughing as they waited in line to meet Santa Clause embraced me with a sense of warmth and security.  I made a flank left into one of the clothing stores hoping to find a present for my father.

I stood there and contemplated.  It wasn’t like anyone was going to stop me, there was nobody even around to see me do it.  The corner of Lafayette and Michigan Avenue was quiet.  I turned and saw the traffic light turn from green to yellow and quickly to red as if there were actually cars on the street to oblige.  I turned to my friend and he nodded his approval.  We found a loose wooden board and crawled in.  As I came to my feet and wiped the dust off my hands, he followed in behind me.  I paused in a moment of astonishment because, for a boarded up building, it was surprisingly bright inside.  Debris littered the floor along with large puddles of what must have been rainwater, dirty and blackened.  I looked towards the ceiling and saw what looked like clouds and the blue afternoon sky peering through the various broken, rotted out floorboards and support beams reaffirming where the rainwater must have come from.

The cavernous lobby sat quietly undisturbed, almost frozen in the memories of a better time.  The fallen, fractured marble from the arches above cracked under my feet as I decided to wander further into the ruins and explore some more.  I cautiously crept through this seemingly post-apocalyptic scene astonished at how this could have possibly happened.  Who could have allowed a building of such incredible stature and prominence to simply whither and die like this?

It was mid-afternoon as the clouds began to roll in and it began to smell like rain was in the air.  I sat listening to the crackling, fuzzy voices on the AM frequency coming out of my hand-held radio while enjoying my lunch break.  A news briefing about the numerous riots breaking out across the country was being broadcast with President Johnson giving his reassurance to the American people.  Race had recently become a hot, volatile issue and the major cities across America were starting to see and feel the tensions between whites and blacks.  I looked up for a moment to assess the weather outside and noticed a large vehicle drive past the window.  I slowly made my way over to get a clearer view of the street.  It was an army tank rolling down the avenue.  Shots rang out from down the street and I ran out the front of the building to survey the scene that was unfolding.  The city was being attacked, attacked by its own people.  Fire spread quickly as the violence escalated with myself standing in the very middle of it all watching in horror, disbelief and angst.  I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move.  I ran down Lafayette towards Michigan Avenue searching for a safe place to call for help.  I made a quick right and staggered inside.

There was marble as far as I could see.  It still looked the way I had remembered it, if perhaps a bit faded from the natural burden of time.  I stood there anchored by the shock of what I had just witnessed.  I looked around to see one man sitting lackadaisically on a marble bench near the grand tiled fountain.  The water trickled lightly into the pool below creating small waves that revealed the pennies resting in the bottom.  Compared to the monstrosity that was taking place outside it was undeniably serine on the inside.  I turned to look out the glass front doors and out onto the street.  Broken glass, broken furniture, broken bones and broken dreams littered the site.  The city had reached the end; the force of infuriation was too much to hold the fragile pieces of humanity together.  I sat down alongside the old man on the cold marble bench and we spoke nothing to each other.  The coldness from the marble underneath me entered my body and sent chills racing though me.  We sat, the two of us, that day and watched it unfold.  We felt the heat from the fire, we felt the sting from the breaking splinters of glass, we saw the terror in the eyes of the young and the innocent and we heard the confused outrage from a city of people that had gone mad.  We watched from inside that building, on that bench, as everything else collapsed around us. 

I stood there staring, as my imagination realigned itself with reality, on the corner of Lafayette and Michigan Avenue by myself, but I wasn’t alone.  I stood next to a building, nestled in rows with other buildings, all of them cold, dark and derelict but never forgotten.  They provide a constant reminder of what was and how it all ended.  I thought about my grandfather growing up in Detroit and Hamtramck during the 1940s and 50s and I thought about what life would’ve been like had I lived it through him.  He has told me countless stories, some I will never remember and others that will be with me the rest of my life.  I never got tired of hearing those stories about the glory days of growing up in and around the greatest city in the world, Detroit.  Of course, he wasn’t there to witness the riots in the way that I had imagined and certainly never told me specifically about the Lafayette building, but I still felt an unexplainable emotional connection to the building and its past.  I’ve only heard about the riots or I have read about them in history books.  I know I probably have no right imagining how frightful a scene that must have been for those who did witness it; for those who lost their lives because of it. 

I continued to stand outside the front of the Lafayette building, thinking about the ruins that must lie inside and how I’ve walked by it so many times before but only on my way to another destination.  The breeze blew on the back of my neck as I leisurely turned to continue down the sidewalk.  I turned back just once to look over my shoulder at the building behind me and watched as it faded steadily, like it’s historic and tragic past, into the horizon, and it became northing more than a distant memory of what once was.  

The Lafayette Building in Detroit