My new old fascination – part one

I’m reasonably sure that anyone under 40 who was a teenager in Southeast Michigan has heard of the Northville Tunnels. The fabled insane asylum / juvenile detention center / medical testing facility (depending on who is recounting the legend) with buildings that were interconnected by a series of tunnels.

But…

How many people actually paid a visit to the tunnels?

To hear high schoolers tell it, everyone, with limited exception. If you hadn’t been, you were going soon with an older brother, people from another school, etc. That is, unless you were simply too afraid to go, after having heard about the animal corpses / satanic worship / “Freddy’s Den” / police presence.

In fact, if memory serves, being afraid to go to the tunnels was one of the few acceptable things to be afraid of. I don’t remember anybody taking shit for being afraid to go.

Of course, being young, bipolar, and more than willing to ditch school for such an adventure, I went. My first adventure was to the library and city hall, to get information. As I found out, information was hard to come by, especially when the person asking for it was clearly not asking for legitimate reasons. In the end, “What do you want that for?” doesn’t trump a person’s legal right to know. I suspect they were either irritated enough by my persistence that they wanted me to just go away, or they thought my understanding of their local ordinances were far too advanced for the average miscreant, and that I wouldn’t possibly do anything destructive with whatever out of date information they had.

I got a map, and it cost me about $15.

The map, as it turned out, was entirely useless. I wouldn’t learn this until a few weeks later, when I decided to go “exploring”. Suffice it to say that I had learned far more about local government and civics than had I actually been in a government or civics class. Assuming, of course, that that was one of the classes I was skipping. Come to think of it, those are probably 12th grade classes, and I’m just being overly snarky with my nostalgia.

Anyway…

I suppose I was fairly brazen about the whole thing. Right off the bat, I wasn’t in school when I should have been. I went in broad daylight (indicentally, this is largely because I was afraid to go there at night), parked relatively close to the “entrance”, and pretty much walked right in.

All things considered, I was looking at a trespassing ticket and maybe some sort of truancy ticket. I had $25 to cover the trespassing ticket, and to this day, I’ve never heard of anyone actually getting in to any sort of legal trouble for truancy. Worst case, the police would catch me and call my parents who, by then, had almost certainly received far angrier calls about much larger offenses.

I’m getting off track here in a big way.

There I was, no tunnels in sight, and the buildings were in serious disrepair. It was obvious that the place had been abandoned for quite some time, but not nearly as long as the legend had me believe (circa 1940). I fell in love almost immediately.

What was this place for?
Who would abandon it?
Why didn’t they take everything?
Why don’t adults care about it?
Wouldn’t this be a great (insert hundreds of ideas here)?
Could I buy this and fix it up someday?
What’s so scary about this place?

For the most part, the questions wouldn’t be answered until last year when I read an article somewhere about the subdivision that’s there now. My heart was broken, and I decided to do some reasearch, only to find that I wasn’t alone. In fact, most of my questions had been answered with just a few Google searches.

In any case, the architecture was beautiful. It wasn’t like any sort of state-run building I had seen outside of Detroit or Lansing (let’s be honest, new state buildings are drab, drab, drab), and some of the buildings hadn’t been vandalized to the extent that their purpose was unrecognizable.

Sadly, most of the buildings had been seriously vandalized. My inner adult became furious with people who had taken spraypaint and sledgehammers along on their visits. What really struck me though, was that through years of neglect and abuse, there were still some medical-looking things around.

Did people leave here in a hurry?
Did they plan to come back?
What really happened here?

I thought I was the only person who cared.

Going back to last year, I was kind of surprised that there wasn’t any sort of fanfare for the area being razed and turned in to a subdivision. Had kids forgotten about it, or is it just that I’m completely out of touch these days?