This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published March 23, 2011 and can be found here.
Johnny Knoxville may be a jackass
but today he shows us that even ugly can be beautiful. In what is actually a 30 minute advertisement for Palladium Boots
, Knoxville turns urban explorer and takes for an eye-opening ride through some of the hardest hit areas of Detroit...
In this shrinking city many of the same struggles we face here in Rochester are amplified by a factor of 5 (at least). In fact, today's headlines announced that the Motor City has lost a staggering 25%
of its residents from 2000 to 2010. That equates to about 237,493 people! Over the same period Rochester has lost 5.55% or 12,180 people.
These are not numbers to be proud of. But Knoxville shows us there are still very good people here - and reasons to be hopeful. He interviews Larry Mongo for example, a business owner who recently opened a blues cafe in a depressed section downtown (where he says even the homeless had abandoned). Mongo says he's more hopeful now than he's ever been, as artists and musicians have been among the first to return and are filling in the "gaps".
Where young artists are typically the first to migrate into areas that may be a little rough around the edges because rents are low, in Detroit there are often no landlords to collect rent, leaving entire apartment buildings wide open to be converted into art communes... and entire neighborhoods to be turned into art projects
. Even the jackass in Johnny Knoxville can't help but smile at the site of abandoned boarded up houses covered in pink polka dots and plastic doll heads.
So take 30 minutes and watch this film. Launch it full screen and get inspired.
