Everything Burns

I was browsing the e-edition of the Detroit Free Press today and caught a blurb about a massive warehouse fire in Highland Park. I had a bad feeling about it; Highland Park and the area of Detroit adjacent to it is home to storied if ruined industrial sites like the actual Ford Model T plant. About ten years ago, a five-alarm warehouse fire in Detroit destroyed the old Studebaker factory. Another fire a few years later claimed a paint shop that just happened to have an amateur museum of Detroit artifacts going back for decades.

Well, this time around the warehouse that burned is still burning was an especially bitter loss, as it was the new headquarters/showroom of Reclaim Detroit, an organization that salvages rare wood, beautiful glass, and other irreplaceable treasures from blighted or demolished homes. But for Reclaim Detroit, these artifacts would've either been lost to arson or to a landfill

But, luck being what it is in Detroit and its toy-towns, all the carefully salvaged wood and glass and metal went up in a blaze anyway. A total loss.

Sigh.