Credit: Max Ortiz, Detroit News
They found a dead body at the old Detroit Public Schools Book Depository/Roosevelt Warehouse the other day at the bottom of an elevator shaft. I haven't heard about any missing high school kids from Livonia so I'm going to assume this was a homeless man. It took hours to saw him out of the ice and they say his face was decomposed so it will be hard to identify him.
The building has been overrun by visitors since I first started going in there, and the last dozen or so times I was there I was NEVER alone (whereas the first dozen times I went there I was always alone). One of the last times I was there I swear there was a group of tourists with all kinds of spelunking gear and those high-tech walking sticks you see old Germans using to hike everywhere in Europe. There was always evidence of homeless people living there, but lately there were quite a large number of them lounging around burning the plastic off wires and extracting tolls from "urban explorers." Maybe they have been working for Matty Moroun.
I plan on driving by later today to see if that billionaire asshole (who owns the place) has sent his minions to board it up again, given the fact it's now a front page local news story (I don't think Matty has a subscription to Harper's). I've been suggesting to Matty's buddy Charlie LeDuff that he write a story about the building for months; it looks like it took a news tip about the discovery of a dead body inside to make it worth his time. But hopefully this awful tragedy will generate enough attention to finally get something done about that hulking mess.
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