National Geographic shines the spotlight on a little-known aspect of Detroit that exists in various sizes across the city: illegally dumped debris that, over the years, have evolved into earthen mounds.
The article, by Deadline Detroit co-founder Bill McGraw, focuses on one of the biggest mounds, on a dump site at the edge of an abandoned neighborhood along Huber Avenue east, of Mt. Elliott and north of the Ford Freeway. The ghost neighborhood is a 189-acre site that city officials had once hoped to turn into the I-94 Industrial Park.
The discarded soil and construction materials have morphed into a mound covered with vegetation. It rises two stories and sprawls across an area the size of two baseball infields. Some trees are 30 feet tall.
"This is a very, very interesting combination of things," said Orin Gelderloos, a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who recently visited the site. He identified nine species of plants and six species of trees growing from the mound. "It's a fascinating area."
The Huber Avenue mound is among the biggest of hundreds of dump sites across Detroit reverting to nature. Some are the size of a few automobiles; others are as small as a pup tent. A new two-story pile of dirt on the west side is just starting to turn green. Older ones are resplendent with Queen Anne's Lace, thistle, goldenrod, grass, and weeds. The oldest are sprouting cottonwoods, silver maples, and other trees.
Virtually all the mounds are byproducts of the bankrupt city's epic abandonment as its population fell from about two million residents in the early 1950s to about 688,000 today.
For years scofflaws have avoided fees at commercial dumps by unloading such heavy materials as cement, soil, metal, and wood on vacant patches where homes and businesses once stood. In Detroit, a sprawling city of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), this empty landscape is estimated to cover as much as 40 square miles (104 square kilometers), which is more space than Lansing, the state capital, occupies.
There is no official estimate of the number of mounds in Detroit, partly because few city officials appear to have noticed them.
Even though the mounds have made their mark on the city's topography for more than a decade, in many ways they are hiding in plain sight. Many are in sparsely occupied neighborhoods rarely visited by outsiders. Illegal dumping is less risky in such isolated spots.
But the mounds are a source of fascination for some people whose jobs or avocations take them to distant corners of Detroit.
"We've seen them all over the city," says Dean Hay, an arborist who serves as director of green infrastructure for The Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit that since 1989 has planted trees and worked to improve the city's open spaces and urban agriculture.
Scott Hocking, a well-known Detroit artist who uses the city's landscape and artifacts in his work, has investigated the mounds for years. "This is really a big interest of mine," he says. "I know where these things are, all over the city. And they're everywhere."
PHOTOS: Top -- The large, mature mound, along Huber Avenue, east of Mt. Elliott, that is covered with lush flowers, grass and trees.
Middle -- A cement block protrudes from a mound at Wabash and Hazel whose debris was dumped on the site several years ago.
Bottom -- A pile of bricks and cement at Humboldt and Poplar that vegetation is beginning to cover.
Photos by Bill McGraw
