Risk and Ruination in Rockaway, New York. Jonah Walters, in Thursday's Souciant.
Decay gazing (ruin porn, if you will) has become a cottage industry in my home town of Detroit. In some sense, it's at least partly responsible for the economic turnaround that downtown is currently experiencing. All the hipster urban spelunkers wrote blogs, which made all the coolest kids from Brooklyn move to town (so to speak; the people here obviously come from all over), and now we have a viable business district and home prices are rising quickly. It's a strange cycle. People flee, a once great place is turned to ruin, and then nostalgia gives it life once again.
Great writeup on the complexities of decay. I'm glad the author didn't shy away from the different sides of the issue - especially the nostalgia factor. It is inherently interesting to look at something that is gone and seeing what it once was. I think the first images I saw of "ruin porn" was an abandon school filled with old desks and soggy books. It was so striking. You could see see the carvings students had left on the surfaces of the desks. They were like ghosts. Recently there post on reddit that was a response to the constant depiction of Detroit as a destroyed town. Titled "No, THIS is Detroit" it was a great view of the other side of things.