I found this website — http://www.forgottendetroit.com — which contains four photographers’ images of the ruined factory buildings in that hard luck city. I wonder why the pictures make me so emotional.
I think it is because they speak to the grandeur of our aspirations of that time, the kind of thing you see in a country that is coming up in the world and wants to make a mark by having public places that inspire. 
When you see something like the above, the ravaged ticket concourse from the train station, it makes you feel as though we live in a country in decline and that we ourselves have lost our center. How could we let these beautiful marble columns be defiled by vandals?
Yet there is poetry too, beauty in decay.