Architecture that was at its prime in the 1970s has slowly fallen into decline and often ruin thanks to decades of neglect, especially in America’s poorest and most racially segregated communities, including Gary, Detroit, Camden and Harlem. Many of these structures were historically significant, built between the late 1880s and the 1920s, but when no budget exists to care for them and entire cities are left behind by economic progress, the forces of nature and decay take over.

In a potent visual representation of poverty in America’s urban centers and the loss of historic architectural character via demolition, Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara has spent the last 40+ years documenting the downfall of dozens of structures and city streets. The resulting series, ‘Tracking Time,’ is a time-lapse in slow motion, photographing the same buildings once every few years.

One old shop in Harlem gets painted several times over, has its stained glass windows knocked out, loses a facade to an ugly garage door and is split up into multiple smaller businesses before finally being boarded over and transformed into a mini-mall-style church in 2014.

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A massive brick building in South Bronx becomes modest row houses, while The Ransom Gillis House in Detroit (top) sinks into the ground, its bricks falling in clumps, the roof caving in, ivy and trees taking over. It’s almost completely obscured by greenery before a restoration brings it back to its former glory.

But other stories aren’t so positive, since people care more about mansions than they do about public housing projects, row houses, and modest residential neighborhoods. Occasionally, Vergara ventures inside to show us that even though the facades still look beautiful, like that of the former Camden Free Public Library, the interiors are utterly destroyed.

It can be a heartbreaking journey but also a fascinating one, watching some of these structures remain the same for many years while the world changes around them before transforming into something new. And some do manage to endure.

A tiny paper village blooms with a thick, cobwebby coating of multi-colored mold, left to decay just as every structure ever built by man would eventually do if humans were to disappear. Italian artist Daniele Del Nero painstakingly constructed these architectural scale models out of black paper and covered them with a layer of flour and mold to mimic the effect of deteriorating abandoned buildings.

“My purpose is to talk about the sense of time and destiny of the planet after the human species, through the sense of restlessness which abandoned buildings are able to communicate,” says Del Nero.

Reminiscent of the History Channel series Life After People, ‘After Effects’ gives us an intriguing and somewhat unsettling taste of just how quickly our civilizations would fall into disrepair if we weren’t around to preserve them. Del Nero initially intended only to photograph his models and then discard them, but is now keeping them as an exhibit unto themselves, protected in a plexiglass case.

The artist told Wired UK, “I’ve always been fascinated by old ruined buildings, but I suddenly started to think about how to reproduce in small scaled the particular sensation of being in a lonely, abandoned place. We are used to imagining our cities as permanent and definitive, but it’s amazing how little time it takes for nature to reclaim its spaces.”

It was built upon the birthplace of the Ford automobile, so perhaps it’s fitting that Detroit’s Michigan Theater is now a parking lot – except that such a use seems to be such a terrible waste for such a stunning historic structure. Built in 1926 alongside the connected 13-story Michigan Building office tower, the 4,000-seat Michigan Theater has been left to decay, another casualty in Detroit’s long decline since its heyday as a car-manufacturing mecca.

(above image via: bourbonbaby)

(images via: wikipedia)

“It is not merely a theatre for Detroit,” John H. Kunsky, the theater’s owner, told The Detroiter in August 1926. “It is a theatre for the whole world. It is designed to be the great showplace of the middle west.” It was described in the press as “a jewel”, and “the world’s finest”. The auditorium featured 10-foot crystal chandeliers that hung eight floors above the seats, and the mezzanine was open to black-tie guests only.  But by the mid-1960s, the Michigan Theater was among dozens in the city to close due to dwindling profits, and though it was saved from the wrecking ball in 1967, its glory days were over.

(image via: decojim)

Ironically, one of the factors that forced the closure of the opulent theater was a lack of parking. The theater faced stiff competition from modern nearby theaters that offered plenty of parking space. After a brief interlude as a music venue, during which it drew some of the industry’s biggest names, the Michigan Theater was gutted. While the shell of the building remained intact, it was filled with a three-level, 160-space parking deck.

(image via: detroitderek)

One perk to the theater’s latest incarnation is that one need not be an intrepid urban explorer (which often includes law-breaking and physical danger) to get a good look at these modern ruins. A paltry parking fee will get you up-close-and-personal with peeling gilded walls, a crumbling ticket booth, the remains of an upper balcony and a shredded bit of red curtain. See more photos of the decaying interior at DetroitFunk.com.

What is it about the cracking paint, the crumbling brick and the ominous silent of abandoned buildings that attracts urban explorers from around the world to crawl carefully through and silently document their rooms and spaces? Deserted buildings seem to grow more complex and interesting as the natural processes of decay take over and as layered debris tells more and more stories as the years go by.

(Images above via Opacity)

Different kinds of buildings, like abandoned places and cities, are deserted for different reasons. Sometimes disaster strikes and there is no funding or motivation to rebuild a particular structure, but in other cases a building’s use expires as in the case of mental institutions and drive-in theaters which are largely things of the past. Some buildings go through second (and third and fourth) lives and are adaptively reused in creative ways while other structures are simply deserted.