Free Republic

8 Years Later, Athens Olympic Venues in Decay There's still one group that loves the training pool for athletes at the former Olympic village in Athens' northern fringe. Frogs. They appear to delight in sitting on debris that floats on the half-filled pool's murky waters. The athletes village itself has fared somewhat better, turned into housing for workers. Eight years after the 2004 Athens Games, many of the Olympic venues Greece built at great expense remain abandoned or rarely used. They are the focus of great public anger as the country struggles through a fifth year of recession and nearly...

'Zombie Apocalypse' To Hit Detroit? Zombie Theme Park Hopes To Breathe New Life To City You may soon be able to pay for an afternoon of fear. Entrepreneur Mark Siwak is hoping to build a "zombie apocalypse" horror theme park in Detroit. Years of population decline has left parts of the city of Detroit rundown and abandoned, but Siwak is hoping to breathe new life into the urban landscape -- by bringing in the dead. According to the Huffington Post, the entrepreneur's idea is to build Z World, a live-action zombie theme park right in an abandoned Detroit neighborhood. Theme...

An Extremely Creepy Tour of an Abandoned Soviet Monument in Bulgaria Remember those derelict Bulgarian war memorials that resemble space fortresses? Well, it turns out they're just as otherworldly inside. Here's one intrepid urban explorer's journey into the shadowy corridors of the shuttered Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship memorial in Varna, Bulgaria. It's also a case study on why you never tour old Soviet monuments alone. In its Communist heyday, the "Park-Monument of the Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship" contained an eternal flame, a bomb shelter, and a tourism center. Loudspeakers would also blast Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 on constant loop. The center opened in...

Since Hurricane Katrina, Ruby Melton's 9th Ward enclave has welcomed a new species of neighbor: clucking, crowing, prancing chickens that dart across streets and nest in the trees. Animal control officers place the stray chickens with a farmer they call the Chicken Man, LeBlanc said, noting that capturing the creatures is "extremely hard" and often requires the effort of several officers. The job hasn't proved as vexing for a band of swift, persevering kids who have invested countless hours stalking and nabbing the feathered bandits, said Ed Buckner, director of the Porch, a cultural organization in the 7th Ward. When...

Take a one minute tour of today's Detroit from the safety of your home. Its not hard to believe that Michigan deserves to sing the blues because it is such a Blue State. Democrat Governors, Congressman, Senators, Mayors, Councilmen, and the UAW have been ignoring the problems since the 1960's. At least Dearbornistan has some semblance of law (quasi Sharia) and order, but like African-Americans who have carved out their own and separate culture, so are Moslems desiring to supercede American culture with their own, thus fracturing a broken state even more. Detroit Poverty 40% United States Violent Crime 430...

A Memoir of life in Hyde Park Claire and I went into a fried chicken place and sat in a booth. At the counter was a drunk cop, and in front of the juke box a young black moved his legs in time to the music, deciding what to play next. The cop told him to stop dancing, but he put in another dime. The cop told him again and got up from his seat, staggering over next to us. He drew his revolver and tried to point it at the offender. It floated lazily upward, turning this way and...

I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and left that city when I was 13 years old. It was bad then. The common joke among "Michiganders" that "flew" South in search of jobs and opportunities is that we hoped that "the last person who leaves turns the lights out." That was back in the 1970s and the situation is even worse now. With unemployment at more than 20 percent, the actual population is now less than 1 million people. In fact, it is roughly half the size it was around 60 years ago. It no longer benefits from government programs designed...

Can farming save Detroit? By David Whitford, editor at large December 29, 2009: 11:37 AM ET DETROIT (Fortune) -- John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management. Twice divorced, Hantz, 48, lives alone in clubby, paneled splendor, surrounded by...

For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said. As hundreds of students gathered in the school gym, outside in a dimly lit alley where the victim was allegedly raped, police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed. "As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN. The witnesses failed to report...

Tomorrow the Pittsburgh Steelers square off against the Baltimore Ravens, and the Philadelphia Eagles square off against the Arizona Cardinals. The winners will go head to head on Feb. 1 in Super Bowl XLIII. If there ever was a time to crow about the wonders of rebuilding a city around a professional sports team, this would be it. Three of the four teams remaining in the play-offs hail from cities -- Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh -- that in recent years spent billions rebuilding their downtowns around pro sports facilities and other community "anchors." Except that there's a problem. The teams...

The city's homeless can camp in Victoria parks, according to a B.C. Supreme Court decision handed down this morning. "Yesterday it was illegal to set up my tent, today it isn't," said David Johnston, one of the homeless activists who argued they have a right to sleep outdoors on public property. Lawyer Catherine Boies Parker, who with Irene Faulkner acted on behalf of the homeless campers in their court challenge of the city's anti-camping bylaw, confirmed the 108-page judgment upheld their argument that a City of Victoria bylaw that prohibits using "temporary abodes" like tents and large tarpaulins for shelter...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Maine's second-largest city has earned some new bragging rights. Lewiston was one of 10 municipalities designated this year as an All-America City. The selections were made Friday night during an award ceremony in Anaheim, Calif., in the competition sponsored by the National Civic League. "My head is just spinning right now," Dottie Perham-Whittier, Lewiston's community relations coordinator, told the (Lewiston) Sun Journal. "I think we pretty much just leaped up on that stage." During its presentation the day before, the delegation from Lewiston talked about various city initiatives, including the Lewiston Youth Advisory Council, the Lots to...

If you can imagine a typical baseball crowd leaving Miller Park and never returning, then you can grasp the decline in Milwaukee County's population during the early years of the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2006, Milwaukee County lost 25,067 residents, according to new estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. ...

Wearing work boots and carrying flashlights on a spring day last year, a band of architects and developers picked their way through the dim interior of the American Brewery. They looked like archaeologists combing through an ancient ruin, which, in some ways, is exactly what the brewery is. Built in the 1800s, the American Brewery has stood empty these past 33 years, a ghostly reminder of a distant past when the city's manufacturing muscle was on display in working-class neighborhoods such as this one in East Baltimore. Rain drips from a hole in the roof and puddles on the floor....

DETROIT, United States (AFP) - Rats or lead poisoning. When it comes to the threats from the broken down house next door, Dorothy Bates isn't sure which is worse. "When it's lightening and thundering you can hear the bricks just falling," the 40-year-old nurse said as she looked at the smashed windows and garbage-strewn porch. "If you call and ask (the city) about it they say they don't have the funds to tear it down." There are more than 12,000 abandoned homes in the Detroit area, a byproduct of decades of layoffs at the city's auto plants and white flight...

DETROIT- A new documentary about Detroit will premiere tomorrow at the University of Michigan. The film traces the rise and ruin of the Motor City. Detroit Public Radio's Celeste Headlee reports: Detroit: Ruin of a City is not a slick, expensively produced documentary like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Super Size Me. The film was made by two academics Michael Chanan from the University of the West of England in Bristol and George Steinmetz of the University of Michigan. They used a handheld digital camera and lots of archival tape. It cost about 20 thousand dollars to produce. Steinmetz says Detroit is...

It was a murder that shocked the city...for about two days. And then the horror of it all receded into the horror of all the others: It was the 30th murder in the LAPD's 77th Street Division this year, the 198th in Los Angeles as a whole. By the time you read this both numbers will almost surely be higher. On May 15 a woman looking for recyclables in a South-Central Los Angeles trash bin found instead the body of an 11-year-old boy. Bryan Lockley, a sixth grader at a local middle school, had been killed by a shotgun blast...

<p>Between 1918 and 1922, Detroit Urban League workers passed out more than 20,000 brochures crammed with "helpful hints" for blacks just arriving here from the rural South.</p> <p>"Don't sit in front of your house or around Belle Isle or public places with your shoes off," read one "helpful hint." "Don't wear overalls on Sunday."</p>