What I remember the most about my visit to the ruins of the Pontiac Silverdome in 2016 is how the place sounded. The way the wind played with the tattered roof panels and whipped past the support cables of the dome, playing them like guitar strings. As I walked across the playing field, I’d occasionally hear bits and pieces of metal hardware falling from above and hitting the ground around me.
It was a little unnerving. Advertisement The stadium in the northern suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, had been disused for years by the time I arrived with my camera. A snowstorm in 2013 had torn the roof to shreds.
A year later, much of the equipment was auctioned off, leaving the place an empty shell. At that point, the once-sterile, polished stadium had begun to fall back to nature: I remember gazing downwards at my feet and seeing tiny shoots of natural grass pushing their way up through the artificial turf. This was not my first encounter with the Silverdome.
In 1994, I was an angsty 14-year-old living in Tennessee, still reeling from the death, by suicide, of my then-idol, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain. My parents, maybe sensing an opportunity to bond with their kids, had loaded my brother and I into an old Toyota and set out on a cross-country road trip to Seattle, his hometown in the Pacific North-West, to allow us to pay our respects. They decided to do this during the 1994 World Cup finals, hosted by the United States, and along the way we took in the tournament.
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