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Its incomplete theaters and fountains and marble-clad foundations offer mute testimony to the boom that was - a giddy era of cheap money fueling wild-eyed real estate speculation that collapsed in a heap of lawsuits. What's left is a colossal 21st-century ruin and questions about what will happen to the buildings and site.
"I don't see anyone coming to the rescue," says Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, who was an early advocate of the project but believes developers who tell him "that it's beyond redemption."
Its future? "A couple hundred million dollars to knock it down and take it away," Patterson says.
Calls to the developers - Bloomfield Hills developer Craig Schubiner, Cleveland-based Development Diversified Realty and New York-based Coventry Real Estate Advisors - were not returned. Schubiner has sued the other two developers, who have argued that changing market conditions caused the project to collapse. After a flurry of frenzied building, construction abruptly ended in November 2008.
"It would be a great set for a futuristic movie in which life on Earth had ceased to exist," says Rockland Richardson, a Pontiac video specialist who drives by the site on his daily commute. Paul Riemer, whose family's Riemer Floors fronts the abandoned project, stares out the store window at a construction fence, saying: "It's killing us. It looks like Bosnia."
Claimed by the elements
A condominium tower that's partially finished has graceful proportions, a few framed windows and balcony trusses that have rusted through. Having weathered two Michigan winters uncovered, open to damage from rain, hail, sleet and subzero temperatures, even what's been built is deteriorating.
From May 3, 2010