I for one find ruins of any type and age quite fascinating and as such am fascinated by the ruins of Detroit. I find that there is a strange beauty in all the decay. And when I look at an abandoned house, for example, I think about the history behind it -- the people who built it, the families who called the place home, and how it ended up in its current state of abandonment and disrepair.

That said, I don't think I'd describe them as fabulous, however. The phrase "fabulous ruins" strikes me as a tongue-in-cheek phrase, mainly because one would normally not associate an adjective such as "fabulous," which is a positive attribute, with a noun such as "ruins," which generally has negative associations. So the phrase sounds somewhat contradictory and oxymoronic.

But as a positive attribute is not normally paired with a negative noun, it is a good marketing ploy because it attracts attention. Reading is all about anticipation. For example when we read something like "I went to the gym..." we would anticipate reading something like "...to work out." We would not anticipate the sentence to continue "...to buy groceries." Thus if we were to read "I went to the gym to buy groceries" the dissonance of it would break our reading rhythm and cause us to think about the incongruity of the sentence. So, in this respect the incongruity of "fabulous ruins" causes an unexpectedness of sorts, and gets people to think about the phrase and what is meant by it. Anyway, that's my semantic analysis.

In fact, I believe I read somewhere that it was initially meant to be an ironic phrase, but then took on a life of its own. I probably read it on this site somewhere, but I can't seem to find it now.

As for the Rome/Detroit thing I don't compare Detroit to modern day Rome with its ancient ruins, but rather to what Rome might have been like after the collapse of the Roman Empire. It is generally believed that Rome had something in the neighborhood of one million residents during its heyday. In the years/decades leading up to the collapse of the empire and the years/decades after it Rome saw a declining population and probably ended up losing more than half of its residents. Some even say that Rome's population fell to less than 100,000. As we can see with Detroit, when a city that had been built up to support a certain population loses half that population there is going to be a lot of empty, abandoned structures. Hence, with many people leaving Rome there were probably many abandoned structures. And with no one to take care of these abandoned structures they fell into disrepair, thus causing blight. As is the case when there are empty buildings nearby there was probably also a lot of building scavenging going on which of course added to the disrepair of the buildings and increase in blight. In fact I believe it is the case that the most famous ruin of Rome, the Coliseum is missing a good sized portion of its surrounding wall not due to falling apart over time, but rather because scavengers stripped the wall down to use the building material for other purposes.

So, I imagine that Rome, with its population decline in the years after the fall and the subsequent urban blight that resulted from it, resembled Detroit in many ways.

Anyway, as someone who is fascinated by ruins, and by extension Rome and Detroit, I have pondered this thought many atime.