Surviving On The Scraps Of The Past

An interesting article in the Detroit Free Press about individuals in Detroit's Delray district legally prospecting in an old scrapyard for scrap metal to sell.

The Detroit Free Press: John Carlisle: Delray's diggers find scrap metal, pride and fellowship

It was morning in Delray in southwest Detroit, on a littered abandoned corner lot not far from the river. A half-dozen young men stood in holes they’d dug in the ground, chopping at the soil, yanking out anything remotely metallic that a scrapyard might give them a few dollars for — from thick steel beams and small copper fittings down to jagged shards of slag.
This was a scrapyard half a century ago, and over the years, tons of steel and copper and aluminum wound up buried in the lot. Since it closed, the neighborhood’s residents have been mining here, with the blessing of the lot’s current owner, since he’d have to pay to remove all that debris anyway if anything is ever done with the property.

Some of the workers there are making some decent money prospecting, and they're certainly doing both hard and legal work. 

It's a sad commentary on Detroit's current state that these hard workers' most economically viable course of action in the city is to dig in the dirt to find and sell the detritus that was manufactured and buried here long ago.