Wood frame houses stand scattered across mostly cleared blocks, with a disused blast furnace island across the channel and a new cable-stayed bridge overhead.
What Delray looks like
West Jefferson Avenue carries more than ten thousand trucks a day through the neighborhood on a wide two-lane road, past a wastewater treatment plant and an oil refinery. Side streets branch off it into a platted grid where open, grassed-over lots outnumber the houses left standing, most of them one and two storey wood frame with boarded windows and peeling porches. The surviving houses mostly date from the early 1900s to the 1930s.
A few brick buildings survive at full scale. , at Yale and South Street, rises with twin copper spires over a dark brick nave with Gothic arched windows. 's grounds sit behind chain link fencing off West Jefferson, its red brick barracks buildings standing beside a tall square smokestack from an older powerhouse, a small boat still dry docked in the yard facing the water.
rises across the Rouge River channel, its idle blast furnaces and cranes standing over slag heaps, beside coke ovens that keep running. The 's cable-stayed tower, 220 metres tall and strung with more than 200 cables, now stands over the same stretch of Jefferson. Fenced construction yards still sit at its base.
Shot in Delray
For Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch filmed the exterior of a shuttered corner bar on West Jefferson Avenue as the club where Adam and Eve watch a set by the band White Hills. The building had traded as the Ideal Bar and sits directly across the road from the river channel, Zug Island visible over the water behind it.
Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013
Jarmusch shot the exterior here for the scene where Adam and Eve go to watch White Hills perform, catching the bar's boarded front and the river channel in one frame. Zug Island's furnaces are visible across the water in the same shot.
What Delray can double for
Emerson in Gary, Indiana
Emerson sits a few blocks from the working gates of Gary Works. Its blocks carry the same pattern as Delray's, a handful of surviving wood frame houses spaced across mostly vacant lots with an active steel plant at the end of the street. Gary's remaining houses run slightly larger and its grid is wider than Delray's, so a tighter frame around one or two houses holds the match better than a full block wide shot. Try searching vacant lots active steel plant now.
South Chicago in Chicago, Illinois
The wood frame cottages built for the old South Works millworkers still stand spaced across vacant lots through the neighborhood, the same scale and gaps as Delray's own blocks. Lake Michigan sits close behind some of these blocks, so keep water out of frame or dress it as a river channel. Try searching millworker cottages vacant lots now.
Brier Hill in Youngstown, Ohio
Brier Hill emptied out the same way after the mill beside it shut down in 1979, leaving a scattered handful of houses on blocks that are now mostly open ground. Youngstown's hills give these streets more grade than Delray's flat grid, so a level, straight block matches Delray better than a sloped one does. Try searching emptied mill blocks now.
