This isn't intended to be a sad story. And if you were looking for a handy metaphor for the current problems facing the Detroit Three, you won't find one here. The auto plants depicted here ceased production decades ago, some more than half a century ago, long before the most recent troubles. They were shut down and abandoned in the greatest days of the Motor City, when it was the world's largest producer of automobiles and the keystone of the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen. This is a simple look back, nothing more.
How Detroit became the Motor City is a fact of geography: Situated on a wide, calm river at the dead center of the Great Lakes, the city was perfectly located to gather iron ore from the north, coal from the south, rubber from Akron, and workers from everywhere-including countless immigrants, many from Eastern Europe, who were desperate for work and a better life. Geography and fate met as the Detroit area also happened to become home for many of the auto industry's earliest inventors and dreamers, including Henry Ford, Ransom E. Olds, and Henry and Wilfred Leland. For some reason these pioneers all congregated in Detroit to build their cars. Maybe they followed each other.
The part of town where it really started-just over a hundred years ago-is known as Milwaukee Junction, a tangle of tracks and switches where two major rail lines crossed: the Detroit and Milwaukee and the Chicago, Detroit, and Canada Grand Trunk Junction. Taking advantage of the easy access to nationwide shipping, Ford and Studebaker (then EMF) were among the first to build plants there, on adjacent sites along Piquette Avenue between John R and Baubien streets. Pack-ard, relocating from Warren, Ohio, built its massive plant about one mile east on East Grand Boulevard, while dozens of other manufacturers and suppliers sprang up all around the area, including the huge Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck and smaller automakers such as Hupmobile and Saxon. And with them came some carmakers that maybe you've never heard of, including Detroit Air-Cooled and Regal.
Residential, retail, and commercial development naturally followed, quickly building the neighborhood past the choking point. The auto plants spilled out of Milwaukee Junction and spread across the city. Ford expanded, first into Highland Park a few miles north, then to a manufacturing metropolis on the River Rouge in Dearborn, while Chrysler, Hudson, and Cadillac plants were sprawled out upriver along Jefferson Avenue. Some of the plants were small cities in themselves. The Packard factory was several city blocks wide and more than a mile long, with its own power plant, two schools, and a department store. One now-forgotten carmaker, Liberty, built a replica of Independence Hall as its administration building. Auto manufacturing was the blue-chip growth industry of the early 20th century and Detroit was its Silicon Valley. Between 1910 and 1920, the city's population doubled. Henry Ford introduced the $5 day for production workers in 1914. While much has been written about his motivation, essentially he was forced to do it: The auto factories had literally exhausted the Detroit labor market.
In the heyday of the Detroit plants, hundreds of thousands of workers daily, from all over the city, streamed into the giant factories to hammer out millions of cars per year. The plants ran wide open all three shifts, 24 hours every day, turning midnight into daylight across the central city. If satellites had existed then, Detroit would have been easily visible from Earth's orbit, lighting up the sky. A gray-blue haze hung over the city thick as smoke, the effluent of foundries, paint shops, and the endless stream of cars driving off the assembly lines onto waiting ships and rail cars. Detroit ran like a 1,000-ton drop forge-until the Great Depression arrived. Between 1929 and 1931, annual production fell from nearly 5 million units to less than 2 million. Hard times drove many of the smaller automakers out of business. But somehow the big plants continued to run, if just barely.
...
>>next page