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With its 10-page special section in Sunday’s paper, including videos and historic photos online, the Free Press has focused renewed attention on the Packard plant, in all its gory craziness.
In subsequent commentary this week, many observers have remarked that the plant is often seen as a symbol of Detroit’s decline. I beg to differ. The plant is really a symbol of Detroit itself. It’s Detroit in miniature – or at least in 43 crumbing buildings.
The plant’s history tells the story of the Motor City in the 20th and 21st centuries, from its innovative early years to the racial drama of its middle years to the turbulent latter decades, when, even in ruin, the plant served as the incubator of art and music, a magnet for apocalyptic sight-seeing and a conundrum with no apparent solution.
That description sounds like Detroit to me.
In the beginning, 1903, when many people with ideas headed to Detroit to participate in the newfangled car industry, guys from Ohio with know-how combined with guys from Michigan with old money, and the Packard Plant on E. Grand Boulevard was born.
The car became a winner, the Escalade of its day, a representation of the city’s brains and brawn. Charles Lindbergh and kings and Hollywood stars drove Packards, and Henry Ford’s body was carried in a Packard hearse. The innovation didn’t stop with the 12-cylinder engines and H-shaped gear shifts. Even its ads were legendary. “Ask the man who owns one,” is a slogan that has gone down in advertising history.
The factory itself was avante-garde. Albert Kahn created the world’s first modern industrial facility when he designed Building 10 with reinforced concrete that allowed for more space and light. Visitor came from around the world to tour the cutting-edge Packard plant, like people visit Google and Apple today.
It wasn't all good
That was the ingenious side of Detroit. But the dysfunctional side of Detroit was never far away. During World War II, the plant churned out aircraft engines and employed up to 39,000 workers and became a bellwether for the city’s racial turmoil.
When management promoted black workers to supervisory or even semi-skilled jobs, white workers protested by walking out in so-called “hate strikes.” The racialized wildcats took place for two years, culminating in June 1943, the precise month when a vicious race riot broke out nearby at E. Grand Boulevard and E. Jefferson. The fighting lasted two days, resulting in the deaths of 34 people.
In the postwar years, independent Packard could not compete with the Big Three. Production stopped in 1956. Packard was just one of numerous Detroit factories that closed in that decade, creating an unemployment crisis by 1960 that propelled the city into the economic tailspin from which it never has recovered. Packard had been considered a good place to work, and many of its employees had high seniority, advanced age and little education: 64 percent of workers – who were largely Poles, Italians and African Americans -- involved in a post-shutdown study had only six to eight years of school. It took many of them years to find another job.
After the cars went away, the plant changed hands, and the complex turned into an early form of an industrial mall, with various companies and storage areas. As the years passed, and suburban facilities grew less expensive and more attractive, the plant lost tenants, like Detroit lost residents, and it underwent a variety of transformations.
By the 1990s, things began falling apart and anarchy was loosed upon the plant. Shady operators moved in, and the city found it was impossible to police the complex, which stretches nearly a mile from north to south.
But even as the buildings began to crumble and sprout trees, they began to attract young people, who explored the labyrinth of tunnels and walkways, took pictures, tagged the walls with imaginative graffiti and, most significantly, nurtured the Detroit-born sounds of spare techno music during all-night raves. Windsor’sRichie Hawtin, a.k.a. Plastikman, now a global techno star, set up his turntables and performed at the plant, creating a tribute to the scene titled “Pakard.”
The plant continued to decline in the new century as scrappers tore apart the walls to get at steel girders and copper wire. One day several years ago their blow torches went too far, and a huge enclosed bridge collapsed onto Bellevue Street. It remains there today, a brick-and-mortar metaphor for the city’s inability to maintain its 139-square-miles.
Now, fires rage almost constantly at the plant and are allowed to burn themselves out, a nightmarish image of urban dystopia right out of “Blade Runner.”
What can be done with the Packard plant? Nobody is sure. It would cost up to $20 million to demolish. What can be done with the city? It would be nice to tear down all the abandoned houses. Many of them burn, night after night, but Detroit is almost bankrupt, and city leaders can’t figure out how to fix the finances. Optimists see hope for both the plant and the city nonetheless.
The plant attracts visitors by the carload, among them suburbanites hosting barbeques on roofs and photographers doing fashion shoots.
Detroit itself is filled with tourists from around the world who come to stare at a city in ruins as well as experience the re-invented businesses, restaurants, galleries and parks.
Packard used to be part of an ingenious city plagued by dysfunction. Today, about 110 years after its birth, it’s part of a dysfunctional city pockmarked by ingenuity. It’s the rise and fall of Detroit, in 3.5 million square feet.
