This past summer Martha Reeves, then on the Detroit city council, showed her ignorance of her constituency when she complained that Jay Leno shouldn’t be putting on a benefit performance for Detroit auto workers in Auburn Hills. Everyone knows the city and the automotive industry aren’t the same. They just happen to share the same name.
In the early days, manufacturing was crowded along the Detroit River and the rail tracks that paralleled it near the narrows where traffic could cross into Canada. But, Henry Ford, a farm boy from Greenfield Township, never worked in the city’s industrial core. His first plant was on Mack Avenue, his second on Piquette, and his third in Highland Park, just beyond the city.
Ford soon began buying farm land to the west of Detroit, where he built his estate and his biggest factory complex on the River Rouge. For a while his son, Edsel, lived in Indian Village, but by 1921 he’d moved northeast of the city to Lake Saint Claire in Macomb County.
The Dodge brothers, Horace and John, came from western Michigan. They began building engines for Ford at a plant in Hamtramack, before they left to form their own company. When they died in 1920, the company was taken over by New York investors, who later reorganized it as Chrysler. Until 1992, the company headquarters was in Highland Park.
To this day, neither Highland Park nor Hamtramack is politically part of Detroit, even though both have long been surrounded by the city.
General Motors was never even close to Detroit. William Durant was a successful carriage builder in Flint, who took over management of David Buick’s company. When he had trouble with General Motors’ bankers, he organized Chevrolet in the same city. Michael Moore is absolutely correct to use Flint, not Detroit, as the symbol for the decline of GM.
Despite the centrifugal movement of the major automotive companies away from Detroit, the city was long the center for small companies and suppliers. Starting near the river, Richard Wright says the Commercial Company built cars on Franklin, while Hudson Motor, Hupmobile and Ransome Olds all began on Jefferson.
Reliance Automobile Company was on East Fort Street and Packard on East Grand Boulevard at Mount Eliot. Lozier was near Ford on Mack Avenue. The Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Company and Wayne Automobile Company were both on Piquette.
In the other direction, along Michigan Avenue and the New York Central tracks that go west to Chicago, the Rickenbacker Motor Company was on Michigan while both C. H. Blomstrom Motor Car Company and Cadillac Assembly were at Michigan and Clark Street.
As the automotive industry spread away from the city, it became a social network of designers and engineers, customers and suppliers who loved the mechanics of cars and the manufacturing process. After World War II, Ford middle managers may have moved to Dearborn Heights while GM executives may have gravitated toward Bloomfield Hills and engineers followed the Tech Center to Warren, north of Detroit in Macomb County, but they all were aware of one another.
That’s why today, when dealers can’t sell cars, it’s not just the city of Detroit that’s suffering, but every node in the network. The last large employer in my hometown, a hundred miles away, made parts for Visteon until the troubled Ford supplier canceled the contract and moved production to Mexico in 2002. The last small employer in Cameron made automotive fasteners. The process was fully automated, but it still was forced to move its operations to China a few years back to keep its contracts.
For lack of something better, it’s the cultural web of individuals, institutions and communities that people mean when they use Detroit as the label for the automotive industry, not the 138.8 square miles of urban real estate then represented by Reeves.
Notes: Reeves was not re-elected in August, partly because of this remark.
Wright, Richard A. "Once Teeming with Auto Plants, Detroit Now Home to Only a Few Nameplates," The Detroit News, 16 January 2000.
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