Packard Plant

Recently, Jason Linkins featured an article by Thomas Morton that ridiculed the standard Decadent Detroit journalist’s tour that always includes a photograph of the closed Packard plant on East Grand Boulevard. The deluxe, VIP version of the standard tourist itinerary is the one followed by Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, the one that includes a few private conversations with "real natives" that leave them experts on the state of the automotive industry.

Stale as it gets, the Packard plant does, in fact, symbolize everything that was once good about the automotive industry and much that’s bad about the city.

The building, designed in 1905 by Alfred Kahn, was the first to use reinforced concrete. His early factories were several floors high, and strong enough to support the weight of vehicle production and assembly. After the perfection of distributed electric systems, Kahn built the first modern glass and concrete, one-story plant for Dodge in Warren in 1937.

He innovated in materials, construction techniques, and design. More important, Kahn didn’t retire after making one contribution or simply cash in on his contacts with commissions for private estates, but continued to experiment with industrial architecture. However desolate, his Packard plant still stands after more than a hundred years, and until recently, it could have been renovated.

Although Packard Motor Car Company, then part of Studebaker, closed in 1956, the final destruction of the building is recent. In 1960, the compound was converted into an industrial park that degenerated into a half-vacant warren of small businesses, while the neighborhood, near an interstate, became increasingly more dangerous. Young people used it for raves and paint ball fights.

In the late 1990's, the state held title to much of the adjoining property from unpaid taxes. In 1997, Detroit’s mayor, Dennis Archer, or his cronies, thought they saw an opportunity to convert the land into an Empowerment Zone with tax breaks, and began foreclosure proceedings for the million plus dollars owed the city in back taxes.

The next year, the state’s Department of Community Health was asked to evaluate the hazards at the 35-acre brown field. It determined the worst problems were asbestos, lead paint, bird droppings, tires and bales of plastic waste, costly to remediate, but not serious.

While the unnamed owners were fighting for title in court, the city evicted the tenants of Motor City Industrial Park, erected a protective fence, and posted guards.

Two years ago, the state supreme court ruled the owners had paid just enough of their taxes to retain ownership. The sitting mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, removed the city’s guards, and vandals moved in with welding torches to strip out steel beams. The fire department is called several times a month, but now limits its efforts to protecting the area, because the buildings have become too dangerous.

The names of the new owners aren’t published, but are known to include Romel Casab, a bottom feeding land speculator, and are suspected to include Dominic Cristini, a convicted drug dealer. When the netherworld moves in, a site is doomed. In the years when Archer was mayor, my hometown was discovering one of its abandoned industrial sites had been systematically used for illegal chemical dumping and qualified as a superfund site.

The stand-off between rivals with different visions for creating personal wealth that negate each other and result in nothing is one enduring city trait the Packard Plant symbolizes. After 50 years, no one has even been able to tear it down as a public health nuisance, not even when Detroit was using urban development funds after the riots to reduce most of the city’s landscape to barren rubble.

However, the magazine story that prompted Morton’s outrage hasn’t been without its benefits. Earlier this month, Senate majority leader Harry Reid used it to justify giving four states special consideration in the evolving health care bill. He said "The cover of Time magazine shows a dilapidated city, dilapidated streets, the debris covering the road and windows knocked out of abandoned buildings. It looks like a ghost town" and then made sure his home state of Nevada was the one that got the Medicaid break.

Notes:
Cruz, John. "Welcome to Mt. Palmer: A look Inside Detroit’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood," posted on his cruzweb.net site.

Guthrie, Doug. "City Loses Site Fight: State Court Denies Detroit's Packard Title Bid," The Detroit News, 2 February 2007.

Linkins, Jason. "Getting The Detroit Story Right," Huffington Post, 29 September 2009.

McGraw, Bill. "Historic Auto Plant Shows Signs of Life," Detroit Free Press, 27 April 2008.

Michigan Department of Community Health. "Health Consultation, Packard Plant, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan," 23 March 1998, posted on United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry website.

Shepardson, David. "Senate's Top Democrat Pushes Bill to Aid Michigan," The Detroit News, 1 October 2009.