The Packard Automotive Plant means many things to gearheads, but let’s take something into consideration: since the 1990s, that building has basically been the symbol of the downfall of Detroit as Motor City, USA, with the bridge that spans over Grand Boulevard the pièce de résistance for photographers, historians, or anyone who wanted to remember the brighter tones of Detroit, the ones that saw beautiful Packard automobiles, war-effort Rolls-Royce Merlin engines being cranked out as fast as the workers could manage, and skilled workers earning the check that would put food on the table and the roof over their families’ head. Now? Well, between the gradual abandonment of the building, the raves and paintball wars that took place, the graffiti artists, the delinquents, and the opportunists that stripped the building nearly bare, the once-proud plant is now more like a vision of a dystopian future, where trees reclaim the building, where fading layers of graffiti cover what used to be board rooms, where you can actively sense the decay. There’s a sadness to the plant that is palpable.
And, unfortunately, there’s now a decay that can’t be ignored. The bridge that spanned over the boulevard collapsed yesterday, crashing down onto Grand Boulevard. You know the image…the word PACKARD above a clock that spanned across the roadway. Even into the 1980s, the building was maintained and kept up as various tenants utilized the space, but in the last thirty yearswhat was once a grand building, a technological achievement, had become a ruin, run down and all but abandoned. Left to the elements and to time, the collapse of the bridge was all but an eventuality. There has always been talk about resurrecting the Packard building. But maybe, with the auto maker sixty-odd years gone and the building already halfway gone, just maybe it’s time to stop looking at the past and to start looking at the future of what the 40 acres of land the plant sits on can be.
Sad, sad, sad…Detroit is such a monumental piece of American history
Detroit is coming back. Six years ago I was there, I couldn’t believe how far it had fallen. Last year I spent a few days there…some of the neighborhoods are coming back. Restaurants, galleries, the riverfront, all were busy. The biggest farmers market I’ve ever been to. Walked 20 blocks down Gratiot at midnight without worry. It likely won’t be old Detroit again, but it appears to be evolving.
We have the same thing over here in the U.K for the past 30 or so years the coal
industry has been F??ked and the old pit towns just devastated no work and no hope in sight.
some of the towns are coming back to life ,but it has took far too long.
It is really sad to see the way \”THEY have let our great nations down.
IS it down to just money or are the governments not bothering about the man in the street?