Ode to the Packard Plant

And to what makes us who we are

Look deep into darkness, and shapeless mounds may appear. These indiscernible forms linger in our subconscious, the last things we apprehend before the light fully evaporates. The old Packard Motor Company factory has been this kind of harbor for Detroit.

With Packard’s demolition finally fully underway, I say goodbye to this lifelong companion. This massive, century-old structure’s persistence over six decades of emptiness always projected a certain resilience and quiet confidence. The night claimed the day, then passed the baton back, and there Packard stood, unmoved by a world disintegrating around it. It could not be burned down, toppled, destroyed by the elements, or otherwise obliterated. Packard’s square-jawed, broad-shouldered figure stood behind the lots of neighboring worker homes, like mountains inspiring the west. Capitalism - at least, America’s version - has not been as kind, using Detroit up until better/cheaper resources could be found, then leaving us in its wreckage.

Variety of structures in the Packard Motor Company Complex, E. Grand Blvd in Detroit. December 15, 2014. Source: Detroit: Decline and fall of the Motor City | Engineering and Technology Magazine (theiet.org)

Identity: Who You Are

“Go through the gate, sir.” The Packard gate was an entrance to the future. The guy who passed through it became part of a ballet of metal, clay and water - the largest, most intricate orchestration he had ever known, at least before the great wars changed everything. The act of entering itself can spark a person, as proved by the hundreds of thousands who uprooted their lives hundreds of miles away to enter Packard, Ford, Briggs, Hudson Motors, Studebaker or Continental gates in Detroit. Seeking the dignity of decent work, Detroit offered them salvation.

I’ve always understood this fact just from the sight of the Packard factory. It was the Grand Teton or Niagara Falls or other natural wonder to which people were inevitably drawn, awestruck. I’ve been so proud that my hometown was this beacon to so many.

People will work hard to support new ideas, and Packard was at its root just that: a state-of-the-art facility for creating luxury cars. Both of these things were new ideas, as well as the notion of these giant factories that people can create greater prosperity together. That this prosperity could be “mine” is where individual interest and collective good intersected. In 1903 when the plant was built, desire for home was the sweat on each worker’s brow, the thing they saw in common with the guy next to them. For whatever the company was truly selling, the workers were buying a sense of belonging. They lived side by side in the foothills of this great mountain.

In an early memory, I glimpse a hospital corridor from my mother’s knee. An accident took me to the emergency room, and my relief after leaving burned that exit walk holding her hand into my memory. The shards of abandoned neighborhoods are much to a city what this fragment is to me: a thread in an intricate tapestry; a feeling in a long chain of emotion. My commute used to take me past the complex; it was part of the south wall of the interstate; my friend’s father first worked as an engineer there - Packard’s identity was part of my identity.

There is a memory, then there is the connective tissue that forms around a memory. The Packard complex supported generations of Detroiters, so it became a shroud around their lives. It held a sizable portion of Detroit’s “grand” E. Grand Boulevard, so it became a warp thread in the old eastside’s loom. Without it, the tapestry unravels.

• PACKARD FACTS:

• 3.5M sq ft in 40-acre campus along East Grand Boulevard

• Albert Kahn-designed; 1st reinforced concrete structure was most modern of its time

• 1903 to 1958 produced luxury Packards, then Studebakers

• Then and Now photo story (Source: Detroit Free Press)

Duality: Who Else You Are

Can you walk in a dark room if you don’t remember the objects there? Though you cannot visually see the objects, your imagination locates them. Detroiters exist in spaces made for objects that no longer exist, yet those objects mean something to us. We continue to feel beauty and understand importance though they are no longer embodied in our surroundings. Packard was our pride and our shame: such an impressive size relative to its surroundings; such a disastrous loss, left to rot with us. No one cared about the price we paid for changing the world.

Memory doesn’t always supply clarity, even where things are written in stone. I know a guy who says he only remembers good times, because that’s what he wants his story to be. He chooses to forget things that make him feel bad, so he sees the past differently than people actually present there with him. Memory can be a process of overriding actual facts - of isolation.

People romanticize “the old days” in the city of the 1940s and 1950s, or the days where America was “great.” These were the days of racial discrimination, no wheelchair access, heavy pollution and lead paint, death on the job. Packard housed all of that under its roof. That’s not to say that specific experiences might not have been better then, or that no person had a better time of the past than they have of the present. It’s just to recognize that a memory can be romantic in one context, and poignant or painful in another. Memory banks can hold conflicting detail; one group can celebrate what another experienced as a disaster. That is the totality of life and doesn’t affect our love.

These defunct factories are trophies for Detroit’s great triumph putting America on the world map, and open scars of our collective losses - including the loss of a collective itself. With the traditional economic purpose of the American city all but vanished, the loss of manufacturing means millions lack a path for making a living. Pittsburgh has no steel, Buffalo grain silos are hulking ghosts, Detroit auto factories are gone even from suburbs for which they left. San Francisco is losing its tech jobs. Packard Motors has been gone since 1958, but the building has stood.

How is it that shadows slice their way through our conscience as they do? At 3am, that shard of light cut by the window shade picks at my emotional scars. I gingerly step through the maze of factory buildings that occupy the back of my mind. We remember through cities, if not through our elders, how the nation once promised opportunity, upward mobility and longer lives. Names were written in stone above doorways by people who saw a long future. Buildings hold the city’s identity as a place where every person can make their own way.

Connection: Finding “Anchorage”

The wildflowers scatter across the fallow landscape now in Packard’s foreground. Soon they will saunter across the vacated footprint, a gentle and forgiving grave blanket to obscure its headstone.

There’s much of my life that is worth forgetting. What is dark has lost light. Packard carried much of Detroit’s grief over its devastation by shedding light on the city’s past. The productive peak of the pastiche of structures making up the complex was a full expression of Detroit the economic engine; the resilience of that complex expressed the resilience of memory. Where its emptiness was like an amputated limb, or like another of the missing fathers whose numbers grew so much in this period after it vanished, its structural fortitude was a comfort. I too can soldier on through adversity.

In the same way that our memories connect us to our own past, buildings connect us for better or worse to choices made before us. This is what the first great American writer Washington Irving called “anchorage”:

In travelling by land there is a continuity of scene and a connected succession of persons and incidents, that carry on the story of life, and lessen the effect of absence and separation. We drag, it is true, “a lengthening chain,” at each remove of our pilgrimage; but the chain is unbroken: we can trace it back link by link; and we feel that the last still grapples us to home. But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. (Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, collection published from 1819-1820)

Is the country’s voyage from its past pulling it apart? Few grasp why Detroit lost everything, incomprehensibly blaming those most injured by the losses. With every demolition does the link in the chain of healthy community life break? Irving said this voyage from what anchors us was “a gulf subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable and return precarious.”

We Detroiters have kept a medieval vigil at the bedside of the automotive age, of the employer-labor compact and neighborhood community, but this patient has expired. Packard’s remains were repeatedly burned as if in effigy to the inherent exploitation of that age. Then its desecration was blamed on people least responsible for it. As Packard is erased, Detroit needs to grieve its loss of self; I do.

“Rest well, Packard.” Another Detroit neighborhood becomes shapeless mounds to passersby and to outsiders groping in the dark to find meaning. May the loss of the Packard plant clear space for new visions of a different and more sustainable future.