A parting glance at Dodge Main, just before the wrecking ball swung
By Daniel Strohl
- Sep 23, 2020
All photos courtesy Historic American Engineering Record, via Library of Congress.
Roughly 40 years ago, Chrysler stepped away from Dodge Main. The sprawling tangle of buildings in Hamtramck, Michigan, that had grown to become one of the world's few fully integrated automobile manufacturing and assembly plants, suddenly became little more than a liability to a company only recently saved from bankruptcy. And as we can see from a set of fortuitously timed photos, the company hardly seemed to look back over its shoulder as it turned off the lights.
So much has been written about Dodge Main that it's easy to get lost in the history of the plant. Though not the first Detroit-area plant that the Dodge brothers worked out of - they had a couple of machine shops in or near downtown Detroit in the first decade of the 20th century while supplying the nascent automotive industry - Dodge Main not only saw the launch of the Dodge automobile, it also kept the tiny community of Hamtramck from being swallowed by adjacent Detroit and remained a mainstay facility for Chrysler for more than half a century.
For a quick recap, though: The brothers built it in 1910, initially to meet the demands of their exclusive customer - Ford - for engines and drivetrains. The 30-acre site they chose in Hamtramck was, at the time, on the outskirts of town but near a significant railroad crossing, and though Albert Kahn designed some of the buildings, the brothers eventually turned to architects Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls to design the rest. With a limited amount of space, the architects built vertically with multistory factory buildings, many of them constructed from steel-reinforced concrete. Once the brothers decided to manufacture their own cars (funded largely by the early investment they made in Ford Motor Company), the former suppliers decided they needed to work toward building every component of an automobile in-house, a goal their company realized by 1925.
Through the Chrysler acquisition and the war years, the plant hummed along as envisioned and the community around it - increasingly made up of Polish immigrants - grew to depend on the plant (by the late Seventies, up to a quarter of Hamtramck's tax revenue came from Dodge Main). By the late Sixties, however, the plant's inefficiencies quickly became apparent. The production and assembly process proved confusing at best, maddening to many outside observers. As Pete Hagenbuch told Allpar:
It was fun to try to follow the line across six floors. This isn't factual, but it’s a for-instance — the line started out on floor two, it went up to four and down to one. It spent a little time on one, went up to six — it was crazy. It was like they put in different parts of the line as things came up. ... a couple of guys in the (Chrysler Institute of Engineering) went down one day and tried to spend the whole day following the line, and they got so tired, that they quit at lunchtime.
The plant could no longer produce every component necessary for the cars that traveled down that labyrinthine assembly line, requiring outside suppliers to be brought into the production process. And, as the Washington Post's Peter Behr pointed out, the energy inefficient multistory buildings suddenly showed enormous operating costs as energy prices skyrocketed during the Seventies.
Its walls of windows let in summer heat and winter cold. The power required to lift sheet metal parts eight floors to the start of the assembly line became too expensive. By last year, the utility costs at Dodge Main had reached $14.6 million, more than twice those at Chrysler's modern, one-story assembly plant at Belvidere, Ill.
Given that Chrysler faced a half-billion-dollar loss in 1979 and that the terms of Chrysler's December 1979 $1.5 billion government bailout necessitated that the company trim $2 billion in costs, it's no surprise Lee Iaccoca et al. decided to shut down Dodge Main right then and there. By then, the company was down to producing the Aspen/Volare twins, due to be replaced by the K-cars anyway. Its time had come.
Over the next couple of years, the Dodge Main site would be the epicenter of a good deal of controversy. At first, Chrysler seemed content to just let the behemoth plant sit empty - knocking down all those reinforced concrete structures would cost too much, let Hamtramck deal with it. A year later, with GM's promise that it would bring a Cadillac plant and all its attendant jobs to the city if the city would just tear down Dodge Main, Hamtramck did just that, but the deal turned sour when GM obtained much of the surrounding Poletown area through eminent domain and put up a factory designed for automated machinery, bringing far fewer jobs than promised.
(Curiously, Chrysler inquired about buying Hamtramck back from GM last year after the latter idled the new plant, but GM now seems intent on building the new electric Hummer there.)
For a brief moment in 1980, though, when the entirety of Dodge Main sat idle and the threat of the wrecking ball loomed, the historians with the Department of the Interior's Historic American Engineering Record documented the vast plant for posterity. They collated drawings and historical photographs from Kahn to Chrysler to the state's archives. They detailed every building that went up and every building that came down on the site. And they walked the empty plant buildings from one end to the other, photographing exactly what Dodge and Chrysler left behind after 70 years on the site.
In all of the photos, it appears as though only the cars coming down the assembly line and the workers assembling them have gone missing. Engineering drawings remain up on the walls and in their filing cabinets. Brushes remain poised in the car wash station, ready for the next complete car to get a shine before leaving. Rows of battery chargers remain ready to charge electric forklifts for the next shift. Carburetors complete with destinations for other Chrysler plants still sit on shelves in an inventory room. With a flicker of the overhead lights, a steel delivery via railcar, and an opening of the gates, one could easily envision the factory coming out of its slumber and another few cars coming down the assembly line.
Yet, in less than a year, it would all come down.
SOURCE: HEMMINGS