For a time, it was the center of the industrial world, the site of a great experiment in manufacturing might. Forever the birthplace of mass production and the home of the pay window that doled out a ground-breaking $5 daily wage, here the Industrial Revolution earned its revolutionary status.
Here, at Woodward Avenue and Manchester Street in Highland Park, Henry Ford built a palace for making cars. The Albert Kahn-designed structure sits unnoticed, barely alive, decaying and unappreciated, a monument to the genius of Ford and the swiftness of the progress he wrought. A national historic landmark, it is where every one of more than 16 million Model T’s was built and where Ford gathered momentum to make history.
The Highland Park plant, which mythology could not make larger, is now 2 million square feet of storage facility, leased by the Ford Motor Co. to store what it can no longer use or can’t yet find a home for: robots, marble, wooden casts of car models, cathode tubes, generators, paint tanks, carpet, transformers, axles.
A rusted propeller and a dilapidated lifeboat from the oil tanker Henry Ford are in the yard. A tree grows from the railroad tracks inside, nourished by a sixth-floor skylight. Another tree grows out from the side of one building, its tender roots undermining the 85-year-old mortar and brick.
Saved from a scheduled razing at least once, the buildings are owned by the Woodward-Manchester Corp. A $750,000 renovation, with work on the roof, windows and pipes, is nearly complete. Eighty-two percent of the available space is leased by Ford, which wiped the plant from its assets in 1981 because “Henry Ford II said sell the damn thing.”
Roger Mullin, site manager, adds that the company has been leasing it since. More than 100 people report to work here daily; 21 are Ford employees. Some are wheelwrights and riggers, some are security. They are left to watch paint peel in thick green swatches from heavy steel and concrete pillars and hang like so many millions of icicles from the girders near the high roof.
The public does not get in, though a lot of people still drive by and wonder. Once, this place drew more than 100,000 visitors a year. That was in the 1920s, when, every 12 hours, 240 railroad cars loaded with raw material entered and 260 railcars of finished parts left.
And when Ford set a record by producing a million vehicles one year–then produced twice that the next.
Around 1910, Ford first set up shop here, six miles out in the country. He had built his first car at 58 Bagley and put out a few cars at his small Piquette Street plant, though none of them were Model T’s. Those would be built in Highland Park, where 4,110 employees put together 25,000 cars that first year.
Production in the cavernous, still-standing buildings started east and traveled west. The plant was dubbed “The Crystal Palace” because of the good lighting and good ventilation provided by almost a half-million square feet of windows. Men built parts, assembled them and shipped the product, from under one roof.
Mass production, not the assembly line, was created here, though it can be argued that Ford perfected the line here, moving a chassis past stationary workersso the 12 1/2-hour job of building one chassis took 1 hour, 33 minutes.
The remnants of the work stations are gone, except for the signs in the parts depot with names of the American cities to which orders would be sent.
There’s no map to the forging department, nor the artificial leather shop, the rubber manufacture depot, the roller bearing shop, the tool shop, the radiator department, the blacksmith shop, the glasshouse, the drafters, the textile factory, the fire department or the English School for Immigrant Workers, where 14,000 eventually enrolled.
The school aside, the place was a giant machine shop, capable, for example, of building 9,000 radiators a day. That’s more radiators than were daily produced at the time by all other radiator manufacturers combined.
The power plant fronted Woodward, so Detroiters on streetcars could admire the seven gleaming gas-steam generators, showcased in a spotless glass room, tiled in white. (You can see one of the generators at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. You can even stand on it.)
In the plant, beyond the starkness of the powerhouse and near the grinding machines, was a hospital, with operating room, dentists and ophthalmologists. The administration building included an auditorium, a photo gallery, a post office, a telegraph and telephone exchange and a moving picture studio.
In December 1919, good business and plenty of paternalism led Ford to put in a commissary across from the pay office so employees could buy their groceries, meat, shoes and clothing without leaving the building. It was wildly successful. In 1923, employees (and those who pretended to be) bought 80,000 pairs of shoes from the company store.
Nearby stood the factory apprentice school for adults, the boys’ school for orphans, and the TB sanitarium, set up by Ford as an outdoor, fresh air manufacturing facility for those sick but capable of working.
It is quiet now but even in its busiest days, the only sounds were mechanical ones. Men were forbidden to whistle, sing or talk. They could not sit down; they couldn’t even lean. They had 15 minutes for lunch and while the facility had one of the earliest examples of central heating, the welding machines made it unbearably hot in summer. The overhead belting cut off much of the light that blesses the interior today.
Ford Bryan, 83, and a very distant relative of Ford, says the inventor must have had a lot of regard for the place, because the Highland Park plant produced more cars in 1923 and 1924 than Ford would manage again until 1956. And that, Bryan says, is how Ford measured his sentiment.
Bryan’s father worked at Highland Park. The best men Ford had worked here and helped create the myth of Henry Ford. Ford, for example, didn’t perfect the moving assembly line–his men did. But he let them proceed with his money and his product because, besides being a good mechanic, the one thing Ford could do was recognize talent, says Ford.
But Ford took most of the credit. Every patent issued from here bore his name, regardless of its origin.
In 1924, the Prince of Wales toured the plant, watching 61,759 men build cars in a virtually self-contained manufacturing city.
The prince did not know it, but the heyday for the plant was over. Employment peaked the year before at 63,168. The center of the Ford universe since 1910, the plant was losing its luster. Ford realized he needed water for power to continue crafting his empire. So in 1915–five years after Highland Park opened–he began buying land in far-off Dearborn, on the Rouge River.
In 1927, Ford moved his last assembly line out of Highland Park to the Rouge plant. By 1933, only 524 hourly workers were at Highland Park.
Some tractors would be built here in later years. And as a parts distribution site, the plant would stay alive until 1974.
Today, the temperature is never allowed to drop below 55 degrees in these caverns. No rats infest the buildings because there’s nothing to eat anymore. The old fire doors and the original fire alarms survive.
So, too, 300,000 Model T’s.
Maybe that is monument enough.
BRICKS, NAILS, ASSEMBLY LINE TALES
What the Ford Motor Co. plant at Woodward Avenue and Manchester Street in Highland Park, Mich., was made of . . .
– 12,124 tons of structural steel, 10 million bricks and 172,000 barrels of Portland cement. The plant required 471,185 square feet of glass.
– The plant covered 56 acres, with 47.5 acres of floor space under cover.
– The power plant, with its seven engines, required 40 tons of coal per hour, along with 2.2 million cubic feet of gas daily–enough fuel to daily power a city of 100,000 people.
– The 10-acre machine shop had 5,500 machines, including 1,000 drill presses, 700 turning lathes, 300 punch presses (some weighing 50 tons each).
What the plant made and who made it . . .
– 300,000 cars in fiscal 1915.
– 18,028 hourly employees, representing 49 nationalities.
– As of Jan. 14, 1914, workers were paid $5 a day. Their previous wage: at most, $2.34 a day.
– The yearly output of 300,000 cars required 125,500 tons of steel, 1.7 million square feet of plate glass; 15 million square feet of upholstery; and 34.6 million square feet of rubber for Model T tops.
– If they ran in a line spaced within hailing distance of one another (that’s 430 feet), the number of cars the plant produced in a single year would have encircled the globe.
