The Motor City

If you had told me three decades ago that there would come a day when I'd voluntarily make my way into Detroit, Michigan and want to go back there when I got home, I'd have said you were crazy. That's not (by the way) the first time I've written something like that in this blog in the last four plus years. For Detroit, that day came earlier this month. It still seems a little crazy.

In 1988, I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, just about 45 minutes west of Detroit. And that city at that time was the last place on Earth that I ever thought I would want to go. I mean Detroit was legitimately scary back then. Murder capital of the USA. Just about all business having fled the city. Abandoned and ruined city blocks deep in the grip of a crack cocaine epidemic.  And if that wasn't enough to keep me away, I'd have to read in the newspaper each Halloween about Devil's Night, a Detroit tradition of setting abandoned houses on fire to see if the fire department could keep up. What kind of hell was this?

Now, I admit in the late 1980s that part of my perception of Michigan's largest city was due to my own bias as a teenager from suburban Connecticut. Heck, I was scared of going to New York back then. In the last 30 years, I've grown up a lot. So, as it turns out, has Detroit. Sure there has been a bankruptcy (Detroit's, not mine) and a 28 year jail term for a mayor that the citizens of Detroit elected and the tax base has a long way to go to allow the city to recover more, but it's no longer the scariest place in the United States, if it ever was outside my own head. I thought it might be time to go back.

Since I left Michigan in 1990, I've accumulated a pretty long list of sights I want to see in and around Detroit. This trip wasn't going to get at all that given the couple of days I was in town, so I focused on a part of Detroit's history that had its population in 1950 at more than 1.8 million people (it's less than 750,000 today): the automobile industry, the thing that made Detroit the Motor City. 


1949 Ford Coupe on display at the Ford Rouge Factory Tour.

Before we start jumping to conclusions about cars and Detroit, the automobile was not invented in the United States. Far from it. There were folks in Europe experimenting with steam powered vehicles to drive on roads as early as the eighteen-teens. When mankind started experimenting with gasoline fueled internal combustion engines as a practical solution to personal transportation, Europe continued to be in the lead. You might recognize some of the names like Diesel, Benz, Maybach, Renault and Daimler who were tinkering with the first wave of cars over in Germany and France.

When Americans starting building and selling cars towards the end of the nineteenth century, the first success was not in Michigan but in Springfield, Massachusetts. Charles and Frank Duryea built and road-tested the first automobile built in the United States in that city in 1893. But when we talk about the launch of the production automobile that would make the first cars available to a significant number of Americans, we have to look to Detroit.

How much car making was there going on in and around Detroit in the early days of the automobile industry? There were an estimated just shy of 100 automakers in Michigan in the year 1907. 100!!! Granted some were small shops that might have produced a single car and most of the names of these folks have disappeared into history but there were for sure some heavy hitters in Michigan in those early days who are recognizable today. Maybe some name-dropping is in order?

Some good stuff beyond these doors...

Ransom Olds made his first car in Lansing, Michigan in 1897. He moved his plant to Detroit in 1899 where the company cranked out hundreds of Oldsmobile Curved Dash cars. Two years after Olds built his first car, David Buick made his own in Detroit; six years later they would turn out 750, an impressive number for the time. About a decade later, Buick was out of the game but cars were still being produced by the company bearing his name but then owned by William Durant. In 1908, Durant founded General Motors with Buick as the flagship brand.

And then of course there was Henry Ford. Ford founded the Detroit Automobile Company the same year Olds arrived in Detroit. Two years later he moved on and formed the Henry Ford Company. A year later, he'd left that behind to his partners the Dodge Brothers who renamed the company the Cadillac Automobile Company. Ford reappeared with the Ford Motor Company which survives to this day. Enough familiar names in there for you? Good!

Assembling a list of automobile-related sites to visit in and around Detroit requires a lot of editing. There are that many to see if you really wanted to. We narrowed our list down to four: The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn; the giant Uniroyal Tire in Allen Park; the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant at the corner of Piquette and Beaubien in Detroit; and the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Frescoes at the Detroit Institute of the Arts downtown. We thought this list would form a good overview and for sure all four are easily visited in a single day. The jewel of this bunch by far is the Piquette Avenue Plant. I really want to focus on that site and ignore most of the rest.

The first cars built by Henry Ford as the Ford Motor Company, including the Model A, were assembled in a rented property in Detroit. When Ford finally had enough money to buy his own factory, he built the Piquette Avenue Plant, a brick warehouse with wooden interior columns, floors and roof. It became the first serious manufacturing plant for Ford and also saw him create some of his most notable early cars, including the famous Model T.

What's so famous (or great) about the Model T? Well, it was only the car that changed everything about the car industry. It was a 22 horsepower, four cylinder, 40 mile-an-hour-maximum wonder that was the first affordable car that was bought by pretty much everyone. And I do mean pretty much everyone. It was so popular that in 1918 half of all the cars on the roads in the United States were Model Ts. There were over 15 million of these things built and sold for customers all over the country. It was the best selling car of all time almost as soon as it started selling and it didn't give up that title until 1972, when it was passed by the Volkswagen Beetle.

Ford's company operated out of the Piquette Avenue Plant from 1904 until 1910. He produced a total of eight different models (the "alphabet" Models B, C, F, K, N, R, S and T) in the factory with a total of 40,000 units made. When Ford moved out of the building in 1910, Studebaker moved in until 1933 to use it to continue to crank out automobiles, followed by 3M who used it for something else. The current owner, a private non-profit who runs the museum in the space, purchased the building in 2000 and has been fixing it up ever since. And yes, they are still in process. While the building's watertight now so the cars inside aren't at risk from water damage, most of the spaces are still unheated. That means on a winter's day in Detroit, it might be a tad chilly inside. I could feel my toes getting cold halfway through the 90 minute tour and our guide, Tom, kept his gloves on for the entire duration. Tom knows better than me.

Model T. Model T. Model T. Well...you get the point.

The tour of the Piquette Avenue Plant begins on the second floor and ends on the third (and top) floor. You don't have to take a tour; you can just walk around on your own if you want. But for the full history lesson, especially if you are a casual admirer of vintage cars like me and not a full blown Ford enthusiast, I'd highly recommend tagging along with a guide. The tour begins and ends, appropriately enough, with the Model T. After checking out the restored office of Henry Ford himself and the across the way office of Edward "Spider" Huff, the talk for tourists begins gathered around a fully intact and gorgeously original red Model T.  As a quick aside, Huff was sort of Ford's chief innovation officer; he's credited with inventing, among other things, the hand crank you see on all sorts of old cars in movies that allowed Ford's cars to start without a battery if necessary, provided you could crank the wheel at the front of the engine hard enough.

If you make it through the whole place, you'll end up at the north end of the factory on the top floor outside a recreated workshop where the Model T was developed. You remember I mentioned earlier that there were a good number of startup car companies in the first decades of the 20th century around Detroit? Well, things were so competitive that defection to other companies (and theft of trade secrets along with them) was so frequent that Ford decided he'd develop the Model T in secret, allowing just seven employees to know what he was up to on the third floor of the building.

In between the first car and the secret workshop, you'll see plenty of Model Ts. There are 17 of them in the last two third floor rooms of the museum alone and those are not the only ones in the place. There are plenty more on the second floor, including one you can touch (don't you always want to touch stuff in museums?) and climb into. And the more you see, the more you will learn, especially if you get a guide as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as Tom.

And let me say here also the Model T you can climb into was not meant to be climbed into by 200 (OK...maybe 210) pound men; the whole car dipped noticeably when I stepped onto the runner at the side of the car.

Model T? Or snowmobile?

Since I wrote down some of what I learned, let me share a bit.

The first Model T had a retail price of $800 (that's about $24,000 today) but that didn't include the roof, windshield, headlights or a speedometer; all those things were extras. Sound crazy? It wasn't so much, necessarily. Most people buying these things back then had no desire to take them out in the rain or at night, so things like roofs and headlights (which had to be manually lit with a match!!) weren't necessarily essential. And speedometers? Well, from the video that we watched at the beginning of the tour (and available on Youtube), it didn't seem to me that most roads were in good enough shape in 1908 to go very fast at all. Who needs a speedometer when you are traveling everywhere in six inches of mud?

If you are still hung up on buying a car without a roof, windshield, headlights and speedometer, consider this: you could actually get the Model T with less than that and add your own accessories, wheels or entire body. The museum has a few of these, including a Model T re-cast as a delivery van and one retrofitted to be one of the world's snowmobiles. Ford realized there was a demand for the Model T chassis without the body which was effectively just a horse drawn carriage on a motor so he branched out and let people buy just the stuff that made the car go and left it up to them to top it off with what they wanted.

We often think of early cars as being black in color and indeed there's a quote something to the effect of "you can get the Model T in whatever color you want as long as it's black" that's attributed to Henry Ford. I'm paraphrasing not because I'm too lazy to look it up on the internet but because nobody knows if Ford actually uttered those words. But the first Model Ts were not black. They were only produced mostly in black once the assembly line was adopted by Ford in his later Highland Park plant, the one after the Piquette Avenue Plant. At Piquette, the first 6,000 were produced in red, just like the first one you gather around in the museum. After that, he made 6,000 in green. And the early ones came with white tires, because carbon (which adds durability to rubber and makes it black) hadn't been added to that product yet.

The Model B at the Piquette Avenue Plant. Not too many of these around.

Now, if you went to the Piquette Avenue Plant in November of last year, you'd see most of the Model Ts in the place today as well as some other Ford cars and some by Studebaker and some other manufacturers you've likely never heard of. But go today, and you'll see every model of Ford produced in the Plant and there are pristine examples of each model to see and examine.

The reason why there is more to see now than a couple of months ago? Larry Porter.

Larry Porter was a Ford dealer who in his spare time collected early Fords. He was so committed to that task that he made it his mission to buy one of each of model of Ford car, up to a certain point. I'm not sure when he stopped but it's a pretty good bet he doesn't have every model of Escort ever produced. He at least got beyond 1910 when Ford moved out of the Piquette Avenue building which is sort of the point here.

Upon his death, a trust was formed which included Porter's car collection. With the Piquette Avenue Plant building finally fixed up to the point that the trust would allow his early model cars to be displayed in the building, some of them are now on view for the world to see in the museum. There are cars of varying levels of condition in the building. Porter's are all absolutely gorgeous. They are a real treat to see. I also think there's something beautiful about the symbolism of machines being returned to their place of manufacture over 100 years after they were created.

How special is this collection? There are some really rare vehicles in it. Porter owned one of 40 Model F cars and one of just 28 known Model K cars still around. 68 total known remaining of these two models and this guy had one of each. The Model K is especially interesting because that car was built as a super high end luxury vehicle based on the demands of Ford's stockholders. No crappy $800 Model Ts for those folks. They wanted to spend some real cash on their cars so Ford cranked out the six cylinder, 60 mph maximum K, which retailed for $2,500; that's $75,000 in today's dollars!! Check out the trim and the horns and lights on the K; they are all works of art on what is in total a work of art.

The Model K at the Piquette Avenue Plant. Not too many of these around either.

Detail view of the Model K. The horn is literally a miniature brass instrument.

One of 40 or 28 not special enough for you? Porter also owned a Model B. There are just six of these known in existence today and this is the only place on Earth accessible to the public to see one. The Porter collection instantly elevated this museum from a really cool place for Ford nuts to a world class museum. The museum had planned to announce the acquisition in April but word obviously leaked out because one of the guys on our tour came specifically to see them. Now the dozen or so people reading this blog know too. I am in no way a cars guy (I think I mentioned that before on this blog) but I appreciated the quality of these cars as works of art. They are nothing short of spectacular and the details are certainly worth spending some time poring over. Just dress warmly in winter, please. And keep in mind the commitment here is (right now) just for five years.

Eventually Ford's operation got too big for Piquette Avenue. He needed a new factory that would allow him to copy Ransom Olds' idea of making vehicles on an assembly line. So he moved his Model T manufacturing business out to Highland Park three miles or so north (Highland Park is a city entirely within the footprint of Detroit) and left behind the history that he'd created in that location. Now, you can do what I did and go back there and see (thanks to Larry Porter) the entire legacy that he and his third car company created from 1904 to 1910. Those were some pretty cool years.

The assembly line thing really worked by the way. Once he got that cranked up, his workers (who were paid an astronomical $5 per day) could put together a Model T from start to finish in 93 minutes.

The Model T. With steering wheel on the left.

A couple of final notes. Check out the pictures above of the Models B and K. Each one has the steering wheel on the right side of the car. It was located there because the biggest danger a car faced on most roads back in the first decade of the 20th century was running into a ditch at the side of the road. So they put the driver on that side to make sure you stood the best chance of staying out of the ditch. The Model T's steering wheel is on the left, which of course is where our steering wheel is today. Ford wasn't the first one to do this but the Model T was the first car where the wheel on the left stuck. So we owe which side of the car we drive on today to the Model T whether we know it or not.

Finally, I mentioned our Motor City itinerary included four stops. You can add many many more sites to your own list. Indeed there's a list of about 20 or so nearby car-related locations on a list inside the Piquette Plant. For my part, I'd skip the Henry Ford Museum and the associated Rouge Factory Tour and just spend as much time as possible at the Piquette Avenue Plant. We got way more out of this place than we could have possibly hoped. Spend a lot of time checking out the details on these cars and take lots of pictures.

I do also think it's worth stopping by the Detroit Institute of the Arts to check out the Rivera Court, which holds a series of murals painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera right in the space between 1932 and 1933. The murals are about industry in general in Michigan but the main images that take up most of the space are specifically about Henry Ford's operations. It's interesting to see what a social commentary these works of art are after spending a few hours ogling some old Fords. The top photograph in this post shows part of the assembly of a Ford V-8 model car and is just a sample of what you can see. Go find the rest for yourself. But don't skip the Piquette Avenue Plant to do so.

There's still a ton I want to do and see in Detroit. Gotta go back here sometime soon. And it doesn't sound that crazy anymore.