An Icon of Detroit's Ruin, Packard Plant Bridge Collapses, Fades Into History

If you drive, or walk, down Woodward Ave. from Detroit’s New Center area to downtown, you can’t help but notice the economic development along that corridor. Detroit has bottomed out. Areas formerly bereft of businesses and housing have been filled in, and hopefully that development will start spreading east and west of Woodward, Detroit’s version of Main Street. Over on the east side of town, one of America’s most blighted urban areas, there is another hopeful sign — a symbol of the city and domestic automobile industry’s decline has literally come crashing down.

The Packard plant bridge over East Grand Boulevard, target of lazy photojournalists for years, collapsed last week, perhaps due to extreme temperature swings the midwest has seen recently.

Detroit’s massive, sprawling, and mostly abandoned Packard plant, where for decades some of the world’s most prestigious luxury cars were made, has long been a symbol of the Motor City’s decline. It has made for dramatic photography for slothful news editors looking to illustrate the deterioration of both one of America’s great cities and one of its primary industries. It was recently used as the backdrop for the opening episode of the third season of Amazon’s Clarkson/Hammond/May vehicle, The Grand Tour.

However, the Packard factory really has nothing at all to do with how the Big Three managed to screw the pooch in the Malaise Era, ultimately giving up big fractions of market share to Japanese, German, and now Korean automakers over the past 40 years.

At the time of its construction in the early 20th century, the Packard plant was a modern marvel. The product of the genius of architect Albert Kahn and his engineer brother Julius (who developed reinforced concrete floors), the factory was obsolete by 1956, when it produced its last car and a struggling, about-to-die Packard moved production to a smaller, more efficient facility. It should be noted that Packard failed at a time when the Big Three were enjoying record sales and big profits. Chevy and Ford each sold over a million full-size cars in 1957. The problems particular to Packard’s demise had little or nothing to do with the structural problems of the domestic auto industry 60 years later.

Despite the fact it stopped produced cars long before most of you were born, the massive and sprawling factory that produced Packard automobiles erroneously became a symbol of the ills of the domestic auto industry that came to a head in 2007-2009, culminating in the bankruptcies and federal bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.

If there is one image of the Packard plant that is genuinely iconic, a synedoche, a symbol that stands for the whole, it was the bridge that spanned East Grand Boulevard that was actually part of the Packard assembly line. As the facility was developed into the 1930s, buildings were added in an almost haphazard manner, and the bridge was used to transport partially assembled cars from one department to another.

In 2015, Arte Express, the company owned by Peruvian developer Fernando Palazuelo that has started redeveloping the site, starting with Packard’s administration building adjacent to the bridge, wrapped the graffiti covered bridge in a theatrical scrim printed with an image of how the bridge looked in the factory’s heyday.

They said at the time they would begin work on the bridge, but recent press reports say the fact that Arte Express only owns the northern half of the bridge hindered that work. The city of Detroit owns the southern half of the bridge and the adjacent building on the south side of East Grand Blvd. The city government’s involvement in the site has been a point of contention with owners and potential developers over the decades.

There is no word from Arte Express as to whether they plan on rebuilding the iconic structure. The city has hired a private demolition company to remove the wrecked span and clear the debris from the street. East Grand Boulevard will be closed while that takes place.

[Images: http://www.instagram.com/camera_jesus, historicdetroit.org/Twitter, Ronnie Schreiber, Amazon]