Urban Ruins: Packard Assembly Plant

SkedAddled · Expire: 2021-08-12

This was my first use of the new Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens.
The IS certainly improves my handheld shots! Shocked

Location is the Packard Automobile Company's former main assembly plant.
Encompassing a footprint of 10 city blocks long and 2 city blocks wide,
the site is absolutely gargantuan. The footprint alone amounts to around
3.5 million square feet, not including the additional stories of the buildings,
which are mostly four to seven stories tall.

Words or pictures cannot accurately convey the enormity of this site.
We spent 5 hours touring it, almost constantly on the move, and I would
be very surprised if we covered as much as 1/16th of the place. Exclamation

Make no mistake: This IS Detroit, in spite of what you may see in the
travel brochures. While the clustered, modern downtown area is rife with
clean & modern office buildings and lovingly preserved older structures,
just a few blocks away lies blight like this. Hundreds, if not thousands of
homes lie in various states of decay, trash and garbage litters the streets
in profusion, and countless historic structures are left untended, to simply
rot away for eternity.

So it is not so surprising, then, that after approximately 50 years, this site
has been severely ravaged by the elements of nature, vandals, scrappers,
homeless, gang members, and much more. It is one of the bleakest
testaments to Detroit's former industrial glory, and one of the most
shocking monuments to the collapse of a once-great automotive empire.

Moving around the place, I was constantly asking myself what could have
begun the demise of one of the most prestigious and highest-volume
producers of automobiles ever to exist on the face of the planet during
their time, and I came to no conclusion while witnessing the sheer size
of their remains left behind.

Welcome to Detroit.
This is our legacy. Crying or Very sad

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mo · Expire: 2016-07-30

Love it...what do they plan to do with the site?? In Sydney they pull down and build almost as soon as the buildings are sold.Get all the shots you can as it won't last.I think of how much Sydney has changed.I hope there are urban(photographic) records somewhere.

SkedAddled · Expire: 2021-08-12

marty · Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 767 Location: Italy

Good series, excellent documentation of urban decay. You're an aficionado of this kind of subject, if I remember well I've already seen other collections from you. Among the others I like the water tower, very powerful image and the tree grown inside the building almost as if the nature is trying to regain its place.

Cheers, Marty.

SkedAddled · Expire: 2021-08-12

Rolf · Expire: 2015-12-26

Hi Craig

most impressive pictures !

You asked : .....

Moving around the place, I was constantly asking myself what could have
begun the demise of one of the most prestigious and highest-volume
producers of automobiles ever to exist on the face of the planet during
their time, and I came to no conclusion while witnessing the sheer size
of their remains left behind........

In my opinion there are always the same problems

- gigantism with the unability to react to changed economic conditions (structures, new products, new markets, costs, quality, customer requirements ....... )

- management mistakes (wrong leaders at the wrong places, incompetence and arrogance)

- and (for the past I�m sure that it was the fact) reactionary die-hards at the unions.

With this mixture you can kill every company. Look at the present situation with GM (btw we have here at Bochum a large Opel facility) or look at Toyota as well.

They will get the last chance within the next 6 to 12 months, and if nothing happen substantially the GM story will then the Toyota story for the next years and in 10 years this company will be bought by Russians, Chinese or Indians and then you can find such buildings as shown at Japan too.

marty · Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 767 Location: Italy

Is your Tamron SP 28-80 Adaptall-2 the model 27A?

Cheers, Marty.

supahmario · Joined: 18 Mar 2009 Posts: 615 Location: Berlin, Germany

#11 is wonderfull!

SkedAddled · Expire: 2021-08-12

Thanks, everyone. I really enjoyed this site.

nemesis101 · Expire: 2015-01-22

Great pictures!

As a former Michigan resident (Northville, a few kilometres away from Downtown Detroit) I wish that this country would spend more money on keeping its cities alive, and a tad less bombing other people's???

It's all part of that great American paradox whereby we are exhorted to carefully divide our trash into every more complex loads... whilst city authorities leave areas like this which must pollute a million times more?

Doug.

marty · Joined: 09 Apr 2009 Posts: 767 Location: Italy

#13, great!

Marty.

SkedAddled · Expire: 2021-08-12

nemesis101 · Expire: 2015-01-22

When I first moved to Northville (from Brussels in Belgium!) I looked it up on the web.. the statistics told me the major employer was.. the mental hospital.. that gave me much pause for thought!!!!

Doug