A Monumental Ruin

We had a grand old adventure inside the Packard Plant on Sunday. We went further into the old buildings than we ever have, and saw one amazing sight after another in this post-apocalyptic palace of industry.

The Packard Plant was designed by the famous industrial architect Albert Kahn. It was built between 1907 and 1911 and was absolutely state-of-the-art for its day. Kahn's use of huge windows to provide natural lighting required this plant to be the first major industrial building in the world to make extensive use of rebar-reinforced concrete in its structure.

It was a beautiful plant and it made beautiful automobiles. Many thousands of sexy Packards rolled off the line here during the glory days. Check out some of these beautiful cars: a vintage 1912, a '37 Packard Six, and the last model to roll off the lines here, the sleek 1956.

The plant was closed when Packard was absorbed by Studebaker in 1957, and has been scavenged, abused, rented out, neglected, and ravaged by the weather over the last 60 years. It has not aged well. It now stands almost completely empty - three and a half million square feet of rotting, beautiful ruin, completely open to the outside world.

Occasionally huge sections of the plant succumb to the elements and collapse to the ground with a thunderous roar. And there are dozens of fires each year, started by the acetylene torches of scavengers cutting down the steel bearing members to sell for scrap (the many miles of valuable copper plumbing is all long gone). The Detroit Fire Department has standing orders to never enter this place because of structural concerns, so the fires slowly burn themselves out, taking huge black bites out of the buildings.

If you can feel sorry for a place, then I grieve for the Packard Plant.

The plant technically has an owner, but that company has not paid taxes on the property for many years, and hasn't filed a tax return itself in almost ten years. So the Packard Plant is an orphan. Much, much too big to demolish without tremendous expense that neither its old owner nor the city can afford (the city started to demolish the place in 2001 but quickly realized that it had bitten off more that it could chew and promptly stopped). A "For Sale" sign on one building appears almost as some kind of cruel joke: nobody is going to buy this place, it comes with way too much baggage. So the plant remains in place as the years pass, slowly crumbling.

Alisa was in from Chicago and she waited ever so patiently in the car while Brian and I ran ninja-like through the ruins of the old office building and into the manufacturing buildings beyond, taking pictures furiously. The detail and wonder in this plant is astounding. Around every corner awaits jaw-dropping destruction.

We entered through the main doorway, which used to be graced with a gorgeous white marble facade etched with the word "PACKARD 1907" across the top. That piece was hacked out of the brick face and sold at auction a couple of years ago and is now on display in the Packard Museum in Ohio. So the entryway now looks like it was punched in the face by a Transformer.

Beyond the door, a once-grand lobby that used to boast elegant stairways, wood paneling, and soaring high ceilings, is now just a rubble-strewn cave.

Up the old stairs we went. We walked hallways that are no longer hallways because all the walls are gone.

We saw the restrooms filled with remnants of smashed subway tiling but devoid of fixtures or plumbing.

We stood in the corner on the fourth floor where the president's office was located. You could almost smell the cigar smoke and picture the mahogany panels that were taken so very long ago. Now it's just a big damp, vacant loft with a thousand water leaks in the ceiling.

On a rainy day like Sunday, the Packard Plant sprouts waterfalls and becomes like a giant shower head.

This is one of Detroit's three best-known ruins, along with Michigan Central Depot and Fisher Body #21. As such, many adventurers have walked its lonely floors over the years. Sunday was no exception. We saw two groups of photographers at the plant. One group was in the building behind the offices, adjacent to a huge collapsed section of the plant. The photographer and his assistants were shooting portraits of a young girl in a mini-skirt and fishnet stockings.

Urban portraits are very "in" today. After all, it's the definition of adventure: unknown, dangerous and sexy. If you are in high school and you pass these urban portraits out to your friends and they in turn give you one of theirs from Olan-Mills, you win, no contest.

Near the top of the office building were great doorways that took us into the adjacent manufacturing center.

The floors here are made of wooden blocks, pungent and covered in tar. There are huge freight elevators here that are locked in place by corrosion and will never move again.

Big steel doors on rollers open into hallways leading to the far reaches of the plant, way off in the hazy darkness.

This place is huge beyond normal experience. On and on it goes, seemingly forever.

There is wreckage and destruction here on a scale that I have never seen before, or even imagined.

In one section we found a wet and corroded steel bridge over a deep chasm.

Far below was a field of twisted steel and bricks. Off to the left in the far distance we could see the open hull of a big boat, rolled onto its side.

To the right and below us lay the remains of a collapsed building, its steel girders twisted like pretzels. The rain was coming down everywhere.

We've probably explored one percent of this place. To see the whole plant would take many months of careful exploration. But we'll never see the whole thing, nobody has in a long time. There are some sections that are now utterly inaccessible due to collapse. But we'll go back and see more. Carefully.

You have to be very careful in this place indeed. There are open elevator shafts, holes in the floor, missing grates and handrails, and everything is old and weakened by corrosion and fire. And scavengers have been removing important pieces of the structure for many years. So when I say that instant death is one wrong step away, that's not dramatic exaggeration. It's absolutely dangerous in here.

I think its impossible to experience this place and not be changed by it. It is so very sad. This plant was once the home of a well-loved luxury car company. A once proud and glorious place, the glory has now been replaced by a whisper of broken dreams carried on the wind over an ocean of obscene destruction.