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November 18, 2008
Packard Plant
By Rob Einaudi
Editor-in-Chief
Last week my brother Fred Einaudi went out to visit his girlfriend in Detroit, and he did a bit of sightseeing while he was there. One of his stops was the old Packard plant, a 3.5 million square foot manufacturing facility which shut down fifty years ago. He found the place strangely devoid of life and eerily quiet, the only sounds coming from creaking girders and the occasional window casing or loose sheet of steel banging in the wind. Everything has been stripped, most of the windows are blown out, and the place seems to now primarily function as a dumping ground for miscellaneous crap. With the Detroit bailout before Congress, these photos seem especially timely. More pics after the jump, and you can see the rest of Fred’s Detroit photos over at Flickr.
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Məxfi
Nov 20, 2008 at 8:25 pm
maybe they were moving big fluffy couches…
Mike
Nov 20, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Ya Austin, I agree. Looks like a Cobalt SS to me too. They stripped almost everything but the best thing about that car, the engine!!!
Chris O
Nov 20, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Dear Chris J in da house,
Ukraine is a country! Pripyat was the near-by city which is now a ghost town, as a result of the Chernobyl incident.
You got your facts from playing Call of Duty 4 and you didn’t even get them right!
Məxfi
Nov 19, 2008 at 11:37 pm
They wern’t killed cause they were moving furniture during an office reorganization? WHAT THE FUCK?
GTwildfire
Nov 19, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I meant to write nobody was killed. They were all injured, some pretty badly.
GTwildfire
Nov 19, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I worked from 1987 to 1995 at an architectural/engineering firm in Philadelphia at 23rd & Chestnut… in a former Packard building. Back in the day, the top 3 floors stored rides and the first floor was a showroom or something like that. One of the elevators was still original, designed to shuttle Packards between floors. Unfortunately the cable snapped one day, sending staff plummeting into the basement. Miraculously nobody was injured because they were moving furniture during an office reorganization.
Tony Cassa
Nov 19, 2008 at 7:47 am
How sad. A show of the times isnt it.
Austin
Nov 19, 2008 at 6:42 am
The red car looks like maybe a Cobalt SS to me(see the supercharger on the front of the engine?).
I would love to see some historic photos of this place before it became ruins. Anybody got some around?
charles
Nov 19, 2008 at 5:55 am
used to work there in the 70s. part of the plant was used by essex wire where harnesses were engineered. other space was used as transit storage for british leland and we used to hot rod new sports cars on the wooden floors.
Eric B
Nov 19, 2008 at 2:42 am
noy much graffiti there, im suprised. looks like a great place for a UE trip. id like to take my own pictures.
Steve
Nov 19, 2008 at 2:09 am
Oddly enough the red car looks like a Chevy Cobalt…
Ghost Adventurer
Nov 19, 2008 at 1:30 am
I see ghosts!
The Man, The Myth, The Legend
Nov 19, 2008 at 12:48 am
Kinda makes you wonder what it looked like when it was booming and pumping out cars. Nevertheless, it would be a shame to see more and more plants all over the place turn out like this with the current auto industry struggling more and more. Congress please help us.
Great set of pictures. Maybe I’ll check it out myself one day if it’s still around, because I think places like this are awesome. History is an amazing thing isn’t it?
Chris J in da house
Nov 18, 2008 at 11:26 pm
That reminds me of Ukraine, which is a city that used to have 50,000 people, but now its a ghost town.
Guyon
Nov 18, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Any word on what the red car is?
Steve
Nov 18, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Reminds me of Pripyat:
Maffew
Nov 18, 2008 at 8:16 pm
thats cool that you can just go in and look around… Does the detroit PD not seem to mind? seems like tresspassing to me, although it’d be cool as hell to actually see. I’d like to take a tour of the place with an old factory worker, just to see their reaction to a once bustling plant turned into such degredation.
JRF1130
Nov 18, 2008 at 7:57 pm
The deteriation of this place has accelerated in recent years. In my teen years (mid 90’s)this was the site of many underground raves. Picture 2000-4000 people DJ’s, homegrown and flown in from Berlin, and of course all of the assorted extracuricullar substances. Sad to see the state of this building, my home town, and the domestic auto industry.