Re: One Story Assembly Plant What If?

Posted by Leeedy On 2014/5/19 9:16:12

Quote:

Hello Roger,

It was my great honor and pleasure to assist you, the Motor City Packards Region and PAC with the guided tour of Detroit. Both of us having grown up there continues to have positive ripple effects. I only wish that I could show everyone what it felt like to drive around Detroit back in the glory days. Whenever my dad and I drove past the Packard plant (as we did very often on the way to his commercial properties) we always had a feeling of awe and great pride. There was an energy and fragrance in the air that it is impossible to really transmit to people by words today.

It was also my chance to show off Belle Isle at the base of Grand Blvd. It is terribly sad that so many publications and Packard fans exhibit old Packard photos and never realize many of those factory Packard photos were taken exactly where we were standing on Belle Isle! Many at or around Scott Fountain-which was a beautiful landmark when I was growing up. It was heartbreaking to see what is to MY eyes... devastation. I see different things when I look at what is there... and all I can see is what was such a beautiful place... with paddle canoes for rent, bicycles for rent, horse carriages, Scott Fountain (working... and changing colors at night)...the skyline of downtown Detroit across the river. The ships gliding past.

So much of what I knew there is gone and it is my belief that people today-especially young people-need to know that it wasn't always like it looks and is today. Belle Isle was a vibrant, beautiful, wondrous place that had everything one could imagine: beaches, museums, hiking trails, speed boats (with Packard engines), horse carriages, food, dancing, golf, yachting, cycling, ice skating, aboretum, zoo, horse stables, riding trails, wilderness, wild deer....

Packard's photographer only had to roll south on East Grand Blvd. and voila! There it was! No wonder Packards were photographed there so often! And...how would anyone going there today know all this unless someone tells them?

As for young folks not getting the Hudson plant ... it is our job to educate them before these memories (which are already fast slipping away) are completely gone! Anyway, that's how I see it. The Hudson Plant was built just like the Packard Plant and the two once existed at the same time. And since we have so much talk about Packard's last plant on Conner Avenue, few today even realize it was just a very short trip on the same street from the Hudson Plant. And... as I said... it was the Hudson plant that put fear in the hearts of demolition people in Detroit back then when they even thought about the huge Packard Plant! I remember very vividly my dad and his friend discussing this very matter in the 1950s. And remember, for a while, Hudsons were using Packard engines! Either way, there is far more a direct correlation here between the Hudson car plant and the Packard Plant-any way one looks at it.

As for J.L. Hudson's Department Store downtown on Woodward Avenue, I still question the wisdom of destroying this building which was a landmark and the world's largest department store! I had some people who never even shopped there seem to take offense at the very mention that it was a terrible loss to Detroit. My grandmother used to take me there for lunch and high tea (YES) when I was a child and this store was a wonderland. Losing it was the end of an era in so many ways... people are still just beginning to realize this.

Too many kids at newspapers and magazines write about and opine about things they never experienced first hand... and jump to some rather meaningless-even silly conclusions. I love the Detroit Freep... but they (like other publications today) are often a rudderless ship in recent times with sadly missing perspective on things that made Detroit the great city it was...once.