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Leeedy's comments that ended "maybe you had to be there" really rang true to me. I grew up in St. Louis, once the second largest auto producing city, after Detroit. Tens of thousands of autoworkers made a decent living for their families at Chevrolet's three plants, Ford's Mercury plant and Chrysler's two. For me, the sounds, smells and heat given off of the old Corvette plant meant that new dreams were being made inside for some lucky customers. Unlike Packard, Chevy lost the battle to save those three plants mostly due to the cost of retrofitting them to EPA standards that would have eliminated the sounds, smells and other things that made me remember them most. Now, the birthplace of the 1954-81 Corvettes is gone, replaced by a Pepsi bottling plant and job-training center, protected from unwanted intruders by a tall, chain link fence. Now, scores of Corvette fans who want to see where their cars were made are told to look where that big Pepsi sign now stands. I suppose that people who love those 1903-54 Packards can at least see EGB as some sort of hallowed ground. Those of us with Conner Street V-8s can no longer even feel that magic.

Here in Atlanta, we've now lost two GM plants and the Ford Taurus/Sable plant that produced half of all those cars for the American market. Just a few years earlier, that Ford plant was proclaimed the J.D. Power award winner for quality. Now it is scheduled to become the official "factory delivery experience center" for Porsche and Audi in North America. Sometimes, there is a happy ending to where a Dream Factory once existed. Time will tell, but I still miss driving by that Corvette plant, windows open on a warm summer evening.

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My reference to Hudson was the Hudson automobile plant that was once over on South Conner.

Your reference here is the J.L. Hudson Department Store that was on Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. Not sure how that worked into the equation. Anyway, I knew both properties very, very, very well. My uncle in fact was a part owner of the J.L. Hudson building. But again, my reference was to the Hudson car plant, not J.L. Hudson's. Same name, same family... totally different buildings, different purposes, and different locations.

The Hudson car plant was built just like the Packard Plant... out of poured, reinforced concrete. And like I said... I watched month after month, year after year from my family's business which was in the area. I watched the demo companies as they tried and tried and tried to tear down the Hudson car plant. It was once rumored to have driven a demo company broke that was tearing it down. That alone scared folks in the demo biz back then. This was before the days of implosion-demo.

Again, for this reason, my dad's construction friend said IN the 1950s that HIS friends in the demo biz would not touch the Packard Plant for love nor money!

And as I have said before, I had free reign of the Packard Plant in the late 1960s/early 1970s (I still have my ID badge) and I can assure you, there were pits full of toxic soup even then... and dark areas with horrid smells I dared not even enter. And heaven knows what has been dumped there in the years since.

I know what it cost in the 1970s to clean up one relatively small buried dump in a beach town in Southern California. Cleaning up the site of the Packard Plant? Today? After demolition? With the EPA watching? Wow. You better hurry up and believe it will be welllllll into the millions!

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Ahhh. Like JFK once said...."Whomever the poor fellow is, I wish him luck!"

A "new danger" the paper says? What's so new about it? Sounds more like a rescue!

According to a couple friends of mine who keep tabs on the plant, people don't need Fernando to send tow trucks to haul cars away. That already happens anyway!

OR... people return to find their parked car sitting on the ground with no wheels and the catalytic converter missing! But there always seems to be yet more thrillseekers who think the odds don't apply to them!

Hello Leeedy:

I still owe you for bailing me out at the 2013 National Meet when you guided the tour of Detroit and the PMCC Plant on EGB when our original guide could not make it. You did it on short notice and spoke about details very few know about.

BTW, the reference to Hudson's was a quote from the Detroit Free Press and not me. As is getting typical here the writers are rather young and would not know about Hudson Motor Cars (where my grandfather worked). So the closet thing they could compare to would be the downtown Hudson's department store.

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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.

Leeedy, I was fortunate at the Detroit PAC National to be on the tour bus of Detroit with you as our tour guide. You certainly did an EXCELLENT job of painting for us what life and times were like in those areas in your younger years. Hope you don't object to the photograph.

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And you don't look a day older than the earlier picture in the Hughes/Peters Caribbean in Beverly Hills!

Given the many other pictures of Packards on display at or about that spot in front of the EGB factory, it's a graphic contrast to things in the 1950s. Unlike Leeeedy, time has taken its toll.

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Owen... thanks for the very kind words. I can tell you that the whole tour was put together at the very last minute and everything I said came directly out of my memories of Detroit. We were originally supposed to have a different destination and guide. But both of those were cancelled at the very last minute... like that very morning! So when Roger asked me, of course, I was happy to volunteer my services.

I picked all of the places we visited, including downtown Detroit, Cobo Hall, Belle Isle and the Packard Plant. It was my hope to actually follow the route I wrote about in the special Packard Plant issue of The Packard Cormorant magazine a few years ago. So it was very gratifying to see the positive response from those on the buses.

Our first stop at Scott Fountain on Belle Isle should be one that every Packard fan ought to make at least once in their life. If you look at many of the old factory shots of Packards taken outdoors, there were photographed right here or in close proximity to this spot. Turning one direction is the skyline of the Motor City... and the other is the beautiful fountain.

In the old days, this beautiful marble fountain flowed and put an incredible mist and soothing energy in the air. At night it had special lighting that made the waters appear to magically change colors. These are the kinds of things that people today would never know unless someone told them. You could look at the dry marble structure today all day and never know what a magical place it once was.

Again, thank you for the kind words.

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Hahahahaha. Welll, those are more kind words. If only they were true. Sometimes I think back to the days when my father and I would drive past the Packard Plant and I would beg him to slow down at night so I could guess the shapes of the new bodies traveling across the bridge behind the frosted glass. Or the times when we would slow down and gaze at the rows of sparkling new Packards in the lot at EGB and Mt. Elliot. We really loved those cars and the company.

So to look at the plant (and Detroit) today is an emotional experience for me. Was it really that long ago? My mind often says no... but the face I see in the mirror when I shave unfortunately says... yes. It was a very, very long time ago.

Thanks again for the kind words and thoughts. It is an honor to share Packard memories and the love of a great company and automobile that unfortunately is no more... except with us...

I don't know how this will turn out on this forum, but here's the local TV news' muckraker reporter's take on the collapse into the street last fall.

At about the 56 second mark, right after the reporter talks to the people with the shopping carts, the camera pulls back to reveal that the roof of the bridge over EGB has collapsed, and revealing the 4 remaning floors of what, If I have it placed correctly, was a 5 floor building.

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/video?clipId=9414711&autostart=true

Drove past the Willow Run bomber/Kaiser/Hydramatic plant today. the office buildings in front look OK, but the demo of the plant itself is well along.