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I've tried to get it into the photo archive but without success.

View of plan of property and buildings of the Packard Motor Car Company factory in Detroit, Michigan. Typed on back: "Plant layout."

Date: 1944
Format: 1 photographic print ; 8 x 10 in.

Photo courtesy of the Detroit Public Library, National Automotive History Collection and used with permission. Click to enlarge!

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View of plan of property and buildings of the Packard Motor Car Company factory in Detroit, Michigan. Printed on front: "Property & buildings of the Packard Motor Car Company, Detroit factory. R.R. Rees, manager. Plant, Engineering Division." Handwritten on back: "Plant engineering maintenance."

Date: 1942
Format: 1 photographic print ; 8 x 9.75 in.

Photo courtesy of the Detroit Public Library, National Automotive History Collection and used with permission. Click to enlarge!

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Bird's-eye view of Packard automobile factory with cars parked around sides of building.

Date: unknown
Format: 1 photographic print ; 8 x 10 in.

Photo courtesy of the Detroit Public Library, National Automotive History Collection and used with permission. Click to enlarge!

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Ah-ha! The 1944 drawing shows where the tunnel from building 22 entered 84. The 1942 drawing shows something there, but that drawing is showing the tour route, so could have been the path for people to walk across the tracks to 84.

Thanks for posting.

View of a partially completed section of the Packard Motor Car Company building with iron framework exposed, the image is inscribed Sep-20-1915.


Date: 1915-09-20
Format: 1 photographic print ; 8 x 10 in.

Photo courtesy of the Detroit Public Library, National Automotive History Collection and used with permission. Click to enlarge!

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View of a partially completed section of the Packard Motor Car Company building with workers up on the scaffolding, the image is inscribed Aug-10-1915.


Date: 1915-08-10
Format: 1 photographic print ; 8 x 10 in.

Photo courtesy of the Detroit Public Library, National Automotive History Collection and used with permission. Click to enlarge!

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The date of this photo certainly is known. I have the original in my collection but it was actually much larger. It was taken in 1946, but the photo version shown here has been severely cropped off both at the top and at the bottom.

What you are seeing here is Looking generally south. The street in the lower portion of the photo was Harper Avenue... before they eliminated most of it here to make way for the Edsel Ford Expressway. Now known as the Edsel Ford Freeway, it whacked off the parking lot to the lower left of the plant and almost all of the street you see here and about a quarter of the plant building to the right of the railroad tracks.

In the original photo that was not cropped, the lot in the upper right-hand corner with all of the cars was the Nu-Car Driveaway lot-where new Packards were stored and shipped out-mostly by truck rather than individually driven as many today have presumed. It has been cut out of this view. But it is obviously the same photo with cars in the same position on Concord Avenue and Harper Avenue.

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Yes, the plant was much larger.


image source: photobucket.com Click to enlarge!

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That pic might have been taken earlier, like summer of 42. The 44 annual report has a diagram showing what was going on where in the plant, and it shows the long wing of Merlin test cells extending down Harper all the way to Mt Elliot. Can't see much past the west end of building 84, but it looks like the parking lot is still there, before 84A was built.

Here's another angle on 84 that shows the west side, the diagram from 44, and a DTE aerial from 49 that shows 84A

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Yes, I know this fact very well. I drove past the Packard Plant in the 1940s-50s-60s all the time with my dad for many, many years. All the time. Sometimes daily. My dad owned commercial property on Mt. Elliot, just a few blocks from here. So I very well know how big the plant was.

At one point in time, the eastbound Edsel Ford Expressway ended here (westbound started here). And if you were traveling across town and no longer wanted to use the old antiquated route of Grand Blvd, you jogged north from the Boulevard on Mt. Elliot to get onto the hot new expressway!

This is the uncropped version of the same photo shown earlier. But the plant still extended farther south (past the top of this photo) and farther north past the bottom of this photo. If you look to the right of the houses in the lower part of the photo you will see buildings leading to the foundry areas and other parts of the plant that do not exist today and which have long been forgotten.

And again, before we go back into the same territory that another thread covered a few months ago, note the lot with cars in it on the upper right of this photo. This lot was Packard Nu-Car Driveaway where new Packards were stored and loaded on trucks to be shipped. It is also where the Nu-Car Driveaway office was located on the Mt. Elliot side. This had nothing at all to do with individual customer driveaway programs. Nor was it where a customer would take factory delivery.