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RE: the shortened building... You are correct. They did cut the building back. I remember exactly when they did this. They used the same brick and shortened the building....keeping the same look. Stone Container Corp. eventually moved in this building.

RE: the Caribbean... Actually if you are referring to the icon here, it was my 1956 in Dover White, Scottish Heather, Maltese Gray. However, I know and have driven the Howard Hughes/Jean Peters car. A friend of mine bought it from the Hughes people back in the 1970s. I also wrote its history back in the 1970s. It is in the White Jade, Rose Quartz, Gray Pearl color scheme. Some people call this "white, pink, black" but the bottom color is actually a very dark metallic gray that looks close to black on photos. Interesting too that Rose Quartz was only used on the stripe of the 1955 Caribbean. It was not normally available on any other Packard for 1955.

By the way, according to what she told my friend, Miss Peters was not particularly fond of the color scheme... which was another reason the car was parked in the garage of the Hughes Beverly Hills residence... and never driven again until her nephew got it out in the 1970s when I first saw it! I recall it had about 600 miles on the odometer when I first saw the car.

This photo is a bit faded after all these years, but here I am driving the car in Beverly Hills in the early 1970s. If you look closely at the 1956, I had wire wheels on it. The Hughes/Peters car was ordered with standard Packard wheel covers...

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<i>RE: the shortened building... You are correct. They did cut the building back. I remember exactly when they did this. They used the same brick and shortened the building....keeping the same look. Stone Container Corp. eventually moved in this building.</i>

By any chance, do you know what Packard was doing in that building after the war? I started a seperate thread about it, but noone has answered.

Re the Jean Peters car, There was an article in the Detroit Free Press late 72/early 73 about Frost and French Studebaker in LA. The article mentioned the odd thing that had happened there recently: a man in a chauffer's uniform had driven in with a Caribbean with only 300 miles on the clock, had the oil changed, and they never saw him again. They had no idea where that car came from.

A few months later Motor Trend magazine covered the car in their "Retrospect" feature. One of their staffers had been seeing it around and finally caught up with it at a car wash. By this time the car had 611 miles on it. The young guy who had it explained he was a relative of Jean's, showed the MT staffer the original registration with her name on it. The story he relayed is as you say, Jean didn't like the car, so some Hughes staffer picked it up at the house and drove it off to a warehouse, where it sat for the next 18 years.

When I was at the Motor Muster in Greenfield Village last year, the archivist from the Studebaker museum in South Bend was there. I asked him if he knew what ever happened to "the Jean Peters Caribbean", and he said "who?"

So, where is that car now, in a museum, or in the hands of a lucky collector?

RE: the so-called "Willow Run Expressway"... Yesssss, I know alllll about the WIllow Run Expressway.... and I believe the Davison Expressway in Highland Park predated it. Anyway, my grandmother owned much of the land around Belleville, Michigan. I very, very, very well remember driving out there back in those days. If you know where that is, I assure you it was a half-day trip out there from Detroit in the early 1950s. Whatever freeway, people may be imagining today was a short strip of double roads that bent and went for only a while and then hit traffic lights. Anyone thinking it was "a snap" to go from downtown Detroit to Ypsi... wow. I have no idea what roads they were using... but it was nothing like I-94 is today!

RE: Free Press articles about Frost & French... I didn't need to read the Free Press about goings on at Frost & French since I knew most of everyone there and I was a customer too (still have F&F license plate frames)! I was certainly living in Los Angeles at that time and I was a founding member of PACs Earle C. Anthony Region, so anything unusual happening at Frost & French would have been easily known. As far as a man wearing a chauffeur's uniform driving the Caribbean... strange story... unless it happened to be Jamie Kay who was Peter's nephew...he was the one who got the car out of the garage. And yes, I knew who shot the car for Motor Trend and I have original photo proofs and posters made up by Petersen Publishing personnel who gave them to me back then. Yesss, still have them. Yess, know all about the restrospect MT article. Still have that too. By the way, whoever wrote that article claimed the car had "air bags" for suspension...so don't be to bowled over by stuff that was published about it back then-most of it written by people who knew nothing about the real details of the car. And the car wash in question was the Sunset Car Wash...located on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood...a few blocks away from Petersen's headquarters in those days. I did freelance and contract work there (at Petersen).

RE: The Studebaker archivist response... Of course he would say "who?"... you should have asked any SoCal PAC member and you could have had an immediate and accurate response! As I said earlier, a friend of mine bought the car from Hughes' people in Hollywood and he has had the car ever since. I wrote the history of this car and it was published in the PAC The Packard Cormorant magazine back in the 1970s. Believe you can still buy that back issue of the magazine by going to PAC's web site and requesting one Or look on the back inside cover of TPC and there is a listing of available back issues and how and where to order them. You can also find old issues on eBay.

RE: Whereabouts of the Hughes/Peters Caribbean today... It is alive and very well in a glass enclosure at the Automotive Driving Museum in El Segundo, CA. Curator there is Earl Rubenstein.

<i>...my grandmother owned much of the land around Belleville, Michigan.</i>

Her name wasn't Palmer was it? I have heard that a family named Palmer was a major land owner around here.

I live in Canton, which is the township just north of Belleville, and retired after working for a company in Belleville, near the intersection of Ecorse and Haggerty.

The aircraft museum at Willow Run, whose hanger on the east side of the airport burned to the ground several years ago, has had a fund raising drive and is working up the purchase agreement for the hanger at the east end of the bomber plant for their new home. The rest of the plant is being torn down as GM abandoned it in 2010.

That rail siding sucks. When I say rail access I mean a yard with spurs. It's amazing that 100,000 cars in a year could come out of that situation. For Packard to be a serious competitor would require 250,000 cars on a consistent basis.

And as I said one story plants are cheaper to build and cheaper to tear down. I don't see much difference if materials are off loaded on an elevated dock or transported from a quarter mile away at ground level. To be sure you can't have toilets overflowing, roofs caving in, flooding, and sinking floors in a multistory building without a catastrophe.

Given the situation Packard did a pretty good job of using their plant and equipment to exhaustion. The plant was designed for building hand built cars.

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Hello,

No, it wasn't Palmer. But I vividly recall all of the trips we had to make to Belleville in the 1950s and it was quite a jaunt. I believe my grandmother knew some people named Palmer in the area, however.

RE: Canton... Yes, I know exactly where it is and I have a cousin who lives there in a house he had built...also retired.

RE: Willow Run... It was so far away from Detroit that when there were airplanes landing there and the talk was of making it into a new civilian airport, people could not wrap their minds around going that far away for a plane. The ground gap between Detroit City Airport over on the east side of Detroit and Willow Run in those days was considered gigantic. Thus evolved Detroit Metropolitan Airport which was much closer in, but still considered out in the sticks for those times.

I am told that the Packard company plane was kept for a time at Willow Run, but I know it was also at Detroit City Airport for a long time.

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This will be my absolute, final comment on the rail/train situation at East Grand Blvd. and the Packard Plant there. I am only concerned about when the plant was in operation and nothing from today matters-be it GPS, Google maps, photos, 21st-century opinions or whatever.

I grew up in Detroit and I saw brand new Packards being loaded on trains and trucks regularly. I am not guessing or opining about this. And there was never an issue getting raw goods in or cars out via train or truck. This is a fact. None of this hindered Packard-whether it "sucks" today or not.

Most of the rail head and spurs that were in the loading area and storage lot were torn up and gone long, long, long ago. So it is senseless to argue over photos showing a decrepit line and the spur from the petroleum storage and coal storage today and attack that! And these two facilities don't even have one block of concrete, one brick or one girder left standing anyway. This is like looking at an ingrown toe nail on a corpse and pronouncing that this is the reason the person died!

I also worked for several major car companies and there was no gargantuan rail yard to others either. Not at Hudson. Not at Mercury. Not at Dodge (which was HUGE as plants go). Not at De Soto... not at Cadillac...not at Ford Rouge... and heaven knows if anyplace deserved such a rail yard, they sure did! It was one of the few factories that literally took raw ore in one side and spit out finished automobiles on the other! There was a huge rail yard over in an area that served Chrysler and Plymouth... but it served numerous other factories too! Gargantuan rail yards would never have guaranteed success to an automobile company.

RE: single-story plants... This is academic since (contrary to modern myth) Conner Avenue was not a single-story plant. And yes... it was indeed quickly torn down and made into a shopping mall anchored by Crowley's Department Store. I saw it happen.

The thing that makes Grand Blvd. expensive to tear down is not merely that it is multi-story but the fact that it was built of poured, reinforced concrete-no matter how the cars inside were being built. Until more recent times when demo-by-implosion became popular on such structures they were nightmares to get rid of.

It took an eternity to tear down the Hudson Plant in Detroit-which was also made similar to the Packard Plant. I know... I watched them from my family's store as day after day, month after month they swung wrecking balls at the thing and it did nothing but shake a little.

Anyway, these are my absolute, final comments on the trains at Grand Blvd. and the construction of the plant... and the so-called "single-story" of the Conner Plant. So I will not be responding further on this...

<i>Thus evolved Detroit Metropolitan Airport which was much closer in, but still considered out in the sticks for those times.</i>

If I trace a path from the bomber plant to Middlebelt, where the entrance to Metro used to be, it's about 15 miles.

For chuckles, I found a photo of Metro, or "Detroit-Wayne Major Airport", from 1949. There is a subdivision on the west side of Middlebelt just north of the highway. I looked on a current satellite photo. The streets of that subdivision are still there, but almost all the houses are gone. Guess they didn't like living right under the approch to the runways.

<i>I am told that the Packard company plane was kept for a time at Willow Run, but I know it was also at Detroit City Airport for a long time.</i>

Packard did a lot of work in aircraft engines in the 20s, using both City Airport and a runway in the infield of the high speed track at PPG. for test flights. I learned some time back that the PT boat engines were developed from an aircraft engine Packard designed in the late 20s. The Henry Ford museum had a plane with one of Packard's experimental diesels on display in the 60s.

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<i>It took an eternity to tear down the Hudson Plant in Detroit-which was also made similar to the Packard Plant. I know... I watched them from my family's store as day after day, month after month they swung wrecking balls at the thing and it did nothing but shake a little.</i>

Somewhere, I saw an estimate that it would have cost Packard $1M to tear EGB down in the 50s.

As it is, the scrappers have made quite an attack in recent years. As all the more valuable metal was stripped years ago, they are going after the steel roof trusses and rebar now. They figured out that if they started a fire, the heat would weaken the concrete, making it easier to break up to get at the rebar. There are areas now where the top floor is almost gone. A year or two back people in the neighborhood had to get a crew out from Channel 2 to film the rubble that had fallen into Concord St, when a section of top floor wall collapsed, because the city had been ignoring their calls.

Yes. I remember very vividly my dad owned commercial property on Mt. Elliot not far from the Packard Plant in the 1950s. Right next door to one of my dad's buildings was a construction company and my dad knew the owner. That man had friends in the building demolition biz.

One day we were having lunch around 1957-58 when the subject of the Packard Plant came up-as it often did back then. The construction company owner told my dad it would probably bankrupt any demo company brave enough to tackle the job. And when there was so much hassle and lost money tearing down the Hudson plant, no Detroit demo company wanted to touch the Packard plant back in those days. One more reason why and how it managed to hold on for so long.

I firmly believe the plant would still be solid today had there not been silliness and fighting between the owner and City of Detroit or whomever else was involved. Just nuts. After all of that fighting... what taxes were collected? And what funds were lost permanently? And what happened to all of the poor businesses that were still in the plant and happy being there, paying rent? What happened to all of the money these businesses (and dare I say-JOBS) these small enterprises provided in this impoverished area? So instead, somebody, somewhere decided to have a ridiculous fight that resolved nothing... and to let this gigantic historic property be completely unguarded, trashed, and left open to every imaginable crime! Brilliant. And a crying shame.

Anyway, I am well familiar with the goings-on at the Packard Plant on East Grand these days. I have friends in Michigan who occasionally spin past and take a look...even send newspaper clippings. Very sad.

And yes, I already knew about scrappers stealing the roof reinforcement sections. Amazed at how they manage to get some of that metal out without killing themselves. But apparently it continues.

And the question that nobody-but NOBODY-ever asks is... WHO are the companies buying all of this stolen material from the Packard Plant and other structures around Detroit and why are they not being held responsible? Like whatever scrap company that paid $75 to the retarded junkies who broke into one of my family's properties in Detroit and stole my two brand-new (NOS) Dodge Red-Ram hemi engines with GM 671 blowers stored since the 1950s (the engines went to my boat which was built in 1952). You think the company that bought these engines DIDN'T know they were hot? It's THAT crazy there.

When the PAC National Meet took place in 2013 I conducted a bus tour that went to the ruins of the Packard Plant. I warned people to stay away from the walls of the building at Grand Blvd and Concord because I pointed out that the wall up near the roof was beginning to buckle. I knew that structural elements of the roof had been removed. I predicted it would not make it through winter and apparently I was right. No brick structure this tall and heavy can stand unreinforced-especially when it already shows signs of buckling.

Below is a photo I took at that time that shows the bulge on the upper part of the wall above what was left of the Packard Bridge. No way that was going to last...

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