Former AMC (Kelvinator) Headquarters up for Auction

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Wished I could buy that place-NICE building-but too far to commute-and if its in a bad neighborhood-the worse may be yet to come-that nice place will probably get bulldozed in favor of low income housing!!Yes,the equipment that used to be built there is sadly missed!!!
 
So sad to see these articles and pictures.

 

Just a painful reminder of the past when this country was manufacturing quality products and people had jobs to support their families and own a home.

 

I just can't wrap my head around what gives these thieves the entitlement to just go into an abandon property and strip it of anything valuable. I know, I know, it's the way things are these days and these types of acts have always gone on, but it is just so blatantly done now, it is a shame   people just don't have any qualms or moral values. When I think back 40-50 years ago about how I was brought up and was taught right from wrong, it seems like I was brought up in a Fairy Tale when times were good and people cared about each other and things in general.

 

Just so sad.  Very Sad.
 
To Be Fair That Mr. Williams Started Things

Scrapping I mean, the others picked up where he left off.

Given the vast amount of abandoned commercial and residential properties in Detroit the place has been happy hunting for scrappers for years.

http://www.detroitresearch.org/?page_id=547

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2014/03/detroit_southwestern_high_scho.html

http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2014/04/11/9-ways-scrappers-are-destroying-detroit-area/

And so it goes.

However it takes two to tango and without those buying all this scrap metal "no questions asked" there wouldn't be a market. These businesses know full well where the shopping cart, car, truck, wagon... load of metal is coming from but....
 
I pass this complex frequently. Scrapping has been a way of life in Detroit for decades. Yes, it is an awful and destructive way to destroy what are otherwise fine and solid (and in some cases historically significant), but when buildings sit empty for decades with no hope for re-purposing, this is what is going to happen. A couple of years ago, the Detroit school system closed about 35 schools, many of them built in the 20's and 30's with incredible features. They were stripped bare within months of closure. Detroit doesn't have enough police to insure the public safety and also be watch dogs over abandoned property. So scrappers often strip buildings in broad daylight without any worries.

In 1955 Detroit was a city of over 2 million people. 60 years later, Detroit has about 800,000. When you lose more than half the population, half of the built environment becomes unnecessary. Yet it still stands and decays. Factories, tens of thousands of homes, hospitals, schools, stores...the ruins of Detroit has captured the interest many because it's almost impossible to believe this could happen, but it did. When it's part of the everyday scenery, one can be desensitized by it, but visitors are always astounded.

The good news is that city that essentially created the middle class and had a profound impact on the American 20th century is coming back in pockets. There will likely never be two million people living here again, but a few neighborhoods that were depressed for decades are seeing new development. This time not because of big industry, but because of small businesses and young people who want something other than a suburban life. This is because property is still very undervalued here, so it creates opportunities for those who can't make a large financial investment.

It's very exciting! You all need to come and visit Detroit!! I don't know if there is any hope for the old Kelvinator/AMC headquarters. The neighborhood surrounding the complex is not great and the scale of the building is such that it would be hard to justify the investment in renovating it. But many smaller scale redevelopment efforts have been very successful, and hopefully that trend will continue.

Best wishes from the Motor City ;-)
 
From what one has read about Detroit

Place only really built up due to manufacturing from really WWI though WWII give or take a few decades before or after. Once the post war manufacturing boom began to slow it caused all sorts of heartache. This mainly came about because the City leaders kept taxing and treating businesses as if they were always going to be around.

Of course what really hurt Detroit if not Michigan overall were the changes in automotive industry. As more and more Americans started buying European or Asian vehicles the handwriting was on the wall.

The Ruins Of Detroit Industry: Five Former Factories - Jalopnik

With the President mulling the use of TARP funds to help Detroit automakers weather the Carpocalypse, we thought it appropriate to show you these five Detroit industrial relics that didn't quite make it.
jalopnik.com jalopnik.com
 
More and more people buying European and Asian cars was an effect, an end result. Pre-'73 oil embargo, Detroit ignored the small but slowly growing market for smaller cars. Once the oil embargo (aka 'energy crisis') hit, that market exploded and Detroit had little to offer. It wasn't until the Ford Fairmont and Plymouth Horizon of 1978 that there were any decent home-grown offerings... and they sold well, btw. To make matters worse, instead of continuing to do what they did well (make great large cars) and add quality small cars, Detroit embarked on the whole 'downsizing' fiasco in which quality was downsized even more than the cars were.

To be fair, I should point out that Ford with it's Granada/Monarch/Versailles on a modified Maverick chassis and Chrysler with its Plymouth Volare/Dodge Aspen/Chrylser LeBaron (successor to the Valiant) did a far better job than GM did in responding to the market changes.

Jim
 
Another thought for the downfalls-these original sites were getting too outdated and too expensive to update--so the car builders built new sites in other states-one is in Texas-not too far from Dallas.A GM plant that builds their SUV's and pickups.Other places,Tennessee and Kentucky.These plants are more up to date-and can be upgraded as new models need to be built.The older Detriot sites were more difficult to change as other models had to be built when the car industry became more competitive.The older plants were already designed to build only a few different models.
Since the scrappers have attacked these what used to be nice buildings-it would be now too expensive to rebuild them.Probably would be more merciful to demolish them-but in troubled Detriot money is needed to pay for demolition and disposal of the remains.Hopefully new places can be built where these old buildings were.
 
Geezis, Detroit can't afford demolition so more than half of it is abandoned in place. Nearby Flint can't afford public drinking water processing, just in the news tonight. Vacation in scenic Michigan; just don't drink the water. And rent a car with full insurance, if you drive your own it will probably get stolen.

Not ragging Michigan. After Reagan decimated the economy, I left what once (1982) was a thriving economy in Oklahoma City with entire blocks of business and residential districts boarded up. I now live in west Fort Worth, a former bluecollar powerhouse of DOD vendors where now there is only section 8 housing, vacant stripmalls, and even Mcdonalds and Burger King moved out years ago. The apartment complex across the street was boarded up 5 years ago until it reopened as a destination for 'illegal aliens', no questions asked and speaking English is.... well, depends who's on duty at the time. Meanwhile, nearby Dallas is run by thugs/for thugs. The former police chief's son is in jail for killing a cop and 2 bystanders. 'At least' one city councilman is headed to jail for corruption and the rest have yet to be discovered at a prosecutable level.

I've only got anecdotes/datapoints to go by, but it appears the US is retrograding to a third-world country. We're one act of congress away from defaulting on our debts, and that 'act' will consist of 'inventing' money out of thin air like we've done for 30 years. Remember and consider folks, We The People/E Plab Neesta (Star Trek) voted for this to happen. They didn't TELL us this would happen. But we were supposed to know they were lying and cut them off. And we didn't so it's our own fault.

Shxt, you thought Saddam Hussein was a threat? Fart in a hurricane compared to the obliviosity of the American public. Here we are, with nobody else to blame.
 
In Atlanta and probably many other cities, that building would likely be turned into condos and saved.  That hasn’t always been the case here, but it’s the trend right now.  We have a great new development that transformed an old Sears warehouse into shops and apartments.  It’s a massive building that overlooks what used to be the Georgia Crackers’ baseball field—now a strip mall.

 
I really enjoy the photo of the American Motors building, so much so that I'm currently using it as a desktop background on the computer. Kevin's post on Detroit is very well written and informative. Although I have never been there I've always been fascinated with Detroit. Most of the articles I've seen only deal with decay and ruin and naturally are depressing. It's good to know that, at least on a small scale, Detroit is undergoing a restructuring. It may never again be America's industrial center but I'm sure over time it will regain a great deal of it's past glory. I believe if half of the 800,000 people who live there had Kevin's positive attitude the recovery would take half the time. 

 

The city where I was born and lived almost all of my life is like Detroit in reverse. In 1950 San Jose had a total population of 95,280. Today it is well over 1,000,000 and growing and is the tenth largest city in the Country.  Although no expert, I don't think there's all that much decay, but then there are very few "grand" structures to fall into disrepair. Buildings are demolished because the property is so valuable and something quickly takes it's place. I grew up in a sort of a single-story world. Now San Jose has many tall buildings and multi-story condos seem to be the new thing. A million-plus  people create all kinds of problems so growth is not necessarily all sunshine and roses. 

 

When I was a kid, the Bank of America building was about the tallest in San Jose. There was a green light at the top. 

twintubdexter-2015100911023402965_1.jpg
 
warmsecondrinse wrote:
"It wasn't until the Ford Fairmont and Plymouth Horizon of 1978 that there were any decent home-grown offerings"

Just how different is the 1978 Ford Fairmont from the 1960 Ford Falcon? Even the engine block is the same.

The big-3 jumped on the compact-car bandwagon for 1960, but of course Nash/AMC had been there since 1950.

Ken D.
 
Scrapping has been a way of life in Detroit for decades.

This comment made by Kevin smacked me between the eyes with the realization that *I* was once one as well. Summer of '69 I worked on a City of Detroit survey crew. We went all over the city doing many mundane jobs like checking the elevations of points known as "benchmarks", the locations and elevations of which the city maintained for use in surveys or construction layout activities. We also staked out elevations for alley paving, chiseled elevations into concrete curbs for asphalt resurface grades, and other stuff I can't recall. We ranged all over the city. One area which Detroiters will recognize was the "urban renewal" lands near Eastern Market. This was a large area of blocks and blocks of streets where all the homes had been demolished, basements filled in, and weeds grew into forests. In this neighborhood the streets were paved by asphalt, the alleys were dirt, sidewalks concrete, and the approaches to alleys and driveways (known in the trade as "returns") were paved with bricks. These were big baked clay blocks maybe 5"x5"x12" placed on a packed sand base. They had been there for decades and were good as new. Well, that summer my dad was looking for some kind of paving material to make a floor for our backyard patio. I took him one of those blocks and he decided it was just the thing and he could use as many as I could bring home. I asked the crew chief about it, he thought there was no harm, so I got to spend lunch hours and break times digging them out of the ground and stacking them in the truck. Then we would make a delivery in the alley in back of our house. We were driving a prominently labeled city truck so we were never challenged by anyone. So I can rationalize that these blocks were never going to be used again for their current purpose and would someday be bulldozed out of there and landfilled. But now all these years later I wonder what differentiates that situation from the metal scavengers of today. We never sold the blocks. They were still there 15 years later when my parents sold the house. I just never thought about it in this way until today.
 
@ Kenwashesmonday: Good point about recycled parts. I believe that like Chrysler's 225 slant 6 and its 318 V8, Ford's 200cu in in-line 6 had already been around for decades when it was put into the Fairmont. The 250 in-line 6 was too tall to fit into the Fairmont, IIRC. 2 other engines were offered, a 2.5 litre 4 and the 302 V8. The 4 wasn't powerful enough and was something of a gas guzzler because real world driving required pedal to the metal most of the time. The V8 was a horror to work on as it was shoehorned in. It also caused the Fairmont to fishtail at the drop of a hat due to its weight. The 200 cu. in. six was responsive in real world driving and actually gave its EPA-rated gas mileage. I liked that car. Other than the engine and automatic transmission, I believe the Fairmont was totally new, from the ground up.

A good design is a good design and worthy of keeping. Keeping the 200, 225, and 318 around for so long was a smart decision.

IIRC (again), the Falcon and Valiant lines DID sell well, as did the Rambler American. While they were a good bit smaller than the average full-sized American car, they were still too large to tap the emerging sub-compact market.

GM had little to offer. The Chevy Nova with a 6 cylinder was a dog. The Vega, Monza, and Chevette? Give me a break. At least Ford learned PDQ from the Pinto and introduced the Fairmont and the Fiesta from Germany.

Jim
 
It's only fair to keep the size classes in line.
Let's look at cars actually made in the U.S. by U.S. brands (which leaves out the Cricket, Colt, Fiesta, etc)..

The following were "sub-compact" cars.
Vega, Monza, Chevette, Pinto / Bobcat, Horizon, and the Gremlin / Spirit.

The following were "compact" cars,
Rambler American, Hornet / Concord, Falcon, Comet, Maverick, Fairmont / Zephr, Valiant, Lancer, the post-'62 Dart, Studebaker's Lark, and the Chevy II / Nova.

To say the U.S. automakers had little to offer is unfair. To say the inports sometimes had an edge due to cheap labor would be more like it.

I never heard of a 2.5 4 cyl in a Fairmont. I know they did offer the excellent 2.3 Lima (Pinto) engine in the Fairmont, usually in a fleet vehicle with a 4-speed stick.

The Ford Pinto was replaced by the 1981 Escort. They both sold like hotcakes.
 

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