America’s industrial past is drawing tourists in increasing numbers
Trip-planning multiple choice: a) Mountains b) Sand c) Surf d) Factories.
If you picked the last vacation option, you’ve got company.
“We’re finding a hunger,” says Michael Boettcher, an urban planner and industrial-history buff. “Everyone has been to Disney World, and it’s like, what else you got?”
In Japan, it’s popular to take nighttime boat cruises past glittering industrial superstructures. In Germany’s Ruhr industrial powerhouse region, bicyclists meander a landscape that has turned recreational. And in Canada, 1920s wooden grain elevators, dubbed the Five Prairie Giants, draw sightseers to the Manitoba plains.
The appeal? “It gives you a sense of where we’ve been and
how that has made us who we are,” Boettcher says.
On a gray November Sunday in Detroit, I joined an assembled group of about 30 people clustered
in white hard hats as they awaited a tour of the city’s vacant Packard auto plant. Pure Detroit, a Motor City-centric retailer and advocate, offers the excursions; Boettcher was the guide. At the sign-in booth, souvenir Packard Plant Tigers T-shirts were on display, the logo referring to the time a tiger got loose inside the abandoned plant during an illadvised photo shoot.
For $40, visitors can walk the 1903 structures where workers once punched a time clock and produced voluptuous luxury cars. In its day, it was considered one of the most modern car plants in the world. Now, its oxidized, eerie beauty attracts explorers from distant points, including two from France on the day I ventured inside.
Packard tourists are getting a pre-redevelopment glimpse of the vast complex, which is now owned by international developer Fernando Palazuelo. His company, Arte Express Detroit, plans to invest $350 million into a proposed dramatic transformation, which is in progress.
For now, the sprawling space feels raw and unmanaged, a stark contrast to styled, branded tourist destinations.
The United States is dotted with industrial remains dating back centuries. In Massachusetts, the circa-1600s Saugus Iron Works, called the birthplace of the American iron and steel industry, is a National Historic Site. Alabama’s Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, which produced pig iron beginning in 1882, is described as a web of pipes and towering stoves that stand as a “monument to the Industrial Revolution.” Among its other current uses, metal arts classes are offered there. And in Seattle’s Gas Works Park, a major, creative overhaul included converting a former boiler house into a picnic shelter.
Detroit’s Packard Plant, visitors learn, was built in a cow pasture and became a mass-production operation, with 40,000 employees by 1940. Now, six decades after Packard shut down, it’s slated for a new generation of mixed-use tenants, including an architectural firm, a public relations company and a barbershop. A brewery and restaurant is planned. The reinvention is expected to take 10 to 15 years, with the first phase alone requiring 260 new windows, Boettcher says.
The decrepit structures are called “ruin porn” by industrial tourism’s detractors. “I have a hard time hating the term,” Boettcher says. “It’s pithy. But there’s so much to know. What’s behind it. What made it that way.”
Steven A. Walton, executive secretary of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, an organization that seeks to preserve the nation’s industrial heritage, says sanctioned and preserved manufacturing sites tell us the “stories of our own mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers.”