The way we were: The rise of industrial tourism
Site revivals offer ‘sense of where we’ve been and how that made us who we are’
“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, cyclists 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 grey November Sunday in Detroit, I joined about 30 people in white hard hats as they awaited a tour of the city’s vacant Packard auto plant. 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.
The United States is dotted with industrial remains dating back centuries. In Massachusetts, the circa1600s 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, an overhaul included converting a former boiler house into a picnic shelter.
The decrepit structures are called “ruin porn” by industrial tourism’s detractors.
Steven A. Walton, executive secretary of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, which seeks to preserve industrial heritage, says sanctioned and preserved manufacturing sites tell us the “stories of our own mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers.”
Many such sites are being preserved. In the 1990s, the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area was created in eight counties in Southwestern Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh. In Dayton, Ohio, the Wright Co. airplane factory is now part of the National Aviation Heritage Area.