We first heard about the Packard Plant from friends at work. We were talking about all the sites and museums we needed to go to while we were living in Detroit and one of them said "You need to go tour the Studebaker Factory!" and all the locals started laughing. Bethany and I looked it up and thought it would be kinda fun to see.
The Packard Plant was opened by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation in 1903. Packard cars were some of the most luxurious of their time. The plant was one of the largest and most advanced auto manufacturing plant of it's time. And now look what it's become.
The plant itself is 3,500,000 square feet and sits on a 40 acre lot overgrown with weeks and trees. The plant closed in 1958 and was not completely abandoned until the 1990's. Crazy what a few years can do!!!
A lot of the upper level has collapsed and now has tree's growing on and through the building. It made us feel like we were in the Walking Dead, where no one was around and at any moment a zombie could pop out and try to eat us. It's spooky.
It amazed me in Detroit the amount of graffiti and the difficult to reach areas it is in. In this pic, you had to be able to spray upside down or climb a super sketchy water tower to get it done.
As you stand in this section of the plant, you can hear the electricity running to building, though who knows why they're still paying to power a ginormous rotting building. The plant was bought by a Spanish investor in 2013 for $405,000 after 2 multi-million dollar offers fell through. 40 acres and a 100+ year old building run pretty cheap if buy in a bankrupt city. Apparently the guy plans to turn it into some giant multiplex with stores and gocarts and other random stuff. Maybe it will be the next Mall of America?
The plant has become a dumping ground for tons of junk and the graffiti artists playground. Obviously there is a lot of very profound art in this place! It's depressing to see how trashed it's become but maybe it just adds to the spectacle of it all?
Seriously though, how did they get the paint across the bridge?! BTW the floor does not exist under that.
With the new ownership, there is said to be a groundskeeper that lives in one of these buildings. Some of the friends I made in Detroit met the 'groundskeeper' and said he was super nice. With the size of the building and property, the most I would think this guy could do is slightly deter the artists that graffiti the place.
It was really fun to explore the plant and sneak around for a little while. We would try to imagine it busy and full of people and not empty and abandoned and surrounded by a decaying neighborhood. There are lots of places like this all around Detroit and it was interesting and kinda fun to drive around and look at it all. We did a whole lot of researching while we lived here, wondering what certain buildings were and what happened to them. Pretty crazy!
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