Chevy-in-the-Hole and the Battle of Flint

A while back when the Flint Water Crisis was near the peak of its media attention, I paid a visit to that city to put in a few hours volunteering with the Red Cross before continuing on toward Grand Rapids and other areas I would be exploring that day.

But since I was in Flint I decided to take a drive around and do some sightseeing afterward. I noticed that the former brownfield where the old "Chevy-in-the-Hole" plant used to be was being turned into a park. So I decided to stop and have myself a walk along the infamous Flint River, source of all the recent water-related hubbub. After all, it was GM who is largely blamed for the polluted state of the river that everyone got sick from.

Image from Google Earth

I have commented before that while Flint is not known for the fabulous ruined architectural gems that Detroit is infamous for, some of its ruins are so vast that they can only be properly viewed from satellite photos. A more zoomed-in view of the massive concrete scar that Chevy-in-the-Hole left behind...downtown Flint is to the right:

Image from Google Maps

If Chevrolet is the "Heartbeat of America," then the heart of Chevrolet is a barren concrete scab riddled with cancer, and its main artery is the Flint River. Ironically, GM discontinued Chevy's "Heartbeat" slogan in 1994 right around the same time as they began shutting this plant down for good. As for America, I will let the readers draw their own conclusions.

Image from Google Maps

Sadly I never had the chance to explore the mighty 20-building complex that once stood here along 130 acres of the Flint River, but it doesn't seem like too many Flintstones miss the place either; it was pretty much universally disliked by locals I think. The *official* name of the complex was "Chevrolet Flint Manufacturing" (later "Delphi Flint West"), but as you might've guessed almost everyone called it "Chevy-in-the-Hole" because it was a grimy polluted sh*t-hole to work at or live next to. Not quite the same thing as an ace in the hole—on the contrary it seems to have been a place of last resort. Demolished in 2004, it remained a cursed, empty brownfield for almost 20 years, and when I visited in January 2016 it was being transformed into a park.

Chevy-in-the-Hole sits in the center of the Flint River watershed, which eventually drains to Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. The Flint River itself was put into this concrete trench by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1963 after a few floods threatened the factory. You may recall that the Army Corps did the same thing for Ford Motor Co. on the Rouge River in Detroit...an environmentally irresponsible move that they are currently in the process of undoing.

A recent Genesee County Land Bank report says that after the Chevrolet buildings were demolished, the vast empty site was paved over "to minimize movement of residual contamination, the contaminants remaining in the site’s soil and groundwater from earlier times." Yummy.

The downtown skyline of Flint in the distance:

When this plant began in the 1910s it was the flagship of the fledgling Chevrolet Motor Division of GM and remained so for much of the 20th century. It grew to a workforce of 8,000 people, and it played a crucial role in the great Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937.

Here is a historic view of the vast plant in 1937 looking up Chevrolet Avenue, which goes down into "the hole," crosses the Flint River, and up the other side of the valley:

Weaver family photo, via buickcity.blogspot.com

Here is what the same spot looked like more recently:

Image from Library of Congress

Speaking of its role in the Flint Sit-Down Strike, author Robert Conot dramatically recounted in his book American Odyssey how key plants at Chevy-in-the-Hole helped break the month-long stalemate between GM management and the UAW men occupying Fisher Body Plant #2 and #1. The problem was that the union was strong in the Fisher Body plants, but they were weak in the Chevrolet plants. If the UAW could seize Chevrolet Plant #4 (which made engines), they could halt GM production nationwide. GM knew of this vulnerability, and as a result they had been extra vigilant to keep the union spirit from spreading into Chevy #4, so most men in that plant were scared to join.

Aware that company spies were hiding in the ranks, UAW leader Roy Reuther (a brother of Walter Reuther) called a union meeting to lay out a plan for seizing Chevrolet Plant #9. The company naturally got word that the sit-down was coming, so when the union men sounded the call to strike Plant #9, management was ready with 200 guards. Teargas bombs were fired into the plant, and when the men began scrambling out to safety, the guards started pummeling them. The men fought back, and as the fists were flying, women sympathizers smashed the plant's windows to let the gas escape.

But while this decoy battle was raging, Reuther unleashed the real assault. A handful of union men from the day shift had been hiding out in a bathroom at Chevrolet Plant #4, and during the chaos they emerged and tried to rally the workers to stop the assembly line. They were too few to be effective, but luckily a UAW committeeman in Plant #6 named Ed Conk was successful in rallying a massive posse there. According to Conot, Conk pulled a hidden American flag from his pocket, unfurled it and shouted "FOLLOW ME!" before leading a running charge against Plant #4. They ran about 200 yards across the complex from Plant #6, stormed their way into Plant #4 and joined the effort to rally the men there.

Image from Library of Congress

Foremen desperately tried to quell the insurrection, but they were soon shouted down, and the machines of Plant #4 stopped. The conquerors climbed to the roofs of the captured plants with their flags and shouted "SOLIDARITY FOREVER" across to each other to signal the victories...America was shocked, General Motors' top brass was absolutely mortified, and even the liberal President Roosevelt and Governor Frank Murphy were taken aback by the brazen coup. This battle was separate from the "Battle of the Running Bulls" of a month prior, where the Flint Police were pushed back across the Chevrolet Avenue bridge when the UAW seized control of Fisher Body #2 nearby.

The Genesee County Sheriff threatened that the workers had 24 hours to vacate the captured plants or be removed by any force necessary. Governor Murphy already had 1,200 National Guardsmen on duty in Flint because of the Fisher Body siege, on top of the 200 local police...a bloodbath appeared imminent. Conot wrote that many feared "America's 1917 was at hand." Business leaders called it a Communist attempt to wrest control of American industry, and rumors flew through Detroit, where the Cadillac, Ternstedt Mfg, and Fleetwood Body plants were also engaged in the sit-down against GM.

Image from Library of Congress

Almost as if the city's name was conceived as a pun, President Roosevelt recognized that if this unrest in Michigan was not resolved peacefully, "the sparks of Flint" would ignite a full revolt across a nationwide tinderbox of worker discontent. He and Governor Murphy worked swiftly to defuse the situation and prevent bloodshed.

The next photo shows another view of Chevrolet Avenue, and two Michigan National Guardsmen are seen maintaining the siege with a heavy machine-gun, while another mans the line with a bayoneted rifle:

Weaver family photo, via buickcity.blogspot.com

The Michigan National Guard had Fisher Body #2 surrounded, and held fast. When the sheriff's deadline to vacate the captured plants came and went, 5,000 workers marched to Fisher Body #1 and encircled it, singing Solidarity Forever. That was the tipping point...GM's president William Knudsen grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the UAW-CIO, and a peaceful wave of similar sit-down strikes rippled outward from Flint to almost every other industry in the country. The course of U.S. history was instantly changed here in February of 1937...it was the dawning of a new era for the American working class.

Image from Library of Congress

GM began closing Chevy-in-the-Hole in the 1990s, and finished demolishing it by 2004. Gerry Godin, author of the Buick City blog, has a few great historic photos of Chevy-in-the-Hole on his website. He commented:

My grandfather and I both worked at this location. I was there in 1973-1974 and he was there during the sit down strike in 1937. I never worked in Factory 2 but did work in 4, 5, 6 and 9. Believe me when I say: This was "Chevy In The Hole" in more ways than one, emphasis on the "hole." It was called the hole because of the valley it was in, but those that worked there had a little bit different meaning for "the hole." I much preferred working at Buick.

It is also important to note that the river that the plant sat on was a racial dividing line in Flint's heavily segregated neighborhoods, which I talked more about in an older post. Additionally the west side of Flint was Chevy country, the east side was AC Spark Plug territory, and the city's north side paid its allegiance to Buick.

Mr. Godin went on to surmise that the origin of the phrase "Chevy-in-the-Hole" came from when the Fisher Body Plant #2 moved from Chevrolet Avenue in 1947:

I would have to think that the workers just said they worked at Chevy until the other plant was built. All I know is when I worked there it was the dirtiest place I had ever seen. And the way workers were treated there was almost like before the union was even allowed to represent you. I could not get out of there fast enough. The stories I've written down in my unpublished memoirs would curl most other auto workers' hair.

A differing perspective on how this factory got its nickname comes from a person commenting at the website Flint Expatriates, who asserted that the factory in the "hole" in fact represented the "cradle of upward mobility," and went on,

I believe it was Buick and AC Spark Plug people, along with the jealous academics who hated the people who worked there in the auto industry because they made so much money with little education, who came up with the hateful name, "Chevy In The Hole." In better days, the Buick and AC Spark Plug people called it "Happy Valley." Up until about 1970, it was the most profitable complex in the whole corporation. It also irritates me greatly that even Google Maps has it labelled "Chevy In The Hole," considering the fact that the grandfather of Lawrence Page, cofounder of Google, worked there. I worked there for short periods in the summer, and I met some of the finest people there I have ever known.

Two other "near-celebrities" also allegedly worked at Chevy-in-the-Hole: Mark Farner's sister (of Grand Funk Railroad), and Casey Kasem's brother.

It is also popularly believed (probably thanks to Michael Moore) that due to Flint's industrial significance during the Cold War, this neighborhood was allegedly Soviet Russia's #3-priority nuclear target in the United States.

In 2005 a partnership between the Genesee County Land Bank, Sasaki Associates, Kettering University, and the C.S. Mott Foundation began forming the "Flint River District Strategy." The goal was to come up with some sort of development plan that would essentially fill in the massive gap in downtown Flint caused by the death of Chevy-in-the-Hole, as well as remediate the nasty pollution trapped under it. Their answer is to turn most of it into a park. Personally, I think parks are always a good idea...in fact since they're making it a park, The Hole probably deserves to be managed as if it were a historic "battlefield," sort of like how the National Park Service does Gettysburg or the River Raisin Battlefield. Now if only we could fix the tap water situation.

Here are my other Flint-related posts:
https://www.nailhed.com/p/genesee-county.html

References:
http://www.thelandbank.org/downloads/reimagining_chevy_in_the_hole.pdf
http://www.flintexpats.com/2012/02/chevy-in-hole.html
http://buickcity.blogspot.com/2009/03/flint-photos-supplied-from-weavers.html
https://www.flintandgenesee.org/what-you-need-to-know-about-chevy-commons/
https://www.mlive.com/auto/index.ssf/2012/01/75_years_ago_today_sit-down_st.html
https://detroithistorical.pastperfectonline.com/archive/2922D98B-F51C-486E-BB83-323018704689
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0717.photos.196712p/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0717.photos.196713p/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0717.photos.196719p/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0717.photos.196717p/
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0717.photos.196711p/
http://www.autonews.com/article/20111031/CHEVY100/310319942/100-years%3A-from-see-the-usa-in-your-chevrolet-to-like-a-rock-chevy
"Shots Fired at U.S. Factory," The Glasgow Herald (Reuter), February 2, 1937, p. 9
American Odyssey, by Robert Conot, p. 343-350

Thou Art Buick, and Upon This Rock I Shall Build...

Photos date from 2010 to 2011.

Flint, Michigan is not known for having huge, magnificent ruins like Detroit, but that doesn't mean that Flint is less ruined. A few of them are so vast they can only be seen from space. This photo view shows about 1/10th of the former "Buick City" General Motors plant's ruins, a concrete scar upon the face of Flint measuring almost two miles long and up to a half mile wide:

Image from Google Earth

For comparison, Detroit's infamous abandoned Packard Plant only measures about 0.7 miles long.

Here is a zoomed-out view of the entire city, illustrating just how vast the demolished swaths of former General Motors properties are:

Image from Google Earth

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the famous "Buick City" plant, either in terms of its physical size or of its importance to General Motors, and to those Flintstones who worked there. It was the heart of both Flint, and of General Motors. GM was founded in Flint starting with the Buick Motor Co., and upon this bedrock Billy Durant did build his church, much as the Lord spake unto Peter...and Buick City became their flagship factory. Flint and Buick are synonymous; inseparable.

It was the great citadel of America's (and the world's) largest industrial corporation, perhaps second only in size to Ford's legendary Dearborn Rouge Plant. There's even a Facebook group dedicated to telling and sharing the stories of anyone who worked at Buick City, or was family of someone who worked there.

Buick City was the world's largest automobile plant in 1911, and the third-largest factory of any kind in the world, according to one article. It continued to grow in size up until it was demolished a few years ago. There are varying accounts of its actual total size, but the most reliable figures I have seen set it as covering 452 acres, and having once comprised five million square feet of building space. Here is a good aerial photo of it: plan59.com/photos/BC/buickcity2000.jpg

This is the corner of Leith Street and Industrial Avenue:

One could not ask for a more complete or in-depth study of the Buick City plant than Gerry Godin's buickcity.blogspot.com, which has been posting photos and articles online of the historic factory and its products since 2007. Mr. Godin himself is a retired employee of the plant, where he worked for many years before he began compiling historical information on it.

The iconic "sawtooth"-style roof that made up the monotonous landscape of Industrial Avenue for blocks and blocks:

Vehicles and parts were manufactured on this spot even as far back as the 1890s. It wasn't until 1903 however that Buick Motor Co. relocated to this site from their original plant in Detroit. During World War I, Buick produced "Liberty" aircraft engines here, and of course also did their part to form the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II. The contamination entry on the EPA's website for Buick City actually waxes a shade nostalgic, and sort of eulogizes this legendary site by telling of its importance to American automotive history.

As a connoisseur of fine Buick cars, I myself attach quite a bit of nostalgia to this old toxic sh#$%-hole, since many of the most beautiful classic cars ever built were riveted together right here. Do an image search for "1957 Buick Special," "1959 Buick Electra," "1965 Buick Riviera," "1967 Buick Wildcat," "1971 Riviera," or "1949 Roadmaster" to name a few, and you'll see what I mean.

Sadly, I never did get inside the Buick City plant to explore it, though I came very close to being able to attend the auction when the equipment and furnishings were sold off.

The EPA also says that the Buick City site is undergoing a "long-term cleanup." Its soil and groundwater are contaminated with various petroleum products, PCBs, metals, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Semi-Volatile Organic Compounds (SVOCs), and even a "free-floating petroleum product" called light non-aqueous phase liquid (LNAPL), "which is particularly difficult to remove." 

Gee, I wonder how the Flint River got so polluted? I know GM stopped using the municipal water pumped from the Flint River well before the big contamination scandals started, because they discovered it was corroding some of their machinery that utilized water. Kind of ironic, since GM were probably the main polluters of the Flint River.

This plant wasn't always called Buick City however, that title only came into use as of the early 1980s when GM had big plans to unify all of the various factories on the site under one banner in order to form one massive complex. 

The name was chosen so as to be GM's answer to their main rival Toyota, whose "Toyota City" in Japan stood as a challenge to Detroit's and Flint's prowess as the vehicle capitol of planet Earth. By naming their flagship plant "Buick City," GM was registering their intent to do battle against foreign competition.

According to the recent book Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew R. Highsmith, the massive Interstate highway I-475 was in fact built expressly to service the new Buick City plant idea in 1986, in a bid to attract automotive supplier companies to the St. John Industrial Park area so as to create a more fully-integrated industrial complex, like that of the Ford Rouge Plant, where raw materials go in one end, and a finished car comes out the other. 

An article from 2014 on mlive.com says that the last Buick ever built in Flint was a LeSabre that rolled off the line at 12:37pm on June 29, 1999. The engine plant portion of Buick City (Powertrain Flint North) kept producing motors until 2010 however, when GM finally abandoned the site completely in the face of their big bankruptcy, concluding well over 100 years of continuous manufacturing here.

The Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response (RACER) Trust (which was established as part of the bankruptcy proceedings) has been in charge of the site ever since, and supposedly continues to work on reusing this scarred land. The American Spiral Weld Pipe Co. of Alabama built a small new factory at the northernmost end of the site, with plans to manufacture most of the Karegnondi Water Authority water pipeline by December 2014.

Apparently American Spiral Weld also received a 50% tax break to locate here, while providing up to 60 temporary jobs while the pipeline is being built. I wonder if they would like fries with that? As the Flint water crisis developed, some have also speculated that the Karegnondi Water Authority and pipeline were a scheme all along to bring hydraulic fracking to Michigan.

Anyway, if Flintonians felt the pains of deindustrialization during the Roger & Me days, the fall of Buick City visited even more woe upon the city than before. The World Socialist Web Site offered some depressing statistics on job loss in Flint. When it closed down it was the last operating assembly plant in the city, and only had 1,200 workers left within its cavernous halls anyway—which is a far cry from the 28,000 who used to toil here during its peak production years of the mid-1980s.

Same spot, after demolition was complete on Powertrain North:

GM employment in the entire Flint area hit 77,000 jobs in 1978, but was expected to plummet to 22,000 as Buick City was phased out—both figuratively and literally. Since the late 1970s GM eliminated over 250,000 jobs...nearly 50,000 in the Flint area alone. The official unemployment rate in the city was 9.7% (more than double the state average), but it would have been much higher if it weren't for the fact that most people moved away from Flint as soon as they lost their jobs with GM.

Speaking of the downturn in the city of Flint, it is worth noting that Flint's murder rate and similar crime stats are consistently worse than Detroit's, and pretty much every other city in North America. The fact that as I was walking along next to the plant and found a fired bullet from a .45 pistol and then also a casing from a 9mm pistol just laying on the ground illustrates just how much craziness goes on here.

General Motors said it was closing down Buick City to consolidate its large car production because of greater demand for its more profitable light trucks and SUVs. Production of the LeSabre would be transferred to the "more modern" Detroit Poletown and Lake Orion assembly plants. 

In 1997 when GM announced they were going to pull the plug on Buick City, UAW Local 599 argued that it would be unwise, and pledged that the union would work to increase speedup, impose more forced overtime, and carry out whatever measures were needed to boost production and profits. Obviously none of these pleas changed the company's mind, and the once-mighty Buick City slowly ground to a halt over the course of the next 13 years.

Many high-seniority employees were expected to retire or transfer to other plants if there was room, or someone with less seniority there who they could bump.

In an article in a Benton Harbor newspaper one employee named Darlene Morris lamented, "Buick City is a building, but it just contains everything I've known for all these years. The last few days have been—well, it's too quiet. Everybody is just kind of closed up. It's very sad."

Many were questioning the excuse GM was tendering for killing Buick City, especially after the company had been saying for years that if quality improved they would keep the plant open." Well, quality did improve. In fact Buick City's quality rating was one of GM's highest—higher than both Detroit-Poletown and Lake Orion Assembly, the two plants that were scheduled to be assuming Buick City's former production.

"They've been preaching to us that our job security is to build a good car with high quality, and we're still closing," complained another 11-year veteran of Buick City.

Supposedly GM was planning to invest $1.5 billion in Flint factories to create several hundred jobs, but compared to the job losses of the past few years this was a drop in the bucket. UAW leaders said that GM's "plans for two new factories near Lansing" make them "question the company's overcapacity claims."

UAW Local 599's president said, "That plant should not be closing...They've got the best team in the company right here…You don't split up the team that wins the championship for you."

A book by James M. Rubenstein entitled Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry, backs up these suspicions. Evidence from Harbour & Associates and J.D. Power did not agree with the official narrative that GM was handing the workers it was laying off, that Buick City was old and outdated, and inefficient.

The data showed that Buick City had in fact achieved its production goals, as well as"above-average" quality control. 

The workers on the assembly line had pulled together since the plant was revamped in the 1980s, and achieved the goals that were asked of them in order to make GM competitive with Japan's "Toyota City."

Nonetheless GM was still saying that Buick City was not good enough, and like a slap in the face, workers felt they were being punished for doing well. That's just about the worst thing you can do for morale in your company.

In exchange for GM investing the money in Buick City in the 1980s, UAW Local 599 had agreed to concessions in the form of flexible Japanese-style work rules. J.D. Power rated Buick City the best assembly plant in North America and the second-best in the world in 1989, one point behind Nissan. So I guess you could say that Buick City did in fact beat Toyota City as they set out to do, although GM lost the war.

But the real reason, Rubenstein writes, for the decision to close Buick City in 1999 was not about production or quality, it was because GM was at odds with Local 599 (the UAW's largest local, 15,000 strong) over several issues.

The union accused GM of not spending all of the money that was promised in the beginning for upgrades to this plant, and the company in turn accused the union of not adopting all of the work rule changes that it said it would.

When the union staged a small demonstration (not a strike) to demand the upgrades that were promised to increase the value of their plant, the company decided in 1996 to simply pull up stakes rather than negotiate with the union. Thus marked the passing of General Motors from its native City of Flint.

Here in the distance, skeletal remains of former factory buildings, nothing left but the rows of steel roof trusses like parched bones in the desert...

There's even a bit of a concrete ruin left here too:

I think that those skeletonized buildings had actually been abandoned for several years already before the plant even closed down. They probably were no longer needed and sat rusting in an unused portion of the complex.

Looks like there was perhaps a powerplant back there:

Here on the right is an all-brick building with something of a stylistic flair, indicating that it is probably pretty old compared with much of the rest of the complex:

Yet another vast empty parking lot...

This building looks like it was designed by Albert Kahn, Associates.

Downtown Flint's skyline looms up in the distance:

I discuss Flint in a few other posts...
Billy & Me

Coloring Outside the Lines

Industrial Avenue in the Vehicle City

Flint is the only major city I know of that has ever torn down its tallest skyscraper, simply because they didn't need it anymore. In 2013 the Genesee Towers (seen at left in next photo) was demolished after having sat vacant for 16 years. That would be like if Detroit demolished the RenCen.

Poor Flint...every time they think it can't get any worse, it does.

References:
buickcity.blogspot.com
http://www.buickheritagealliance.org/buick_history/motor_division
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl-yoEhXIrF0AJ_Tb-QLwUFbwxIFBT7XsDJtEE8Ttm7eD5ysVU9v4pCp2Pja9ugy99OZr-c-53_h51_euf-F3pdfcXBUYr0FDmrd81vBPyHHOxcpmylnlA5hXawjm_seuQ9n1_nmhcdls/s1600/largest+plant.jpg
http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2014/06/15_years_after_buick_city_shut.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/07/auto-j02.html
http://www.heraldpalladium.com/flint-buick-city-no-more----last-buicks/article_f58d9181-be45-5ed5-a4f3-d6bcb24da838.html
http://www.brownfieldsconference.org/en/ErfSite/341/Buick_City
http://www.plan59.com/photos/buickcity.htm
http://www3.epa.gov/region5/cleanup/rcra/buickcity/index.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-toyota-city-symbol-of-japans-auto-rise-2015-5
http://www.gm.com/company/historyAndHeritage/creation.html
http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2014/03/public_hearing_looms_for_propo.html
Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry, by James M. Rubenstein, p. 158
Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis, by Andrew R. Highsmith, p. 255, 267
Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town, by Steve Babson, p. 226-227